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Instead of a taboo, it’s more of a constant factor. Pornography is everywhere in contemporary society, so it’s in art too. While the obscenity in pornographic art is still sometimes camouflaged to a certain extent by so-called emancipatory motives, most often everything is in full view, just like the porn that art bases itself upon. The question, therefore, is what does art have to gain by it all? When I was asked to comment on contemporary art’s growing interest in porn – from the Destricted video collection to Texte zur Kunst’s ‘Porno’ issue – the editor made his request in politely wary tones, which seemed to suggest that the topic might offend me. The problem is not the subject but the context: it’s hard to write a precise account about art and porn in a global era. While circulating internationally, both practices are marked by local/national contexts which are difficult to compare, let alone know. Every country, each city, has its censorship laws, biopolitical agendas, aesthetic traditions, along with unwritten moeurs about the body, while art and porn travel among them with ease or crash landings. Compare attitudes towards mere nudity – top versus bottom – on French and German beaches. And attitudes are always changing. In the Netherlands, there have been some surprising reactions to Dutch artworks about the anus, which Post Porn theorist Beatriz Preciado calls a ‘radically democratic’ zone (everyone has one).2 Despite the much-celebrated tolerance of the Netherlands, Atelier van Lieshout’s scatological porn video Joepiedepoepie, 2002, caused a scandal when it was shown at the Fons Welter gallery; some critics questioned the atelier’s right to state funding.3 Yet Joep van Liefland’s Broccoli Hardcore, 2003 – screened at De Player in Rotterdam in 2004 – hardly raised an eyebrow, although the graphic projection shows a man having anal sex with a tasty green vegetable.These reactions, however disparate, demonstrate that the nude has been the historical link between art and porn. Whatever the creator’s calling and intentions, nudity has traditionally marked the point where ‘art’ may be deemed ‘porn’, or vice versa, depending on who is looking. Of course, the move from porn to art tends to take longer. In exploring the nude, art and porn (and the middle term of eroticism) have often been covert allies in challenging conservative family values, gender roles and sexual practices in Western democracies (and allies in being censored). Many artists deny making porn when faced with the charge and the possibility of censorship. Unfortunately, Robert Mapplethorpe, who disliked the word ‘shocking’, did not live to fight the Corcoran’s decision to cancel his retrospective in 1989; but Kiki Lamers challenged a French court’s decision in 2000 that she was found guilty of corrupting minors after she had photographed nude children as studies for her paintings (in 2004, an appeals court reduced her eight-month prison term to a suspended sentence). Other artists have openly embraced porn, especially its close-up perspective, from Jeff Koons’s 1989-1991 collaborations with his then porn-star partner Cicciolina, to Pipilotti Rist’s Pickelporno (Pimple Porn), 1992. Still others dip into porn for humorous critique, such as Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley who hired porn actresses to re-enact Vito Acconci’s 1960s performances as Fresh Acconci, 1995.

Porn, Art and Post-Production

In our fresh century, art and porn have forged a powerful new alliance beyond the traditional nude and the direct quotation, whether close-up or critical. Both realms have been radically transformed by globalized markets for spectacles and by mobile media technologies, from digital cameras to web cams. If censors once hoped to protect high art lovers from becoming lowly porn fans, distinguishing between the groups makes no sense today. The internet eliminated the physical space that separated (and segregated) the museum from the porn shop, along with their respective users. While museums and porn shops persist, it’s no longer necessary to visit them to get some art or some porn or a bit of both; all variations can be found on YouTube and myspace; and anyone can post a new hybrid, write a blog or chat to find collaborators for an indie porn. With Web 2.0, the old elitism of art and the old trashiness of porn fused into a massive user-friendly market with DIY consumers and producers (or both), who are as proficient with up & down loading as they are well-versed in exhibitionism. With 12% of all websites for porn, there are an estimated 372 million porn pages; 25% of daily search engine requests – 68 million – are looking for porn; 8% of daily emails – 2.5 billion – include porn; 35% of monthly peer-to-peer downloads – 1.5 billion – are pornographic. Despite the accumulated statistics, computers allow private access to public images while letting users keep their on-line viewing (and exhibiting) habits a secret in the virtual world.But many contemporary artists are no longer interested in keeping secrets. Instead of denying that their art is pornographic or obscene, they may fully inscribe themselves within the realm of pornography. Take Thomas Ruff’s Nudes series from 2000; the blurred images, downloaded from porn sites, not only quote pornography but also identify the artist as a user of internet porn, like Atelier van Lieshout’s Joepiedepoepie. Joep van Liefland produced his very own genre of ‘splatter porn’, but all of these artists become more like (re)distributors in a post-production world.For women artists, the shift is equally clear. If Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono once used the sanctity of the art world to guarantee the critical content of their nude performances (and to prevent them from being seen as strip teases), Alexandra Bachzetsis now choreographs pole dances as performances while newcomer Jennifer Allen has made her former experience as a pole dancer into a new art form. Fully embracing porn, Madeleine Berkhemer creates works that can be enjoyed in a cheap porn zine or in Roy Stuart’s sleek Taschen series, in a museum or in a fashion show, as artworks or as sexy lingerie. The Purple series – with prose, fiction, fashion, books, products and the now-defunct Purple Sexe (1998-2002), which remains for adults only – treated porn as just one part of a cross-over exploration of lifestyles with a distinctly high-and-low edge.

