During one of the lectures for my Art and Ideas class, at York university in Toronto, the professor, Anatol Schlosser, recounted a remarkable story concerning our up-coming photography assignment. (The project involved us taking a slide of whatever subject we chose.) Several years back a mature student in the class decided it would be poignant to photograph her husband and ten year-old daughter embracing, a symbol of the father-daughter bond so rarely depicted. It was to be a moving image of the family, and to further emphasize the closeness of the two, she photographed them in the bath tub. After all, what more natural and close act is there than a father bathing his child? Apparently the employee at the photolab, developing the slide, did not agree, and found it to be in the best interest (of whom?) to notify the police. They soon enough came to the family home, searching for other evidence, other photographs. The student, a mother, was charged with possession, and possible distribution of child pornography. At the trial, my professor extensively explained the circumstances of the slide, that is was an university assignment, that is was art. It was a huge misunderstanding. She was acquitted.

Though he told us the story to caution us in what photos we took, it does serve as a fine example of the dynamic relation art has to reality, and the resulting tension between them. Is scandal in art just misunderstanding? And, as Wendy Steiner writes, "whatever pleasures it provides will hurt no one"? We hear the story of Zeuxis, who painted grapes so real it fooled even the birds. The consequences of a such a creation is much more than aesthetic; it enters the real world. And even Massacio, when he suggested at perspective in his Holy Trinity of the early Renaissance, church-goers were said to have ran out of the cathedral, screaming in holy disbelief, and fear, that they had seen something so real, it must have been created by God himself. The Lumiere brothers screened the first "moving picture show" to the same reaction. What does this tell us? Quite simply: art has always shocked people, and there is little reason to believe it won't continue to do so.

But the question now, coming to a new century, is not just about realism or religious naiveté. We are no longer impressed by a realistic rendering. Norman Rockwell does not shock us; Mapplethorpe does. Indeed, art itself is wrapped in a shroud of politics and ideology. It is no longer only about aesthetics. Colour, line, balance--the previous agents of shock value have been replaced by the issues, the politics--that which the work of art signifies. It is not about painting but more what it represents. Wendy Steiner's argument, in The Scandal of Pleasure, is, even she admits, contradictory. Art should move us and we should submit to whatever magic it has; but only to an extent. It should not be blamed if the Pope gets upset, or even the president of the United States for that matter. As she puts it: "to acknowledge both the power and the pleasure of art, aware at the same time that it is still art and not something else." Art is not reality, that is for sure, but her statement only holds true to an extent. It is all fine when we are looking at a painting or photograph on the wall, when we, as a spectator, view art as a static object; but what happens when the object views us, or becomes the very environment we are in? The art of today has done away with classical painting as we know it, and the once defined boundary between art and spectator, which made us so comfortable, is being increasingly dissolved. That is shocking. So as it turns out, the answer is much more complicated than just a simple misunderstanding. It calls into question the fundamental role of art which every epoch assigns, what is expected of it, and, in turn, its limits.

Yet it seems like all the fuss around art came from the very fact that it should be realistic. In it, we see something of our world. Where did this idea come from? Norman Rockwell cannot be solely blamed. Here, one of the greatest opponents of art, the first Jesse Helms, so to speak, can be mentioned-- Plato. It is he who makes the first link between art and morality, a curse which haunts artists and writers today. The arts to Plato were to represent beautiful things in the world, hence the term mimesis. Painting and poetry should be mimetic, and what they should be mimetic of is nature. In Plato's Republic, there can be found such statements, loaded with disdain and condescension, forever shaking the foundation of art like sledge hammers. In the state of the Republic, the arts should represent beauty, harmony and the good, according to Classical ideals. "And surely the art of the painter and every other creative and constructive art are full of them...in all of them there is a grace or absence of grace," he declares. Then later, "We would not have our guardians grow up amid images of moral deformity...until they silently gather a festering mass of corruption in their soul." Any art, then, which is not representational of beauty and harmony is associated with moral deficiency; or "ill words and ill nature." The consequence of such a crime is banishment from the state.

He continues to attack art in general. It is not just producing ugly works which artists can be punished for, but that art should not be trusted at all. In Book X, he explains how artists and poets work only on appearances and not on real knowledge.

