Urinetown

[ded i]

Here's a thread I want to make available to gallery viewers:

http://www.jerzeedevil.com/forums/showthread.php?t=5614

[Pyro]

Pissing is art? :jduh:

[Rhonda]

unique and original art is ugly at first glance

all unique and original art is not always ugly first

just because it's ugly makes it neither unique nor orginal

©2006 J. Rebecca Moore



Andrew Ferguson, Assist. Manag. Editor, National Review, [Extracted from NATIONAL REVIEW, 8/4/90]

Washington, D.C. -- Bureaucrats in the arts, like their brethren elsewhere, are the Greta Garbos of democratic society: all they want is to be left alone.

They labor in a tiny vineyard, a hermetic subculture of thousands of artists and dozens of customers; here, a show of fingerpainted toilet seats hung on the walls of a county welfare office; there, a nude dance performed in the basement of a Presbyterian church.

Their obscurity is their happiness--that, and the $150 million they annually dispense through the National Endowment for the Arts.

Every so often, however, there's a leak in security.

Controversy--the bureaucrat's nightmare of nightmares--inevitably ensues.

There was the flap this spring, for example, when Senator Alfonse D'Amato discovered that a photographer called Andres Serrano had used $15,000 of NEA money to finance Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine.

And then Congressman Dick Armey of Texas heard about Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mapplethorpe died in March of AIDS, celebrated, as he had been for a dozen years or more, as a major artist.

The Christian Science Monitor (even!) had early on tagged him "one of the most original of America's younger photographers."

Mary Baker Eddy, phone your arts desk: Mapplethorpe's leitmotif was "homoerotic and sadomasochistic imagery"--one of his more celebrated pieces, for example, showed a man urinating into a pal's mouth, while another featured the artist himself, doubled over and pantless, with a bullwhip dangling from his orifice of choice--as well as photos of "children in erotic poses," a form of personal expression more commonly known, when not federally funded, as child pornography.

These pictures and more coagulated in a traveling show sponsored in part by the NEA, to the tune of $30,000.

The exhibit--which also included, for aesthetic effect, scores of pictures of flowers--was scheduled to arrive at Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery in July.

On June 8, Congressman Armey and 108 co-signers sent a letter to Hugh Southern, the acting chairman of NEA, asking, in effect, what the hell was going on.

Noting "this is not the first time we have had concerns about the NEA funding inappropriate materials," the congressmen said they understood that "the interpretation of art is a subjective evaluation, but there is a very clear and unambiguous line that exists between what can be classified as art and what must be called morally reprehensible trash."

Had it not been backed up by the power of the purse, the letter would surely have been laughed off as the thundering of Neanderthal lunatics or the posturing of pols (which in some cases it doubtlessly was).

Under the circumstances, however, the Corcoran decided not to show the Mapplethorpe exhibit after all, reasoning that the proximity of Mapplethorpe's subidized shutterbuggery to irate congressmen might endanger NEA funding.

The Corcoran's decision sparked the predictable outrage from the Washington arts crowd: "appalled . . . rightwing . . . outright cave-in . . . censorship of the most vulgar kind . . . McCarthyism . . . muzzle freedom of expression"--the heavy breathing almost drowned out the cliches.

A hardy amalgamation of artists and gays and lesbians and aesthetes gathered outside the gallery, chorusing, "Shame! Shame!"

Cocktail parties were held.

There was talk of boycotts, although of what, precisely, no one seemed sure.

The directors of the hapless Corcoran seemed at first surprised, and finally hurt: all they had tried to do, after all, was keep the money flowing to the very same people who now reviled them for their prudence.

In the wake of Mr. Armey's objections, Sidney Yates (D., Ill.), the art establishment's mouthpiece in Congress, has undertaken to ban indirect funding from the NEA, a practice which he blames for the Serrano and Mapplethorpe contretemps.

Conservatives on the Hill have greeted the reforms, along with the Corcoran's self-censorship, as a small victory.

But do they understand how small it really is?

There was something almost quaint about Mr. Armey's letter, with its talk of a "very clear and unambiguous line" separating art from rubbish.

For it is one of the primary premises of the art world that this line doesn't really exist--that it is in fact a kind of cramp in the consciousness of the unenlightened (read: middle-class American) mind.

"If art is to remain something other than a blue-chip commodity,"hollered one of the speakers at the rally outside the Corcoran, "it will challenge and offend, especially those whose power rests in the status quo."


:firedevil :firedevil :firedevil :firedevil :firedevil :firedevil :firedevil :firedevil

Anyhoo, here ya go: one of mine. No pissing on this one, please.


http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k127/yeahrhonda/SpikesHoliday4theDevils.jpg

[Umberto]

ooo I like that rhonda.

[ded i]

National Endowment for the Arts funds were cut almost in half in '96, in part because of the Maplethorpe exhibit and Serrano's "Piss Christ."

Since then the US government has slowly increased NEA funding -but it has not been restored to previous levels. Today NEA funding is funneled though schools, state governments, and other (censoring) agencies. After '96 there was little figurative art funded or exhibited. Unless we use trendy or upscale galleries, my friends and I have found it is still difficult to show nudes.

Figurative art has recently returned to favor in museums and avant garde galleries, but nudes are censored in many parts of the US.

Is it amazing that :peeps: "piss art" has had such an impact on artistic autonomy and what the public is "allowed" to view? Not really. Censorship in the Arts has been a constant theme historically.

Michelangelo finished "The Last Judgement" in 1541 and, in 1564, during an era of prudity caused by Catholic reaction to the Reformation, the Pope ordered another artist to paint loincloths on Michelangelo's nude figures. In the early 1990's, when the fresco was cleaned, many of those loinclothes were removed.

:flasher:

[zfox]

http://www.jerzeedevil.com/gallery/files/4/4/0/talen-in-action.jpg
ART !

[ded i]

Thanks, zfox! That image reminds me of Andy Warhol's Oxidations series, also called the Piss paintings.

A canvas would be covered with wet (probably) copper paint and Warhol would then piss on it so a chemical reaction took place changing the colors on the canvas. These paintings were actually well received by the critics. One wrote that this was "Warhol at his purest" and compared the lines and squiggles produced by the urine stream to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, also alluding to Pollock's legendary party piss (as depicted in the 2000 movie Pollock) into Peggy Guggenheim's fireplace.

Warhol, who was gay, freguently invited guests to "paint" these canvases, enjoying the penis exposure and the fact that someone else did the actual "repetitive technical work" for him.

http://www.mcah.columbia.edu/dbcourses/krauss/medium/jss_050202_warhol_001.jpg Andy Warhol, Oxidation Painting, 1978

[zfox]

Wow DED, I knew that picture was something, but I didn't kown how important it was :jdwink2:

Glad to bring back your memories, mine are stuck in the 60's :spin:

[ded i]

Wow DED, I knew that picture was something, but I didn't kown how important it was :jdwink2:

Glad to bring back your memories, mine are stuck in the 60's :spin:
Yeah - that's how we know we were there ... :D:

I have very few brain cells left to rub together - only enough for art it seems to me ... but that's because I practice practice practice ...

:devilzide