Point of suspicion – Weekend – Kommersant

Modern art, presenting the viewer with images of sexual violence, puts him in front of a moral dilemma: “watch – do not watch”, “participate – do not participate”, in order to leave him with a feeling of slight embarrassment – with any choice.

Text: Anna Tolstova

Suspicions of pornography have long haunted art, and sometimes not without reason, because the nude is its lingua franca. The Leopold Museum recently hosted an exhibition dedicated to the Viennese photographer Otto Schmidt, who established a global photography publishing business that was in demand from China to the Americas. What brought Schmidt such success? No, not Viennese types, not Alpine landscapes, not castles of Austria-Hungary, but pornography. It, of course, was sold under the guise of “plots for artists” – but artists who did not have enough money for a model really used such publications not only for their intended purpose. However, we are unlikely to be able to unambiguously say what these mannered Schmidtian nudes are – pornography, art, or “porn” disguised as “art”. Arguing with a British philosopher who argued that a work of erotic interest to the viewer is “false art and bad morals,” the famous English art historian Kenneth Clark wrote in The Nude: “Not a single image of a nude, even the most abstract , cannot but evoke an echo of an erotic feeling in the viewer, let it be his lightest shadow, and if it does not evoke this feeling, then this is false art and bad morals. However, is it possible for the viewer to be so easily rehabilitated in the case of images of sexual violence (when the sexual is understood extremely broadly – ranging from the fear of rape to the castration complex)? Is it always possible to justify voyeuristic interest by referring to the theory of psychoanalysis and the practice of surrealism? Is it always possible to draw a line between exploitation and criticism? Does an alibi of humanistic intention always work, since it could not protect Goya with The Disasters of War?

Edward Kienholtz

“Five Car Stud”
1969–1972

For the first time, an installation (or, as the artist himself called it, a tableau) by Edvard Kienholz was exhibited in 1972 in Kassel – on the legendary fifth documenta by Harald Szeeman, and then disappeared from public view: it was bought by a certain Japanese collector and she lay in a warehouse for forty years in Japan. The work, previously known from photographs and now considered the main creation of Kienholz, surfaced ten years ago, toured museums in America and Europe, and finally ended up in the collection of the Prada Foundation. The biography of the masterpiece – disappearing for almost half a century and the inability to really see the details in the pictures – seemed to be written in accordance with the artist’s intention: his tableau showed what was impossible to look at, and even on the documenta of 1972, full of provocative, not sparing the viewer’s feelings of works , stood out as shocking and was almost attacked by neo-Nazi vandals.

The phrase “Five Car Stud” is an untranslatable pun on words: in the name of one of the most popular varieties of poker, five-card stud (five-card stud), a mistake was made intentionally, so that the “card” turned into a “car”. On documenta, the installation was displayed behind the Fridericianum in a big top. Entering the circus tent, the viewer saw a composition of five cars forming a circle, the headlights of which illuminated a terrible scene: six white men in clown masks fell on a black man and castrated him, in one of the cars you can see a white woman, she is crying, she is vomiting, probably this is the girlfriend of the victim, who caused the brutal reprisal of the guardians of racial purity over her lover. The scene is realistic, like a diorama: Kienholz collected clothes and props from Los Angeles flea markets, bought maxi in some Hollywood costume store, made casts for the figures from his friends. But at the same time, the scene is very poorly lit – in order to understand what is happening, you need to enter the headlights, that is, in the very center of the action, trying on the role of a passive spectator (and, thus, an accomplice) in this nightmarish circus. Kienholz’s composition was not based on some kind of documentary photography – it embodied the spirit of the civil rights era and the sum of narratives about discrimination.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

“Great feat! With the dead! (“Great Deeds Against the Dead”)
1994

Goya was perhaps the main source of inspiration for Jake and Dinos Chapman from the student bench, and the Disasters of War series of etchings became a favorite material for pastiches, interventions and remakes in a variety of media. In 1993, the Chapman brothers, using plastic soldiers, recreated all the engravings of the cycle in the form of miniature compositions, and the following year they took up one of the most terrible sheets, the etching “Great feat! With the dead! ”, Presenting human bodies, or rather, what was left of them, in full size – the soldiers gave way to hyper-realistic silicone mannequins in nylon wigs. The etching is part of the first part of the series, which depicts the atrocities of both sides, the French and the Spanish, the invaders and the partisans, during the Pyrenean War, and Goya does not spare the feelings of the audience, depicting the process and result of abuse, torture and executions.

