The issue of nudity and pornification in the works of Jeff koons,
Nobuyoshi Araki and Thomas Ruff.
Nowadays the boundary between pornography and art is getting unclear....
The age old question of “What is art?” will always be difficult to define. People are constantly pushing boundaries and challenging our preconceptions on what we consider to be acceptable art. Nudity and pornography forexample has always been touch and go in the art world, and has us constantly questioning, how far is too far? How much is too much?
In this essay I am going to explore the issues of nudity and pornification in three of the following contemporary artists: Jeff koons, Nobuyoshi Araki and Thomas Ruff, All of these artworks were produced in the 1990s’, and they all caused controversy during the time they were released; therefore I focus on the impact they have had on our culture and society today.
Before we examine these artworks, I would like to briefly explain the term of “Pornification”, that been widely use in recent years. According to the Oxford Dictionary it is defined as:
“The increasing occurrence and acceptance of sexual themes and explicit imagery in popular or mainstream culture.” The Oxford Dictionaries (2011)
The word pornification is simply to add pornographic content to an image.
Jeff Koons “Made in Haven, 1991”
The first artwork that we are going to look at is made by the famous American artist Jeff koons. This is a series of work that features the artist with his then wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, also known as Cicciolina in moments of sexual foreplay.
These images of exuberant sexuality were first presented at the 1990 Venice Biennale where, exhibited among more conventional forms of expression, they produced both shock and titillation among viewers. Koons hit a nerve in the art world with this series, in part because it was shocking subject matter that tested the limits of late twentieth century censorship. While audiences are quite familiar with the semiotics of popular media, pornography was a form of popular culture that was and is still taboo in polite company. Koons has always sought to test the boundaries of appropriate taste. In Made in Heaven, love, romance and sexual desire are examined critically, implicating the viewer by making him a participant, as nearly all pornography requires an outside viewer to be classified as such. (Christie’s 2011, para 1)
As he said in the interview for his book:
I am dealing with the subjective and objective. Modernism is subjective. I use Modernism as a metaphor for sexuality without love -- a kind of masturbation. And that’s Modernism. I played this off the Post-Modern. Sex with love a higher state, in which one can enter eternal, and I believe that’s what I showed people. There was love there. That’s why it wasn’t pornographic. (Muthesius & Riemschneider 1992, p.30)
This billboard poster is part of a project in which Koons made works depicting his sexual relationship with his wife. These provocative works show the naked couple in explicit poses and reference paintings by artists such as Edouard Manet to examine the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons employed Ilona’s regular photographer and backdrops, to create the distinctive aesthetic associated with 'glamour' imagery.
“The artist is the modern day Adam, looking buff, muscular with perfectly coifed hair. Ciccolina is the late night cable television Eve, wearing the contemporary accouterments of lace hose, a tight corset and a diamond tennis bracelet. He holds her and she holds him. While they are embracing each other, it is their individual pleasure that seems to guide their grasp of one another. The artist and Ciccolina are surrogates for all our fantasies. Blurring the boundaries between fine art and pornography, Koons challenged the conventions of artistic taste, encouraging his audience to make their own decisions about what is acceptable.” (Christie’s 2011, para 2)
As he said in the interview for his book:
In Made in Heaven I wanted to take this vocabulary of embracing your class and make it more wide. Not just to a bourgeois class but to a much wider audience. I was trying to deal with people’s desires. Also, I think it was presenting the idea of the chameleon - that if one emulates what one wants to be, one can become that. (Muthesius & Riemschneider 1992, p.29)
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Nobuyoshi Araki “Shikijyo Sexual Desire, 1994-96”
Nobuyoshi Araki is best known as one of the key art photographers to present sexually explicit work. He is the epitome of the promiscuous photographer, taking tens of thousands of pictures using a range of cameras, with a predatory fluidity that gives a woman’s body, a flower, a bowl of food or a street scene a literal and psychological sexual charge.
Araki is a major celebrity in Japan, he lives and work in Tokyo, having published close to over 350 books of energetically gridded, juxtaposed and sequenced photographs, and still producing more every year. Many of his photographs are erotic; some have been called pornographic. Among his photography books are Sentimental Journey (1971, but later reissued), Tokyo Lucky Hole (1985), and Shino (2002). However, it was not until the early 1990s that Araki became well known outside Japan, the Shikijyo Sexual Desire was one of his photography series that got the West attention. His acceptance as an artist in the West has relied on the subjectivity, photographed women smeared with paint or bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo’s ancient past or Tokyo’s modern sexual underworld, as well as the boldness of his work.