Plato's censorship, then, is based on two things. One, that the artist who makes the ugly work of art not only knows nothing because he works only on appearances, but that he is also morally deficient. Secondly, those who view that ugly work of art will be fooled and be equally corrupted. Cleverly, he attacks art on all sides of the equation--the artist, the work, the effect of the work and the viewer. Yet by even doing this he is admittingly a certain power in art which even artists are weary of claiming, that looking at a painting could have such drastic consequences. If only that were true.

In Plato, already there is a legislative threat on art, albeit in a fictitious state. His is, admitingly, a consistent ban on art in general. Senator Jesse Helms, on the other hand, does not go as far. To him, only "bad" art should be banned, thus leaving the good and beautiful to be enjoyed; he wants his cake and eat it to, so to speak. Jesse Helms' amendment on July 19, 1989 to the Interior Appropriations Bill, in response to a Mapplethorpe exhibition, sounds alarmingly Platonic. Art galleries, specifically those in Philadelphia and Cincinnati, were banned to support:

Signe Wilkinson's cartoon in the Philadelphia Daily News showing Helms and an assistant removing art in a museum, including works from the most popular artists, with the caption "Great idea, getting rid of all the fag art, Mr. Helms!" could not be closer to the truth. A large portion of the history of art has been precisely about homoeroticism, religious denigration, and certainly discrimination based on race, class and gender. Helms apparently has fallen into the trap of beauty, set so well by art, like any other homophobic viewer who admires a Caravaggio; or anti-pornography activist who compliments Renior for his treatment of women; or devout Christian who reads William Blake. And so on and so on... The fact that Helms, or anybody else, believes that a definition of what is acceptable or not acceptable in art can still somehow preserve good "real" art (that found in "clean" textbooks) shows severe delusion. Quite frankly, good art is sometimes about "bad" things; the beautiful is quite often about the ugly. This is the ultimate problem with censorship, that it will inevitably censor, however accidentally, what was not intended to be censored. In short, the flame will burn that finger which holds the match.

Scandals, we can say, then, are centred around either aesthetics or ideology--ideology as in what is represented and the politics behind that representation; aesthetics, as in characteristics of the representation itself. And of course, there can be an opposition on both grounds. The problem with Helms' bill was that it was rooted in aesthetics but actually wanted to censure ideology. A senator in perhaps the world's most self-proclaimed democracy cannot, after all, admit to a censorship of ideas. In other words, when he said the portrayal of homoeroticism was bad, he was really against homosexuality itself. To illustrate both these grounds of opposition (ideology and aesthetics), the English writer, Salman Rushdie, and the American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe need to be examined.

The work of Salman Rushdie, particularly The Satanic Verses, has arguably caused the largest scandal in post-war literature. And even more, it is a scandal of East versus West, the fundamentalism of Islam against the liberalism of Western democracy. Rushdie, as a man of Indian descent, is a bridge between those two worlds. He himself is a symbol of this clash. Yet as a writer, what is he? Steiner explains that "despite the events that have written him into world history, Salman Rushdie, in literary terms, is ordinary." The Satanic Verses can be seen as a Magic Realist novel, and in this sense, it puts him in the tradition of other writers of the fantastic. Though made popular by South American writers such as Gaberiel Garcia Marquez, fantastic literature, as a genre, goes back further and can be seen in writers such as Jules Verne and even Charles Dickens. So this is nothing new. Rushdie is not a literary avant-garde of, say, James Joyce's stature. While the latter has challenged the structure of the modern novel, even combining words together creating almost a new language, the former is quite content to use the existing one. The thing about Rushdie is that at one point he "lost his artistic licence." Quite clearly, then, this is not a matter of aesthetic judgment.

What it is, and is deeply, is an ideological one. The Satanic Verses questions and interprets the life of Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, as given in the Koran. On February 15, 1989, a bounty of 1.5 million dollars was put on the author's head. Countries labeled it blasphemous, and even Canada stopped its importation considering it hate literature; bookstores, in fear, refused to sell it. There were riots. People died. The book was publicly burned.