Although one of the pages of this part of the suite is called “I can not look” (“No se puede mirar”), the artist just makes us look at the terrible. But still hides the most terrible details, as in the sheet “Great feat! With the dead! ”, where you do not immediately notice that the corpses tied to a dry tree trunk resembling a guillotine, one of which is dismembered, castrated — the details are hidden in a pile of etching strokes. The Chapman brothers flaunt the bleeding wounds at the site of the severed genitals, turning them into Barth’s puntum and arguing with Susan Sontag, who claimed that Goya’s view of the macabre is devoid of pornographic lasciviousness. Art critics wrote that Goya’s body, cut with a saber, resembles fragments of beautiful antiques, so that the whole composition becomes a paraphrase of Laocoön. The Chapman brothers, having hired shop mannequins for the role of antiques, mock the viewer, satisfying his shameful curiosity and as if anticipating that snuff is about to flood the Internet space.

David Levinthal

Series “Mein Kampf”
1994

Women undress at gunpoint, naked women pass in front of a row of SS men, kapos push a woman’s body with legs wide apart into the furnace of a crematorium – in this and other series, David Levinthal photographs scenes played out with dolls of various kinds, from Japanese porcelain to soldiers. His Polaroids are blurry, like those of the pictorialists, but not because photography imitates painting: blurry lines and blurry spots are needed to make the puppet theater seem real, just a slightly out of focus reality. We are unlikely to be able to find a documentary photograph that formed the basis of the composition of this or that puppet show, but all his performances are an absolutely convincing fiction and may well take place in reality. Moreover, Levinthal’s vague picture of fictional reality often seems more shocking and offensive than the original document – this happened with the Mein Kampf series dedicated to the Nazi extermination camps.

Until recently, the topic of sexual violence, especially violence against women, remained almost taboo in the canonical Holocaust narrative, supplanted by heroic pathos and dissolved in the gender-neutral epic of martyrdom. Exceptions like The Night Porter by Liliana Cavani or the collages by Boris Lurie, whose meaning was fully revealed in the posthumously published Anita’s House, only confirmed the rule. David Levinthal repeatedly objectifies the victim of sexual violence – isolating her private story from a big epic, constructing a puppet mise-en-scene, forcing a woman to be naked at the muzzle of SS machine guns, pointing the barrel of a camera at her and, most importantly, forcing the viewer to participate in this objectification. Strain your eyes to see deliberately blurry details.

Taryn Simon

“The Innocents”
2000–2003

The heroes of Taryn Simon’s photographs spent many years in prison, sentenced to life imprisonment, and sometimes to death for especially serious crimes – as a rule, these are rapes or murders accompanied by sexual violence. The accusations were often based on the testimony of miraculously surviving victims and witnesses – they recognized the perpetrator in an innocent person. DNA tests, which became available to the investigation years or even decades after the verdict, proved their innocence. The artist brings those acquitted to the scene of a crime not committed by them, identification or arrest, in order to make a formal portrait. Places – shabby rooms in cheap hotels, backyards of unpresentable eateries, city outskirts, wastelands. Heroes – among them there is no one from prosperous white America.

The political meaning of the work, which shows the power of racial and social stereotypes, replicated in the mass media and cinema, lies on the surface. Artistic meanings are somewhat deeper. On the one hand, photography’s claims to objectivity are exposed here: at first, documentary photography served as an instrument of false accusation — most of the victims and witnesses identified the “innocent” from an identikit, but now photography, as an art, rehabilitates the accused, colliding two truths that are not really related to each other — the truth of the hero and the truth of the place – and without presenting any other supporting documents, except for artistic ones. The crime itself remains behind the scenes – we never know what the hero was convicted of, but at the same time we can easily imagine in detail the terrible event that happened here many years ago. The picture, not given to the eye in sensation, is successfully completed by the imagination.

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