On the Nude, and other Transgressions

"I don't think it is any longer necessary to make nudes, which might be a way of saying it is no longer necessary to enact transgressions in order to make significant works of art, even modernist art. This is, again, not to suggest that the cultural and social antagonisms which provoke the whole process of art as transgression, from Romanticism on, have been cured or calmed."

Jeff Wall in an interview with Arielle Pelenc. Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews. p 256

Does the law crush the soul? Is obeying the law living in bad faith? Is transgression the beginning of authentic existence, the origin of art's truth and freedom? Although one might be drawn to think that these are the tenants of avant-garde art (which finds itself necessarily embattled against traditional, official culture), Jeff Wall asks these questions, ultimately opining that "it is the writing of laws, not the breaking of them, that is the most significant and characteristic artistic act in modernity." So, encrypted in the act of transgression, the avant-garde experiments by positing new behaviors, not just breaking old ones. 

It is not then, the violation that makes avant-garde art (or really, any transgression) so seductive, but the idea that new ways are being experimented with and found--better ways. The artistic nude emerged against a social attitude that demonized the human body rather than curing society's arcane, philistine conception that the nude body was a hazard and hotbed of iniquity--that it, rather than society itself (among them, politicians of both church and state), needed to be tamed and educated. In Western Europe, we see this social attitude nearly entirely usurped by a more liberal mentality. One need only flip on the TV to see women nude in shampoo commercials.

What that also does, importantly, is call into question those artists still existing in that pre-mentality. If you stumble across a young photographer looking to do nudes (there are a few here in Princeton), you might first ask yourself if they've done their homework. The Monk or even The Scarlet Letter were once polemics against sexual legalism. Today "erotic" clit-lit stocks grocery store aisles. The Godardian Breathless jump-cut, child of the New Wave, tires itself in standard MTV fare. 

Laws are meant to be broken, re-written, attempted, and broken again. How else can we progress? How can we live but by transgression?

JMH