Yet the interpretation and questioning of holy material has been going on for decades, if not centuries, in the West. Christianity itself has seen such productions as embarrassing as Jesus Christ Superstar and as disturbing as Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ. What is about the Koran, then? How is Islam different? Unlike the Bible, which is more or less a compilation of writing about the teaching of Jesus, written over a period of time by many people, the Koran fundamentally has one author and one occasion. It is, as Edward Said describes, "a sacred text whose authority derived from its being the uncreated word of God, directly and unilaterally (my italics) transmitted to a Messenger at a particular moment in time." Mohammed receives the Word of God through the Angel Gaberiel. Already, there is a transcendental quality to its genesis, opposed to the more organic and temporal one of the Bible. Here lies its claimed authority:

What Said means by "worldliness" I shall explain later. It is no doubt that part of the fundamental practices of Islam stem from this fact (and perhaps a point of misunderstanding for the West). Nonetheless, the Koran is an untouchable text, a work which is "the paradigmatic case of divine-human language." Rushdie violated this by even interpreting it, though not explicitly (his character is named Mahound instead of Mohammed), and the consequences have been serious indeed.

If Rushdie's case does not involve aesthetics, Mapplethorpe's certainly does, and the two artists have been compared to each other (Steiner even uses the subtitle Rushdie K. Mapplethorpe) more for the degree of scandal they caused rather than the nature of their art. Mapplethorpe's work had already been exhibited in New York, New Orleans, Berlin, Cologne, San Francisco, Geneva, and Milan when The Perfect Moment retrospective hit Philadelphia, opening in December 1988 and running to the end of January 1989, the same year as his death. 175 photographs were exhibited, but the ones which caused the most sensation were the X, Y, Z portfolios, 13 photos consisting of nude figures, sadomasochistic poses and flowers. What is interesting, however, is not that the show was not even allowed to open in Cincinnati, or that even then president, George Bush, said he was "offended at some of the filth,"-- these events are somewhat predictable-- what is really of interest is that when the Institute for Contemporary Art was put on trial in Cincinnati, only 7 of the 175 photographs were charged as being obscene. What does this mean? Mapplethorpe's other work, particularly his flowers, are highly sensual and erotic. Only the seven (5 were sadomasochistic) photos angered people. It is an issue of representation, then, of aesthetics. Yet, as mentioned, ideology and ethics was part of it as well. What was taken offense to, was not sexuality, but a certain type of sexuality, mainly homoeroticism and sadomasochism. Flowers are easier to look at, but here is the problem.

The difficulty with persecuting aesthetics, which is essentially what the trial was about, is that it always turns into an issue of ethics. Flowers are pretty. No problem. Can society, as a whole, however agree that looking at a man with a whip in his anus shows a certain type of beauty and gives pleasure as well? What about a potent stream of ejaculated semen? Apparently no, because that would be condoning a wrong type of beauty and pleasure (assuming that beauty gives one pleasure). But you cannot state that in law (at least not in America) because that would be legislating ethics. So the issue is argued on the basis of aesthetics again. Curators and experts were called in for the defense, explaining how Mapplethorpe's pictures show "good" aesthetics (composition, light, etc...), sometimes with ridiculous arguments. Yet, as Steiner astutely observed, art is not just about diagonals and balance; whatever shock or excitement we feel, we were meant to feel, and that has a very important role in how art is received. As she eloquently writes: "What art can do, and do very well, is show us the relation between what we respond to and what we are, between our pleasure and our principles." My feeling is that the defense had a good chance of losing if it were not for a most foolish prosecution argument, that the photos speak for themselves.

This idea of photographs speaking for themselves needs to be examined for it reveals so much of how we view art, and language for that matter. "Picture this", "A picture is worth a thousand words", "Do you see what I mean?"--all these statements suggest that language is just a pre-stage in understanding, culminating in a final "picture". The picture is valued, then, for its immediacy in showing us something. In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci praises painting exactly for this, calling it a "wonderful harmony of simultaneous cooperation." Though the idea of pictures speaking goes back to Simonides of Cleos, but Sir Philip Sidney, in the late sixteenth century said it best with his line:

Such was the power of pictures that even poets tried to evoke them, sometimes resulting in tediously long descriptions. But like Zeuxis' grapes, a speaking picture would have huge implications; it would intrude on reality, participating in it. Or as Wendy Steiner writes in The Colors of Rhetoric, "A speaking picture would almost be a person."But of course pictures do not speak at all, and whatever words we hear are words we ourselves have ascribed to them. If anything, the defense proved that with an army of academics and art experts, their words were enough to convince a jury that pictures needed to be explained. With an opening statement of "The pictures are the state's case," the prosecution was doomed to fail.

