The Art of

131
09
The newly attained
sexual freedom in
America raised concerns
in the late 1970’s
regarding explicit
violent and sexual
imagery in the media.
In the heated debates
about pornography,
“Pro-sex” feminists saw
a subversive potentiality
of pornography in
rejecting sexual repression,
self-oppression,
and hypocrisy. See:
Hans Maes, “Erotic
Art,” in: Edward N.
Zalta, ed.: The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/
erotic-art (accessed 25
November 25 2015).
expression’ with social involvement and to express rage against the ‘hypocritical
intelligentsia, capitalist culture manipulation and consumerism.’ 08
One discrepancy of postwar American life that Lurie and his colleagues
were never tired of exposing in their works involved the absurdly prudent
rules regarding explicit representations of sexual activities and nudity
in the American public sphere (Hollywood, television, Madison Avenue)—while
explicit images of war atrocities during the Cold War were
broadly available to every household. The members of NO!art shared
these insights—and a sense of dissident freedom to confront them —
with underground comic creators, exploitation filmmakers, comedians,
and later pro-sex feminists 09 who praised certain pornographic imagery
and sexual practices as feminist, liberating, subversive, and educating.
They opposed feminists who viewed pornography as exploiting and objectifying
women, and argued that antipornography discourse ignores
women’s sexual agency and supports neo-Victorian ideas that men want
sex and women merely endure it. By that time, it had become a common
conviction that the mechanisms of both rebellion and suppression
were driven by and permeated with sex.
Lolita | see image p. 21, a work from 1962, shows a ripped poster of the
Stanley Kubrick film that had been released earlier that year. The face of
Sue Lyon, the film’s star, armed with heart-shaped sunglasses and sucking
a red lollypop, has been rotated 90 degrees to rest on the base of
the canvas. Her gaze is directed at a black-and-white photograph in the
upper left-hand corner that shows a person crushed under the weight
of a barrack’s wall. An incident mentioned by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann
in Jerusalem is often noted in relation to that work. While waiting for his
verdict, Eichmann was given the novel Lolita for relaxation by his guards.
Eichmann returned it a few days later, complaining that it was an unwholesome
book (“Das ist aber ein sehr unerfreuliches Buch”—he told
his guard). Whether Lurie was aware of the incident or not, it exposes,
like his own work, the disjuncture that enables someone like Eichmann—
but not him alone—to wax “good citizens” who are appalled by nudity
and representations of explicit sex and at the same time to tolerate passively,
collaborate in, or even execute a crime of an unprecedented nature
and dimensions.
However, NO!art artists, most of whom were men, and Lurie himself
were often accused of failing to challenge patriarchal structures themselves.
Some critics point out that the artistic violence in their work, while
directed at the society, was directed more immediately at the women
depicted. Some have even concluded that Lurie’s persistent focus on the
violated female body undermined his progressive political aspirations
and explains his exclusion from the avant-garde canon through the pres-
08
LURIE/KRIM/HUN-
DERTMARK
PIN-UPS, EXCRE-
MENT, PROTEST, JEW
ART, p. 13
Shock Treatment: Figures of Women in Boris Lurie’s Work