Figuring Out Figurative Art

Contemporary Philosophers on Contemporary Paintings

Derek Matravers, Damien Freeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317591320
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In 1797 Friedrich Schlegel wrote that "philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy, or the art." This collection of essays contains both the philosophy and the art. It brings together an international team of leading philosophers to address diverse philosophical issues raised by recent works of art. Each essay engages with a specific artwork and explores the connection between the image and the philosophical content. Thirteen contemporary philosophers demonstrate how philosophy can aid interpretation of the work of ten contemporary artists, including:

• Jesse Prinz on John Currin
• Barry C. Smith and Edward Winters on Dexter Dalwood
• Lydia Goehr and Sam Rose on Tom de Freston
• Raymond Geuss on Adrian Ghenie and Chantal Joffe
• Hallvard Lillehammer on Paul Noble
• M. M. McCabe and Alexis Papazoglou on Ged Quinn
• Noël Carroll on Paula Rego
• Simon Blackburn and Jerrold Levinson on George Shaw
• Sondra Bacharach on Yue Minjun.

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The discussion ranges over ethical, political, psychological and religious concepts, such as irony, disgust, apathy, inequality, physiognomy and wonder, to historical experiences of war, Marx-inspired political movements and Thatcherism, and standard problems in the philosophy of art, such as expression, style, depiction and ontology of art, as well as major topics in art history, such as vanitas painting, photography, pornography, and Dadaism. Many of the contributors are distinguished in areas of philosophy other than aesthetics and are writing about art for the first time. All show how productive the engagement can be between philosophy, more generally, and art.

1	The pornography of Western art
John Currin The Dane (2006)	Jesse Prinz

Fine art has long had a complex relationship with pornography. Some artists in the Western canon were pornographers. Countless others created works that are clearly designed for titillation, if not masturbation. The majority of Renaissance masters created works that exemplify the objectifying male gaze. Over the last two decades, the link between art and pornography has become a topic of considerable interest, with some A-list artists quoting pornographic imagery in works made for gallery exhibitions. No figure is more associated with this trend than John Currin. His sexually themed paintings have been in equal measure controversial and celebrated. They have helped to secure his place as one of the leading painters of our time, while also being described as flagrantly misogynistic. Currin’s work offers a welcome opportunity to reflect on the relationship between art and pornography. His painting, The Dane, derives directly from pornographic sources, yet also challenges current standards of beauty, and can, for that reason, be regarded as a transgression against the prevailing porn culture. Here I shall use this work to interrogate the “artification” of pornography and the “pornification” of art. Currin manages to stay on the art side of the divide in this work, but this doesn’t get him off the hook. Creating offensive images under the mantel of art would hardly qualify as ennobling. Currin fans the flames of contempt by defiantly embracing the charge that he objectifies women in his work. While devotees might hope to interpret his work as ironic, he insists that it is motivated by his own sexual desires.

My goal is not to assassinate Currin’s character here. Neither is this an apologia, and much less an apotheosis. Rather, I want to read The Dane as a culminating point in art history. It draws on pornography as a source, but it is also informed by Currin’s reverent knowledge of past masters. The painting serves as a diagnostic tool. In deciding whether Currin is a pornographer, one is also confronted with the fact that his work is continuous with art history, and that fact allows us to see pornographic elements nascent in the Western canon. We are confronted, in other words, with the possibility that, if Currin’s work is pornography, then the same might be said about much Western art.

Looking at (looking in) The Dane

John Currin studied art in the 1980s, when neo-expressionism was all the rage. Julian Schnabel was on a rapid ascent, and art schools, like Yale, placed emphasis on various forms of abstraction. Figurative postmodernist painters, like David Salle, were also in the spotlight, and Currin admired Salle’s work, but his own experiments were initially more abstract, drawing on the likes of de Kooning for inspiration. Then, at the end of the decade, he grew weary of abstraction and turned to portraiture. One early effort, Mary O’Connel (1989), was based on a yearbook photo. Two years later, while commuting to New Jersey,¹ he got the idea to paint the silver-haired TV actress, Bea Arthur, topless. Set against a mustard background, Arthur stares at the viewer with slightly raised eyebrows and pendulous breasts, in a lifeless pose that is both too frank to be sexual and too sexual to be frank. Bea Arthur Naked sold at Christies this year for nearly $2,000,000.