An artist who creates both an ideological and aesthetic scandal, and is a lesson to what Steiner calls, "the failures of formalism" (like the art experts testimony), however, is the photographer, Andres Serrano. Like Mapplethorpe and Rushdie, Serrano also was introduced to the world mainly by way of scandal. His photograph, Piss Christ (1987), caused outrage from both politicians and religious leaders. It was attacked, interestingly enough, on both aesthetic and ethical grounds. Reverend Donald Wildmon said it was not the photograph itself which lead him to label it as blasphemy, but the title. In fact, he has a point. At first glance, the photograph is not shocking at all: a crucifix immersed in a golden bath of light, like Jesus in space. It is only after one reads the title that one discovers the golden bath is urine. But Wildmon's case ignores aesthetics altogether, focusing solely on the title. So perhaps if Serrano titled it, Honey Christ, everything would be fine. In May of 1989, however, Senator Gorton cited Benedetto Croce in an attack on Serrano's aesthetics. His was what Gorton described, through Croce, as an "intellectualists error." Art, in other words, should not mix beauty with ideas, and so Serrano's is the wrong type of beauty. But, as seen in Mapplethorpe, the wrong type of beauty actually means the wrong type of ethic.

To return to Plato for a moment, however, it does appear that scandals in art arise from a mimetic potential. That is, people are usually offended when they can "see" something offensive. If we consider the art forms like dance, music and architecture, which have a relatively small mimetic potential, they usually also go about offending a small number of people. To further explain what I mean, it is necessary to take the three disciplines which have arguably caused the most scandal--literature, painting, photography--and examine the mimetic potential of each.

To start with painting, which has the unique characteristic of losing its tendency for realism in this century, we see a very interesting story. Painting, up until the beginning of this century, had been assigned the role of photography, recording wealthy families and the world in general. When James Whistler was put on the famous "art for art's sake" trial over one hundred years ago, his crime was that his paintings were losing their tie to reality. With pieces like Nocturne in Black and Gold, which is very abstract, people could not accept the fact that painting was becoming unrealistic. Today, the argument is still used but more for economic reasons. When the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa, Canada, spent valuable tax payers' dollars (millions of it) to purchase a Rothko, it was greeted with jeers like, "a child can do that." But cases like this are actually not about aesthetics; people are more upset because of the millions of dollars used to buy it. It is more an issue of public spending. If we, however, accept the classical idea of painting, that it is mimetic of our reality, Steiner's argument is easy to accept. As a spectator, we look at the painting and no matter how realistic it is, we are always conscious of the fact that it is still only a painting. (Jackson Pollock, however, would use the huge size of his canvases to help envelop the viewer, creating a environment) Even hyper-realists such as Duane Hanson and Andrew Wyeth fail to move us. And with abstract painting, we may read reality into it (violence/sex/ religion), but it is difficult to take it literally. Steiner's idea that we should submit to art's magic, but keep it separate at the same time holds most true with painting.

With literature, or text in general, it is an unique case of not actually looking at reality, but reading it. After all, we don't look at a book the same way we look at a painting. Texts need to be actualized by a reading process, which is more intellectual than visual. Here is where part of the danger lies. Reading takes us away from the world and into a new one. Children are encouraged to read precisely to explore new worlds. In this way, this element of "escapism", that texts really do succeed most in creating a new reality for us. Yet once that reading process stops, we return to our reality. People who cannot differentiate between a literary reality and a world reality have a clinical disorder rather than a tendency for literalism. It is what we read of which causes trouble. D.H. Lawrence's infamous Lady Chatterly's Lover was banned for its sex scenes, and E.M. Forster's Maurice was banned frankly for homosexual sex. More recently, in America, Tom Sawyer has been attacked for the representation of Huckleberry Finn, an Afro-American. Scandals in literature, then, have mainly been about what is represented, not the means of representation (except, say, the case of Joyce, but that was largely a debate which took place in classrooms, not at dinner tables). A perfect example, as was discussed, is Salman Rushdie. As with Madonna's Sex book, people need to "see" something in order to be offended.

