Keep your porn in art: I want art in my porn
I do not know who raised the flag first, but it has been around for a while: the idea that art can contain pornography and, yet, not fall under any kind of questionable category. I am not talking about nudity. Nor am I talking about erotic depiction which is often justified as connected with fertility cults and rites. Many temples in India, built between 900-1300 AD, blatantly exhibit erotic art, but I doubt there was any pornographic intent. Paleolithic cave paintings and carvings, the Turin Erotic Papyrus, sexually explicit paintings and sculptures in Pompeii: all these are going to be interpreted simply as depictions of daily life with some erotic but not pornographic intent, since the concept of pornography as we know it did not appear until late Victorian times.
The Webster Dictionary defines pornography as 'a depiction of licentiousness or lewdness: a portrayal of erotic behaviour designed to cause sexual excitement'. It seems like there are a lot of carefully worded attempts of separating pornography from erotica, placing the first as having as its primary purpose the graphic depiction of sexually explicit scenes, while that erotic displays sexually explicit scenes in a more realistic and equal fashion. Some even claim that eroticism is the exploration of the feelings and emotions inspired by sex and sexuality, while pornography focuses exclusively on the physical act, and by creating this difference they ignore the physical effects eroticism – or even art itself - might have on someone. I am not going to debate over the level of sexual arousing that erotica can generate in contrast to pornography for a great amount of people, mostly women; this has been extensively done, and it is old news. My demand is that art should be included on pornography to cater the needs of an audience who gets off out of art expression. Like me.
What I want to talk about is pornography in its essence, and how much art can be applied to it without removing it from its primordial intention (for I am a firm believer that nothing - not even art - is born out of unintentionality, even if unconsciously). The notion that pornography has no space to host art comes from the idea that art is something more elevated than and superior to regular living. To a certain extent, that is true – to a society which dwelled exclusively on basal modes of reality, to which art and imagination were too expensive to be bought, and to whom struggling to survive meant hours of physical labor that bordered slavery; to that society, which disappeared centuries ago when the borders between classes became something less distinguishable exclusively as a result of social rights and economic revolutions that promoted a less animalistic way of living to less privileged spheres of social life; to that society I can understand that art would be an unattainable reality. However, since even the most “simple” artistic representation, that which holds not only an aesthetic proposal but also a functional one, like the designs on pottery found in underprivileged groups located in remote places in Brazil, for example – is considered art, I can no longer accept the idea that art belongs to a separate category from that of living, nor that it holds a superior or more sublime character.
Therefore, it is no longer acceptable that artistic intention might not be found inside pornography. However, there seems to be a refusal in the placing of art inside porn, be it for market reasons or for the mechanic repetition of the format under which pornography has existed in the past centuries. As a result, while everybody seemed to be worried about the amount of sex and skin inside museums, pornography was excluded to a second position one more time, being left out of discussions which surrounded art or being even degraded to a position of object, and not subject. The subjectification of porn, and the idea that it can contain different façades and, in them, to find art included – that is what I propose as discussion. The discussion on the separation between art and pornography is old. The debate about to which extent art can contain pornography is outdated. By the time you finish reading this article, even my request for the inclusion of art in porn films will have been outgrown. But I am still waiting for something new to show up on my screen.
- Published march 3, 2012