In the ensuring years, Currin’s fame and infamy rose like floodwaters. Needing to exceed the shock of his geriatric nude, he turned to schlock, painting maidens with twisting bodies, coquettish expressions and grotesquely large breasts, who look like centrefold girls on growth hormones. Examples from this period include The Wizard (1994), in which an older Madison Avenue woman in black gloves clutches the enormous naked breasts of a young blonde. The anatomical oddity of the nude in this picture is nothing in comparison with paintings that would appear in the following years. For example, The Bra Shop (1997) shows two young women in miniskirts and spray-on blouses, which reveal oversized breasts. The breasts are centred on the canvas, each one larger than a human head and as spherical as a beach ball. One woman in the painting is tenderly measuring the chest of the other, who glances demurely downward holding a pink brassiere that is manifestly too small, as if Currin needed these extra narrative elements to draw further attention to the canvas’s most conspicuous elements. Currin was praised for the craftsmanship of his paintings from this period, but academically trained painters would surely scoff. Technically, the works are amateurish, perhaps intentionally. Currin uses impasto paint for the faces in The Bra Shop, alluding to de Kooning or other macho mid-century expressionists in Clement Greenberg’s pantheon.

Within a couple of years, Currin’s technique began to show signs of improvement. Already regarded as a champion of traditional painting skills, Currin’s work was now living up to that reputation. Paintings like The Pink Tree (1999) show the studious influence of Northern Renaissance masters. Currin uses a stark black background with a twisting tree as the setting for two serpentine female nudes. The appearance strongly echoes paintings of Adam and Eve by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Memling and especially Lucas Cranach the Elder. The allusion to these classic works is amplified by the fact that one of Currin’s nudes appears to have short reddish curly hair and she stands taller than a long-haired blonde, which is precisely the hair-style differentiation used in some of Cranach’s paintings of the Fall. Of course, Currin’s Adam is a woman, who smiles broadly while glancing sideways at the nimble Eve, whose crouching posture resembles the gait found in traditional Expulsion scenes. Currin’s anatomical choices are more constrained here than in earlier work. The bodies are still idealized, but the upper bodies of these women have been dramatically downsized, and their broad hips and spindly legs place them just outside prevailing norms of anatomical perfection. The latter features strongly evoke Memling.

These examples set the stage for The Dane. Currin’s paintings of the 1990s often present sexualized and distorted female bodies. They bring to mind pin-up girls and cartoons found in Playboy magazine. They are the kinds of images that might best be viewed while wearing a smoking jacket in a bachelor pad, while sipping a whisky sour. They hark back to a time when misogynist imagery still seemed like innocent fun. We now recognize the playful iconography of that era to be condescending and infantilizing. Currin spent a decade decontextualizing these images and his efforts were ambiguous enough to engage critics: was this a spoof of pin-up sexuality? An exercise in irony? A winking jab at artworld prudishness? No one was really sure.

By the turn of the millennium, Currin was an A-list artist with major museum shows and paintings selling in the high six figures. By this point, he had also followed a formula of progressively pushing the sexual explicitness of his work, while also pursuing greater mastery of traditional painting techniques. His work of the 2000s can be seen as an ineluctable extension of this trajectory. In these recent years, Currin began to draw on pornographic sources more overtly, and with increasing skill (for instance, one can track the increasing retinal realism of his fabrics and hair). Turning from the back pages of Playboy, he started to seek out vintage hard-core pornography. He was particularly inspired by Scandinavian pornography from the 1970s, discovered on the Internet. The Dane (2006) is appropriated from one of these images.