Photography, on the other hand, is most problematic because what it depicts is essentially a real life image. Whether a scene is staged with models or a journalistic photograph of war, what is shown is what the eye sees. It is an art form which, to no matter what degree of abstraction, always references our reality. As Steiner writes,

More than its ability to capture reality, photography poses a special problem on this issue because of the latter part of the statement--its tie to popular culture. As she notes, photography is everywhere and is practised by everyone. The visual image is so ubiquitous in the media and everyday life, that we are now accustomed to relating it to advertising. To see a photograph is to see a product. It is small wonder, as Steiner points out, that Helms and others have difficulty separating a photograph of homoeroticism with the advocacy of homosexuality. So photography's bond to our world is twofold: one, it shows the world as how we ourselves see it; and two, it is associated now with the promotion of whatever it is photographed. It is only the sophisticated eye, accustomed to viewing art photography, which can view images separate from the above conditions.

A perfect example of this difficulty is when art photography is used for advertising. In this situation, the viewer is caught is how best to see the image. When the Benetton clothing company launched it's ad campaign showing dying AIDS patients and fleeing refugees, photographs of real people in very real situations, it angered both marketers and artists. The tension was precisely around how we see which images in what context. The problem was not so much showing a dying man that was shocking, but using that image, and ultimately, him, to sell socks and sweaters. For the sophisticated eye, this was immoral; for the masses, it was just visually shocking.

What photography also does is create a dialogue between subject and viewer. In the case of the Benetton ads, we, as viewer, feel for the people in the ads, their plight for survival. It is a common case of the "gaze", historically a white western male one. As in the paintings of classical nudes, pornographic photos compose themselves entirely for this male gaze. They make us think "self-conscious...questioning the subject's role as victim or accomplice.." This gaze is now being challenged. Robert Mapplethorpe, in his famous Self-portrait, places himself as the subject on his own work. Crouched over, whip in hand, he turns to face the viewer, confronting us. At once, he takes the power from our gaze and instead is gazing at us. As Steiner notes, "This work is confrontational, teasing, searching. And it obviously causes certain parts of the population extreme anxiety." The discomfort might stem from the very fact that Mapplethorpe is so unself-conscious, brave, so unashamed. It is this self-proclaimed authority and right which puts people on edge, and, not doubt, offends.

But it is time to change the discussion to another mode of discourse. The best connection between art and life is that fact that they are objects, commodities, things which belong to and of the world. In this way, the emphasis changes from how art is seen or received, as largely this essay has discussed up to this point, to how it acts in the world. Paintings and books do not take place in a vacuum. They operate and circulate both as products and ideas, influencing and limiting their own interpretation. Edward Said, in his essay, The Text, the World, and the Critic, examines precisely this issue, here concerning literature but an aspect just as well might be applied to paintings.

The traditional approach to textual analysis, and indeed visual analysis, is to take the work as a complete separate and autonomous unit in itself. We are taught to look at formal issues of aesthetics, ignoring the circumstances of a work's creation. Such an approach certainly has its benefits, but something very important is also being left out. And conversely, a discourse too steeped in circumstantiality (ie. artist biography, political conditions, etc..) is no good either. (We saw this used as one of the arguments for Mapplethorpe's defense, that his photos "are a record of a peculiar moment in sexual history." Said attempts to reconcile this. "Is there no way of dealing with a text and its worldly circumstances fairly?" he asks. To Said, how and when a text is written has an integral importance to the text itself:

From this, texts are worldly. Its worldliness can be seen in two ways. One, the transcendental nature of a text. Shakespeare is dead, but his plays and sonnets are still read today. Similarly, Michelangelo has long since passed away but his ceiling of the Sistine chapel still participates in the world. Secondly, one might not even have read Romeo and Juliet, the text, to be familiar with it. (The same is not necessarily true with art. I'm quite sure Picasso is a household name by now, but how many households out of ten can name one painting?) Works of art make themselves known to us before we know them. Through reproductions, television, word of mouth--all these factors contribute to the worldliness of a work.

Secondly, this affects and limits their interpretation. Being worldly, texts control what can be done to them. The idea of the "limitlessness" of interpretation is disputed by Said:

For example, the world is so used to reading Hamlet a certain way, mainly in an Oedipal context, that it has restricted other interpretations. The Sistine Chapel makes another fine example. The very fact that the ceiling is of a chapel, suggests a religious intention. However, if someone's first experience of it was from an art history textbook's reproduction, the same intention would not necessarily be interpreted.