Presumed Innocent

Such shifts, however radical, do not come from art. Rather, porn has become an undeniable part of popular culture – a global Western culture. Artists embracing porn can be likened to an earlier generation fascinated by media, movies and TV. But artists arrive too late on the scene. The Canadian cable channel Showcase – whose motto is ‘Television without Borders’ – seems more avant-garde with its explicit line-up (Bliss, Webdreams, KINK, G-Spot, Sin Cities, Porno Valley) all aired between 9 pm and 6 am, as dictated by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ ‘Code of Ethics’. In light of the mass appeal of such shows, Pop Meister Andy Warhol’s forays into porn can be said to have gained their rightful place beside the Coca-Cola cans: as omnipresent, if not banal, pleasures. Indeed, porn used to be the issue that split feminists into two camps: PornNo, headed by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who made Indianapolis into a ‘porn-free’ city in 1984 with civil rights legislation that identified porn as discriminatory; and pro-porn, first championed in Angela Carter’s brilliant study The Sadeian Woman (1978). Consider an art world anecdote from the same era: When Lynda Benglis posed nude with a giant dildo for an advert in Artforum in 1974, associate editors Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson resigned over the ad’s ‘extreme vulgarity’, which ‘made a shabby mockery’ of ‘the movement for women’s liberation’. The web has since unsettled PornNo’s fiercest claim: a causal link from porn to rape. According to US statistics, a 10% increase in net access has led to a 7.3% decrease in reported rapes; states that adopted the internet quickly saw the largest declines. While the internet circumvents local restrictions, a taboo remains around children as users and subjects. Showcase, while programming to children’s sleeping hours, complies with the Action Group on Violence on Television, which developed classification and control systems with V-chip technology so parents can screen out programmes from their children. Last February, Viennese police busted an international child porn network involving 2,360 suspects from 77 countries; it’s hard to imagine any other porno genre uniting so many law enforcement agencies.Another example comes closer to home: the judicial inquiry around CAPC Bordeaux’s 2000 exhibition Présumés Innocents. L’art contemporain et l’enfance (Presumed Innocent. Contemporary art and childhood), which suggests that the Lamers case is a new kind of censorship, where the internationally-recognized taboo on ‘kiddie porn’ takes local laws beyond their jurisdiction. Last November, former CAPC director Henry-Claude Cousseau was called to a Bordeaux court to explain what role he played in ‘distributing violent, pornographic or degrading messages, accessible to a minor’ and ‘images of a pornographic nature of a minor’ (paedoporno charges bear a maximum sentence of three years and a 75,000 euro fine).The inquiry managed to involve the Vienna police, who interrogated the artist Krystufek about a public masturbation piece (since destroyed), and Interpol, which had no luck reaching Mapplethorpe, whose 1982 photograph of Louise Bourgeois holding a dildo had caused offence. The Bordeaux complaints stemmed from a local child protection agency La Mouette, but they were legitimated by the national Jolibois amendment (1993), which eliminates the legal difference between acts of violence and representations of acts of violence. However French it may be, this amendment has had an impact beyond France’s borders. It is ironic that the co-curators underscored the international reputation of the artists, who have all exhibited in museums around the world. Many people jumped to their defence by signing a petition, but just how innocent was the show presumed to be? As philosopher Yves Michaud noted in Le Figaro: ‘Contemporary artists go on proclaiming themselves critical and avant-garde. They mean to denounce and shock by claiming their total freedom of expression. But still, it is rather strange that they should be shocked when what they intended to be shocking actually shocks. It is then that they lay claim to their sacred contemporary art, entitled to some sort of diplomatic immunity within artistic institutions. One feels like reminding them that they should defend themselves not by claiming this immunity and signing petitions, but with even more aggressiveness, quite simply demanding the right to free expression and opinion in our formerly democratic society which is unfortunately becoming a hypocritical clerical society.’4