Like The Wizard, The Bra Shop and The Pink Tree, this painting captures two women in an intimate moment. Like the latter three, there is a blonde and a redhead. There also appears to be an age differential, as in many of Currin’s works, but, unlike The Bra Shop, The Dane presents the older woman as the object of desire. She stands tall, and smiles, wearing nothing but a slinky necklace, a hair comb and lace-topped black stockings which have been pulled down to reveal her genitals. The younger woman is fully clothed, and wearing costume jewellery and blue eye-shadow. She stares in lustful meditation, with parted lips, at the standing woman’s hidden treasure. She is seated subordinately, with one hand pressing firmly against her partner’s naked thigh. The two women contrast anatomically. The standing woman is disturbingly thin, almost anorexic, but also evoking the spindly contours of figures in Flemish primitive painting, or the angular nudes of Austrian and German expressionists. She also resembles Picasso’s Woman Ironing, who has somehow struck it rich and is now living the good life as a dominatrix. The seated woman is not rotund, but she is curvilinear in comparison. Her breasts swell roundly beneath her blouse and she has a fleshy, dimpled chin. Even her hair curves, flipped back 1970s-style in a crowning S-shape. She is too slight to please Rubens, but could serve as a stand-in for Picasso’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter.

Figure 1.1 Still from Blue Climax, Issue 20 (1982) © Color Climax Corp., Copenhagen.

In many of Currin’s earlier paintings, figures stand against an empty field of colour or other minimal backgrounds. Here, the figures still float in the foreground, but there is a greater sense of place. Behind the standing figure hangs an enormous animal skin. Behind the seated figure there is a moss-coloured antique china cabinet lined with glistening plates. On top of the cabinet, there is a lit – but lightless – candlestick, which rises up against a rose-red wall, which Currin has patterned with a lavish gold brocade.

The background differs from the source material in various ways. In the original photograph, there is a hanging animal skin, but it appears to be a grey cow hide, rather than the plush brown bear skin of Currin’s picture. There is also some kind of shelving unit or perhaps a bedpost, but the porcelain plates are Currin’s addition. In several exhibitions, Currin has interspersed still lifes with such items among his lascivious nudes. Here, they seem to convey a kind of hominess that adds domestic intimacy to the mise en-scène. The china cabinet also brings old-world class to this smutty scene. In the 1970s, Americans regarded Scandinavia as a libertine paradise where beautiful blonds engaged in guiltless casual sex. Denmark was seen as both forward-looking and quaint, almost provincially innocent. Danish free love was not progressive or political, but rather Edenic and blissfully naive, according to this stereotype. Currin’s china cabinet makes this exoticizing ideal more evident than the original photo. He also replaces the seated figure’s black satin shirt with a striped-pink variant, which seems more disarming and benign.

The most dramatic change is the wall décor. The original is slate grey, with two hanging floral prints. Currin’s gold brocade adds opulence to this interior. It may also be a quotation from Renaissance paintings again. Gold brocades were a popular motif in fifteenth-century Flemish paintings. For example, there is a painting of the Virgin and Child by Rogier van der Weyden in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, which includes a similar pattern on Mary’s throne. As in Rogier’s painting, the brocade on Currin’s wall in strangely flat, violating the angled geometry of the room. The Rogier painting has a second panel, which shows Saint Catherine holding a sword (Saint Catherine was a martyr who was first broken on a wheel and then decapitated). Curiously, Saint Catherine’s posture in that panel is very similar to the standing nude in Currin’s painting, which is based on the pornographic photograph. The similarity is surely coincidental, but one can’t help thinking that Currin’s attraction to the Danish image was informed by his deep affection for Northern Renaissance painting.

The foregoing is little more than a clinical description of The Dane. Commentary will follow. I shall be most interested in asking whether Currin’s appropriation of a pornographic image results in a work that qualifies as pornography itself. This question will help us explore the nature of pornography, art and their relation. Before getting there, I want to say a bit about other artists who operate at the boundary between art and pornography. Some of these others will help us put Currin’s project in context.