So from Said, then, we can say that if the circumstances of a work's creation affects the work, then certainly the circumstances of its reception does as well. The world in which receives art is just as important as the world which created it. What is interesting is that whatever meaning is derived in both instances can be different. Let me explain: first, a writer writes a novel. Whatever influences her world has on her also enters the book, however indirectly. Once the author gives the rights to publish her novel, she loses all interpretive control over that book. Thus, over a long period of time, after she has died, that book can be read in a completely different way. It's form even can change. And whenever it is read, the world of the reader influences it's interpretation as well. In short, we have three worlds: one of the author, one of the text, and one of the reader. We can diagram the process accordingly.

As mentioned, the text can be very different when it is finally read. A good example would be Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The world of that text now includes all the plays, the film-adaptations, and any new edition of the novel itself. How different the story must be for someone if they saw the film before reading the novel. One recent edition which I saw at the bookstore has even a scene from the movie as a cover. Forevermore, the purchaser of such a book will have Emma Thompson's face in mind. Jane Austen herself never wanted this, I'm sure.

If some of the artists which have been discussed are viewed through this light, we see some examples of just how "worldly" a work can be. Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is a fine case. As Steiner points out, the ratio of judgments made of it, compared to how many have actually read the novel is very low. In most cases, people did not choose to pay attention to the book, the book came into their lives via newspaper or television news. The book has been picked up by the whirlwind of politics and issues surrounding it, propelling in the world's attention. But is it important to read the book? As argued, it is not an issue of aesthetics but ideology. Indeed, the debate around Rushdie is a political one, and somebody familiar with the political and religious issues involved can say a lot more than one who has studied the book itself. Interpretatively, it is the same case. The Satanic Verses, itself an interpretation of the Koran, cannot help be but interpreted from that. The whole controversy is about the limits and the right of interpretation.

Art, at one time, had privileges a lot greater than it does now. Joseph Addison, in the eighteenth-century, noted that Sir Francis Bacon even prescribed "a poem or a prospect... and advises him to pursue studies that fill the mind with splendid and illustrious objects, as histories, fables, and contemplations of nature." Though art and literature has generally lost this medicinal quality, it gained even greater powers in the early twentieth century, in the wake of Modernism. Furturism, Surrealism, Constructivism--all these movements were based on the idea that art and society worked together, progressing. Art became almost a new religion, and in it, the faithful sought miracles. Robert Hughes describes the conception of Surrealism as the follows:

And indeed, this century is full of other Popes who, like Breton, believed "art had not only the power but also the duty to change life." Thus, those who cannot tell the difference between art and life may not just be literalists, as Steiner claims, but also some of the forgotten faithful of modernism.

Art is very different today, however, and here is where some of Steiner's ideas need to be challenged. The boundaries now between art and life are even closer; but it is not the effects of art which change life; life itself is part of the art. In 1971, the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who works with public spaces, opened a restaurant where people dined and "he himself acted as a kind of mediator, participating in the conversation and discussions of the guests." (it lasted for 2 years!) Wendy Steiner cites the female artist who constantly underwent plastic surgery, displaying her body each time as a piece of art. These "works" are very different than throwing paint on canvas. Here, real people participating in real life consequences. Now then, where does art stop and real life begin? This is a fundamental question of contemporary art.

I would like to first discuss the ideas around public art and "land art". The late twentieth-century artist, in reaction to the commodification of art in a bourgeois capitalist society, has attempted to de-objectify art by making part of the world, "site-specific", unable to be purchased and hung on a wall. The results of such work has produced very interesting dialogues between the public, the earth and art. At the same time, the artwork has now extended beyond the classical sphere; art now becomes part of the world in a very literal sense. The art of Robert Smithson, Richard Long and Christo invaded the earth like martians, popping up in the middle of downtown Chicago or spreading across the desert, like another list of great wonders of the world. Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970) was essentially a rock path, extended from the shore, spreading out into the Great Salt lake in a spiral. Like the mysterious concentric circles found in farmers fields, to the unwary, this piece could have easily been evidence of extra-terrestrial visitors. It was a celebration of nature, as Hughes describes it: "The Romantics' awe in the face of nature is hard to revive in a culture as estranged from nature as ours but, enfolded in distance and immensity, such works of land-art are saturated in nostalgia for it." Now, the consequences are not just aesthetic. What are the environmental consequences of throwing tons of dirt and rock into a lake? Nature has had the last laugh; the lake rose and the spiral is now covered over.