Araki’s photographs of young Japanese woman are seen as a visual diary of his sexual life, for he clams to have sex with most of the woman depicted. His images are often seen as a kind of photographic foreplay, rather than a detached and exploitative voyeurism. The infrequency with which other men appear (typically as clients or sexual partners of the women whom Araki photographs) is important in preserving this reading of the work. Sometime the relationship between the photographer and his models is described as collaborative in a romantic way. As he stated:
What's important in my work is always the relationship between me and the object -- it's a kind of love story. I don't concern myself with why a relationship starts or where it goes. The most important thing is just the relationship between the two of us at that moment. This world becomes our world. As stated by Liddell (2006) ‘Nobuyoshi Araki - Intimate photography: Tokyo, nostalgia and sex’
To the extent, that it is also suggested that Araki and his camera are conduits for these women’s sexual fantasies.
“Since his photography is considered to be a diary, one that promotes his genuine desire for these women, much of the potential debate about the possible pornographic and exploitative aspects of his work is curtailed. This shying away from obvious reading of Araki’s images demonstrates how intimate photography can circumvent debates that surround so much other contemporary art photographers and photographic imagery in general.” (Cotton 2009, p.143)
Thomas Ruff “Nudes, 1999”
With the development of internet then the explosion of porn website, the Nudes series were made. German photographer Thomas Ruff is specifically interested in just how far he can restrict immediate sexual association while still leaving the subject matter clear. Ruff is best known for coolly objective images which support his claim that "photography can only reproduce the surface of things".Ruff records, but generally refrains from implying a particular viewpoint, inviting others to supply their own interpretation of his work. His aim, in other words, is to render sexual material somehow un-sexual, and to achieve this he employs a number of distancing devices.The sources of his works were downloaded from the porn website, re-photographed, blurred then enlarged and enhanced with digital pixellation. Ruff's images are photographs of photographs from which he wishes to remove his own interpretative presence.
“With their saccharine tonal ranges, these are beautiful images that demonstrate how idealization is key to the representation of a subject , and that potentially any subject (and here a relatively new form of images-making and viewing) can become a meditaton on aesthetic form.” (Cotton 2009, p.213-4)
To this end, the only information he specifically provides regarding their content is a single word: 'Nudes'. Other than this, viewer are left to draw their own conclusions. Our inability to make out exactly what is happening may cause us to lose interest or even experience frustation. Eventual recognition of the context might cause concern, shock or even a voyeuristic sense of pleasure. For others, the partially veiled nature of the images could render them more erotic.Yet as Ruff has made clear:
“What people see, eventually, is only what's already inside them.” (Brennan 2005, para 2)
“You've seen this throughout history," he adds. ''Every time a new medium comes around, there's an explosion of sexual content. It happened with books, it happened with movies, it happened with the VCR. And now the Internet allows it to happen to an even greater extent.” As stated by Aucoin(2006) ‘The pornification of America’.
Pornography has become part of our main stream culture.Therefore the question, “is it art or pornography?” may depend on what era you came from, and how strong is the story or message behind it. Maybe art is just there to challenge our society, leading us to think more and view further.
Bibliography
2011, The Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Aucoin, D 2006, ‘The pornification of America’, The Boston Globe, retrieved November 2,2011,from http://www.boston.com/yourlife/articles/2006/01/24/the_pornification_of_america/
Brennan, M 2005, Sex and sexuality in art, retrieved Nov 5,2011, from http://www.modernedition.com/art-articles/sex-in-art/sexuality-contemporary-art.html
Christies.com 2011, Jeff Koons (b.1945) Ponies, Christie’s auction house, retrieved November 7,2011 from http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4288606
Cotton, C 2009, The photograph as contemporary art (new edition), Thames & Hudson Ltd, London.
Liddell, C.B 2006, ‘Nobuyoshi Araki - Intimate photography: Tokyo, nostalgia and sex’, The Japan Times online, retrieved November 7,2011 fromhttp://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/fa20061123a1.html
Muthesius, A & Riemschneider, B 1992, Jeff Koons, Benedikt Taschen, Cologne.
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