예술과 외설--여성의 누드

Abstract

The problem of demarcating the boundary between art and pornography is often discussed and much investigated, but never fully agreed upon, reflecting strongly a relativistic tendency in contemporary aesthetic discourses. This paper argues that all academic efforts at such a demarcation is not only practically futile, but also ideologically harmful in that they build their differential justification on the basis of class, sexual, and social distinctions--on the acceptance of the symbolic order. It is a grave mistake if we suppose that our act of seeing is epistemological and pure. Seeing (voir) is inseparable from knowledge (savoir) and power (pouvoir) and is motivated by scopophilia (appetite of the eyes). Seeing female nudes, whether refinedly artistic or sloppily pornographic, contributes to male sexual and aesthetic economy of gaining pleasure at the expense of the other sex. The goal of scopic satisfaction is realized in the absence of castration anxiety on the part of the viewer: the sexual object seen should not endanger the seeing subject into losing his dominant position of knowledge and power. That is why nude arts, not to mention pornography, have to be produced in agreement with and in terms of the visual grammar of the symbolic order. The woman as the Real should be eliminated on the canvas of the painter order to be transformed and artistically reborn into a sign, the object of the scopophilia. To use Jacques Lacan's term, the gaze should be mediated and tamed by the symbolic order. The look is maximized by minimizing the gaze. That is why all nudes cannot but be pornographic. Arts are not opposed to pornography, but are its cultivated and legitimated ally and accomplice. This paper concludes with the suggestion that the only possible alternative to pornography is found in works of avant-garde artists such as René Magritte and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Their works belong to the realm of meta-porno, pornography's critical reflection of itself, characterized by the double gesture of self-exposure (exhibitionism) and of self-accusation (castration). It is only through meta-porno that arts can deny their old time-honored privilege of satisfying the appetite of the eyes in the name of high culture as opposed to the low culture of pornography.