Similarly, Walter De Maria had a piece from 1971 titled Lightning Field. Four hundred stainless steel rods were stuck into the New Mexico desert, lined up like a "bed of nails", attracting lightning in the ultimate fire works show. From this, we can clearly see the Romantic nostalgia. It is the incredible ferocity and rage of nature provoked; it is a staged natural sublime.

The city of Copenhagen saw another invasion of sorts; this time of public art. The City Space installation of 26 artists, part of the 96 Cultural Capital festivities, was sometimes obvious, sometimes not to pick out. Having its roots in the same anti-commodity tradition as land-art, public art, as one of its pioneers, Richard Serra, writes:

Similarly, the goal of the installation was to "focus on the interest of art in creating meaning in the public space and the ways in which that can be done." Whereas traditionally the public went to see art in art institutions, public art is fascinating for it positions itself onto the public. Though the target audience now is larger, the audience is also a very different public than the one who went to museums. The reaction is quite often negative. But this is part of it. In the 70's when Jenny Holzer placed posters around Manhattan with messages such as "Enjoy yourself because you can't change anything anyway," and "If you aren't political your personal life should be exemplary," the public was speechless. Not knowing where or who these posters came from, the public is at loss at how to react. "By bringing art as close to reality as possible, his or her first glance is 'tricked' into registering the art project as part of reality."

Jes Brinch and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen's Burn Out project in Kongens Nytorv a couple of years ago had the same effect. Located spot right in the middle of Copenhagen, a tourist hotspot, the assembly of cars and buses shocked and startled unsuspecting tourists and pedestrians. It is almost as if the disarray of cars and buses was a re-arrangement of reality, mixing up everyday symbols in a radical new order. This caused a scandal (or as much as a scandal found in Copenhagen), and eventually the installation had to be removed, as a result of complaints from local businesses. Again, the complaints which began on aesthetic grounds (ie. it's ugly), was actually a case of scaring away potential business. This is an issue of economics.

But one of the installations in the 96 cultural year plays with this public "trick" in another interesting way. Beat Streuli's Portraits, Copenhagen was nine large portraits of Danish high school students, in full colour, posted on transparent film on the windows of the Zürich insurance center near the town hall square. The public here is confronted with the public. Looking at these portraits, the public see faces of teenagers, perhaps even their own friends or family members, and the "beauty of innocence." The faces become almost like advertisements, imposing, grabbing your attention, yet we are comfortable with them because they are faces of us. It is almost like an anthropological project, a survey of young modern urban life which "exposes the collective face of the metropolis." Even when I first noticed these photographs, I was curious what they were, finally concluding that it was just another clever advertising campaign. The boundary between art and life are certainly dissolved; the public becomes the art.

A recent exhibition at Arken, the museum for modern art, titled, The Scream, gives us some more interesting examples of this art-life dissolution. The title naturally echoes the famous painting by the Norwegian, Edvard Munch. The scream, like the speaking picture, is a highly expressive dialogue between the individual and the collective; it intrudes upon our world; the scream, being a scream, shocks us. In an introduction to the show, Kim Levin describes it as follows:

This is not a quiet exhibition. It is highly confrontational and questions the very art-life bond, bringing as close to reality with noise, with a scream.

A playful example of this is another of Brinch and Jakobsen's installations titled, Smashed Cafeteria. Stemming from their infamous line of previous "smashed" or "burned" environments, this one questions the museum cafeteria. In a corner of the cafeteria, a broken assembly of chairs and tables (much like Burn Out), the same ones used by the public, are merged with the real tables and chairs. Furthermore, and slightly more subtle, the plates and cutlery given to the public are all different, a mix-match of aesthetics which certainly makes you think. All this makes us question the safety and harmony of our social and public environments. The tables make us anxious, and the plates confuse. "Their act of smashing can be seen as very direct form of social criticism, addressing in particular the art institution, by smashing the museum cafe, head-on." Like Helene Billgreen's wallpaper decorating the washrooms, this installation relies on the public interacting with it. It is art as much as we want it to be.