Porn as Avant-Garde

Last October in Berlin, there were no limits on free expression and opinion at the first edition of the PornFilmFestival, curated by Jürgen Brüning, nor at the concurrent Post Porn Politics Symposium, a two-day-and-night affair organized by Tim Stüttgen. The symposium promised ‘Queer feminist perspectives on the biopolitics of porn performance and sex as culture production’ with a host of interventions, from filmmaker Bruce La Bruce to performance artist William Wheeler. Annie Sprinkle’s intervention, titled My life and work as a post porn modernist for 30 years, gave the entire event a slightly retro feel: reassessing theories from the eighties in terms of web technologies, just as Documenta 11 rethought old post-colonial criticism in terms of the new politics after 9/11. In Texte zur Kunst, Stüttgen penned the postscript Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-Pornographic Politics, which rightly argues that Sprinkle is ‘the mother of post-porn.’5 Yet, thirty years ago, her practice had a political urgency – the oppressive Reagan years, marked by the AIDS crisis and NEA funding cuts – which also drove figures like Pat Califa, Susie Bright or Karen Findley and which seems to be missing today. For his part, Stüttgen identifies post porn as an alternative to the ‘hetero-normative dispositives of contemporary hegemonic porn’. But just how hetero-normative is mainstream porn now? While celebrating alternatives, the Post Pornographers do not seem so different from the Presumed Innocent curators, since both groups somehow insist they are not doing porn but something else. Not kiddie porn but art. Not porn porn, but post porn. In both cases, there’s an unsettling naivety, since the so-called ‘alternative’ sexual subjectivities are already prevalent on mainstream television. Showcase’s Webdreams, a docu-drama about internet porn, films four groups of people in the Montréal industry, reality-show style: The gay porn star is married; he and his wife are heterosexually monogamous and homosexually multi-partner; the female porn star, to deal with filming a double penetration, tries to call her girlfriend. One can envision a moment when pornography will be freed from both censorship and lifestyle to become a political beacon of Western democracy. The fight against censorship could well end up as a position against multiculturalism in the religiously-fuelled clash of cultures.So, what’s the difference between art and porn? The PornFilmFestival website offered an answer: ‘Art is more expensive!’ Artworks may be more pricey, but porn is far more profitable. World-wide revenues are estimated at 57 billion, with adult videos taking the largest share at 20 billion; the revenues are more than all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises combined; in the US alone, profits exceed both Hollywood’s and the combined revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC. Unlike art, porn has also been a driving force of technology – a fusion of the body, aesthetics and machines that the Futurists only dreamed of. Porn determined the predominance of VHS over Betamax over 25 years ago; today the porn film industry is deciding who will win the format battle between Sony’s Blu-Ray and Toshiba’s HD-DVD technologies. Porn has been equally crucial for the development of web video and moving images on mobile phones. Porn site architects were among the first to perfect full-streaming video and the online payments that have come to be a familiar part of e-commerce.Since art is unlikely to have such an impact on technology, the alternatives seem to lie in the realm of economics – at least for artists who would hope to question porn instead of simply reproducing or redistributing it. One might take the example of Santiago Sierra, who highlights the relations between economics and porn while exploiting them with interventions such as the video Diez personas remuneradas para masturbarse (Ten People Paid to Masturbate), 2000, for which ten Cuban men were each paid twenty US dollars to masturbate in front of Sierra’s camera. With her film 20 Minutes (Female Fist), 2005, Kajsa Dahlberg offers a more decisive alternative to the visibly exploitative economies of Sierra. After filming a public city square, the artist puts the cap back on the camera lens and interviews a woman who has started a lesbian porn project in a women’s collective house in Copenhagen. As the female voice explains, the porns will be made by woman to be viewed by other women only. No money will exchange hands, only contracts; every person who receives a free copy of the lesbian porn must also sign an agreement stating that the disk will never be shown or given to a man. While there is little to see in Dahlberg’s film, the speaking/darkness does not seem like an act of prudishness but rather a way to underscore the novel idea that porn could be taken out of economic relations while still remaining in circulation.1 Texte zur Kunst, ‘PORNO’, December 2006, 16. Jahrgang, Heft 64.2 See Tim Stüttgen, ‘Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-PornographicPolitics’, Texte zur Kunst, December 2006, p. 130.3 Sacha Bronwasser, ‘Joepiedepoepie’, de Volkskrant, 5 December 2002.4 Yves Michaud, ‘Ce nouveau fondamentalisme moral qui menace la sociétéfrançaise’, Le Figaro, 28 December 2006.5 See Tim Stüttgen, ‘Ten Fragments on a Cartography of Post-PornographicPolitics’, Texte zur Kunst, December 2006, pp. 128 – 132.