Pornography and contemporary art

Many important figures in the Western canon (and elsewhere, of course,) produced works with overtly sexual content. I shall postpone the question of whether such work is pornographic. Sometimes the sexual themes are implicit, as with Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, and sometimes more obviously intended to titillate, as with Cranach’s many paintings of the Judgement of Paris or The Golden Age. There is also a long tradition of reclining nudes who are, no doubt, intended to exemplify and excite male desire: Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, Correggio’s Danae, Goya’s Naked Maja, Boucher’s L’Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia are canonical examples. Explicit sexuality was pushed even further when Courbet unveiled his The Origin of the World, a cropped close-up of a woman’s naked crotch. Many of Courbet’s risqué precursors had avoided pubic hair, and any sign of a vulva, as if to preserve the juvenile purity and virginity of their female subjects. It was recently discovered that Courbet’s painting originally included the head of his model, a favourite muse, which he or some collector evidently cut off, making the picture more objectifying, despite a title that seems to flatter women. Also relevant for analysing Currin is Courbet’s The Sleepers, which, like The Dane, offers a male perspective on lesbian desire.

Courbet’s brazen excesses paved the way for further excursions into sexually explicit art. Ingres, Degas, Lautrec and Rodin all made sexually themed images. Klimt made pictures of women masturbating and heterosexual intercourse with visible penetration. Schiele served a jail term for producing pornography. Georg Grosz and Hans Bellmer drew pictures of penetration and fellatio. Picasso etched erotic minotaurs. Duchamp cast a woman’s vagina in bronze. Balthus made a career of sexualizing children. Man Ray took photographs of himself engaged in sexual acts with his muse, Kiki of Montparnasse, who was also a gifted painter. These images are as graphic as today’s hardcore pornography.

Quoting from pornographic sources continued after the Second World War. In the 1940s, Francis Picabia was making paintings inspired by pinups. In the 1960s, Warhol made a film of a man being fellated (Blow Job, 1964). In the early 1970s, Betty Tompkins made enormous paintings of sexual close-ups. The 1970s also saw the rise of feminist art, and female nudity figured prominently in the work of feminists. Hannah Wilke stripped in front of Duchamp’s Large Glass. Valie Export posed for a photograph carrying a gun and exposing her crotch; while, in another piece, she invited people to feel her breasts. Carolee Schneeman created a performance piece in which she removed a long scroll of text from her vagina. Other female performance artists with a more ambiguous relationship to feminism were also working with sexual themes: Yoko Ono had fans cut off her clothes; Marina Abramovic asked gallery visitors to abuse her naked flesh; and Annie Sprinkle invited people to peer deeply into her anatomy.

In the 1980s, when Currin was in art school, mainstream artists continued to draw on pornographic imagery. David Salle painted naked women spreading their legs, contorting and bending over in suggestive ways. Eric Fischl painted a teenage boy staring at the naked crotch of a reclining nude woman as he steals something from her purse (Bad Boy, 1981). Also highly visible in this period were the lounging nudes of Philip Pearstein and Lucian Freud. The homoerotic photos of Robert Mapplethorpe had also attained considerable notoriety, and art enthusiasts learned about Nan Goldin’s harrowing world of drugs, sex and illness.

By the 1990s, internet pornography had become a major cultural phenomenon, and explicit imagery was more accessible than ever before. This had a noticeable impact on visual culture. Advertising, film, music videos and fashion (especially for young women) seemed more sexualized than ever. It is no surprise that artists’ fascination with pornography became even more prevalent during this period than in prior generations. In 1990, Jeff Koons made a series of gaudy photos of himself having sex with a porn star named La Cicciolina (Made in Heaven). They later married and divorced, and she was elected to the Italian parliament. Video artist Pipilotti Rist also filmed sex acts using her hypnagogic style (e.g. Pickelporno, 1992). Later in the decade, Vanessa Beecroft began photographing large groups of idealized nude women with shaved genitals, which by the 1990s had become the standard in pornography, and, by extension, outside of pornography. Young British artists also began producing sexually themed work. Tracey Emin created a tent listing all the people she had slept with, and the Chapman brothers made child mannequins with phallus noses or sex-doll orifices in place of mouths. In this period, the United States and western Europe began taking an interest in works created by artists from other parts of the world. Museums began to collect works by Marlene Dumas, a South African who was making ethereal paintings that often draw on sexual source material, such as Fingers (1999), which shows a woman spreading open her vulva from behind. Japan’s Ta...