Lova Hamilton's video, Look of Love, is more disturbing. The video shows her cutting up and blending animal organs until it is a liquid, drinking that liquid, and vomiting it up repeatedly. While this is supposed to lead "us out of our conventional framework of social codes," my feeling is that is the ultimate, most horrifying, example of a real-life consequence of art. Works like this, like the plastic surgery woman, frighten me because it places the artist as a type of martyr, sacrificing themselves for something called "art". It is here, in my mind, post-modernism most resembles modernism; the continual belief that the religious authority of art, and indeed the worship of it, can only be shown by a personal sacrifice, a real-life irrevocable action, which shocks is a most dangerous crossing over between life and art. Like Jesse Helms's fear: art will be life.

Enlightened Beguilement: It is true, as Wendy Steiner notes, that we are living in a culture (and academia) which, while can talk of diagonals and colours, cannot give a content-oriented explanation of art or "produce a theory of value that explains in what manner art impinges on reality and why it is important to do so." The scientific reign of Formalism continues, and there is almost a fear of speaking the "I like". It is also true that we should "indulge in a little aesthetic bliss." These two facts make it easy to draw the line of division between art and reality, and Steiner's paradoxical warning holds true. "We will not be led into fascism or rape or child abuse through aesthetic experience. And while it is true that art is virtual, occupying a different space than politics, aesthetic experience," and "bliss" is not what it used to be. Her claim operates on the classical idea that we are looking at an "object" of art, harmless and mute, waiting for us to inject meaning in it. But art now has moved outside of "aesthetic experience," and the real-life consequence is not the product of art, as we fear with Rushdie or Mapplethorpe, but is actually part of the art work itself. The artist, the work, the viewer now interact increasingly closer together.

I have tried to argue that opposition to art is either on aesthetic or ideological grounds (and often the aesthetic is about ethics). In this way, scandal, then, moves the focus outside of the virtual realm of art and into the real world. And while Steiner shows that whatever reality is in art is imposed by the viewer, for better or worse, Edward Said has shown us that art, as an object, already participates in the world, its worldliness thereby affecting its meaning. I, on the other hand, have introduced the problems with contemporary installation and public art to the debate. This, as we say in North America, is a whole new ball game.

It is too easy to be shocked by an image on paper or canvas. As with Zeuxis, Massacio, and the Lumiere brothers, art has been shocking because it questions and changes people's previous ideas of aesthetics. When a picture moves for the first time, as with film, it is indeed miracle. We live in a time where that sort of technological and aesthetic innovation no longer excites us. We may find pictures beautiful, but not shocking on the same scale as it previously was. Instead, the image enrages us because it is juxtaposed with an idea, an ideology, an ethic. People get mad because art offends their church, their political party, or their cultural values. It is understandable, then--not justified-- that writers and artists are being persecuted. As mentioned earlier, this is nothing new and comes with the territory.

Contemporary art is difficult to discuss for me because the rules of the game have changed. The criteria for aesthetic judgment, so embraced by formalists, has been changed. I can no longer look to composition and line and colour to make a statement. Instead, I go to the idea. But how do you evaluate ideas? What is a good idea and what is it about it which makes it good? The focus now is on us, as the viewer. Our reactions, our fears and frights to art contribute to the effect and power it has on us (as with Smashed Cafeteria). It makes us more self-conscious; the gaze has been inverted. Thus, in a very ironic way, we need to be shocked. When a woman changes her body or vomits, or when tons of rock are thrown into a lake in a spiral, these actions are real and have irrevocable consequences. Needless to say, this contributes to the art, making it new, novel, shocking. And so it is the same with scandal. Art and literature are still properties of a capitalist system where free publicity is better than no publicity. The scandal of pleasure is no more than a pleasure for scandal.

Bibliography

1. Addison, Joseph. On the Pleasures of the Imagination, Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992.
2. Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New: Art in a Century of Change. London:Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1993.
3. Levin, Kim. The Scream, Borealis 8. Arken: Museum for Modern Art, 1996.
4. Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting. translated by Philip McMahon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.
5. Østerby, Anette. City Space: Sculptures and Installations made for Copenhagen 96 Copenhagen: Bredgade 71 1996.
6. Plato, The Republic, Critical Theory Since Plato.New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992.
7. Said, Edward. The Text, the World, and the Critic Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992.
8.Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology fo Poetry, Critical Theory Since Plato New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992.
9. Steiner, Wendy. Below Skin Deep.
10. Steiner, Wendy The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
11. Steiner, Wendy The Scandal of Pleasure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Related Links

• Mapplethorpe show in Dublin
• The Salman Rushdie Pages
• Andres Serrano Reference Page