Can art still shock?

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Is Grayson Perry right – can we no longer be outraged by art and literature? From Manet’s Olympia to Pussy Riot and Houellebecq, Adam Thirlwell presents a short history of shock

 

 

Olympia by Édouard Manet. Photograph: Corbis

 

Adam Thirlwell

Friday 23 January 2015 17.15 GMT

The Guardian 

 

For a long time, I’ve been nostalgic for the era of shock. It’s with a certain fondness that I reflect on the crazed year of 1857, which began with Gustave Flaubert in court for his first novel, Madame Bovary (in the presence of a stenographer, hired by Flaubert, for the benefit of an incredulous posterity), followed, six months later, by Charles Baudelaire, on trial for his first book of poems, Les Fleurs du Mal. on both occasions, the unlucky prosecutor was Ernest Pinard, who lamented “this unhealthy fever which induces writers to portray everything, to describe everything, to say everything”. The era of grand trials! Or if not trials, then scandales: like the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, with its catcalling audience; or Duchamp’s impish Fountain – his notorious urinal, signed by R Mutt, submitted to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917, but rejected by its committee.

 

I was nostalgic because it seemed to me that shock was no longer possible. Or, perhaps more precisely, shock was no longer admissible. We are all, pronounced Grayson Perry, bohemians now – and therefore unshockable by art. And if this is true, it signals a grand and maybe melancholy shift in the nature of art, and in the relation of art to society. It also appears to me – considering, let’s say, Pussy Riot and Ai Weiwei – a slightly provincial argument. And then came the attack on Charlie Hebdo.

 

Naturally, the discussion that followed was about the right to offend, and the potential geopolitical imbalances of such offence. But even more urgent it seems is to define what offence might be at all. To be shocking, to be offensive: the meaning of these noble terms might not be obvious. There are so many variants of shock. What might be necessary, for more precise orientation, is some kind of shock genealogy.

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Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917). Photograph: Alfred Stieglitz/AP

And the place to start, both symbolically and historically, is Paris.

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Imagine that you are in 1865, at the Salon in Paris, looking at the paintings. You are, in this experiment with time travel, a critic. But you are not looking at the classical allegories with their cherubs and porpoises, or the sodden northern landscapes. Instead, you are laughing at a painting of a nude. The title of this painting is Olympia, and the artist is Édouard Manet. Yes, here you are among the connoisseurs of shock – in the crammed atmosphere of Room M, listening to the way the critics talk among themselves. Olympia looks like a gorilla or monkey, they are saying, and the hand draped over her crotch looks like a spider or a claw. She is made of india rubber. Definitely she is unwashed, and the sooty marks of her cat’s paws can be seen all over her sheets. If, that is, anything can be made out at all: because really she is formless, inconceivable, a blur where there should be a body.

 

We are so used to the idea that the history of modernism represents a heroic succession of shock artists that it’s rather touching to observe how downcast Manet was by this reaction. He wrote a bedraggled letter to his friend Baudelaire: “I really would like you here, my dear Baudelaire; they are raining insults on me, I’ve never been led such a dance.” (To which Baudelaire admittedly replied in the full regalia of modernist panache: “What you ask from me is truly stupid. People are making fun of you; jokes annoy you; no one does you justice … Do you think you’re the first person to be placed in this position?”) But then, Manet wasn’t exaggerating. This painting, wrote critic and philosopher Georges Bataille, was “the first masterpiece before which the crowd fairly lost all control of itself”.

 

Now of course, to the innocent tourist in 2015 standing in front of this painting – which depicts a woman naked on a bed, her two companions a black woman bringing flowers, and a cat – such loss of control might just seem another episode from the history of 19th-century hysteria. But it is at least worth considering whether the contemporary critics were correct – not, perhaps, in how they theorised their reaction, but in having such a reaction. Not to be shocked at all might represent the greater obtuseness.

 

Sure, the scandal was to some degree purely to do with subject matter: that Manet had apparently so frankly depicted a prostitute. And some of it was to do with form: that Manet had apparently so frankly made his painting an exercise in sketched flatness. Those shocks were perhaps specific to the 19th-century atmosphere. But they were also just surface shocks. The deeper shock, as Bataille observed, was how no sign-system was useful in understanding Olympia. The painting could neither be defined according to “the drab world of naturalistic prose”, nor its opposite, the universe of “absurd academic fictions”. Manet’s genius and the true source of the bourgeois outrage was his ability to “disappoint expectation”: “instead of the theatrical forms expected of him, Manet offered up the starkness of ‘what we see’. And each time it so happened that the public’s frustrated expectation only redoubled the effect of shocked surprise produced by the picture.” The greatness of the art was that it changed the nature of the form. The shock was just a side effect.

 

Let Olympia, therefore, stand as a mini maquette of shock: the immediate improprieties of subject matter – prostitutes! The working classes! – followed by the more hidden improprieties of form. And yet none of this might be visible in the present moment. There’s a wonderful chapter in TJ Clark’s 1985 book The Painting of Modern Life, where he analyses the shock of Olympia, at the beginning of which he assembles the manic archive of contemporary criticism: all the chatter of the Salon virtuosi. The shock, he observes, simply created a failure of criticism. For in the present moment of outrage, there might be only absence, and frustration.

 

This creates one final, hidden complication: the more blankly frustrated a critic feels, the more she might also suspect that the entire operation was a deliberate joke. In a minor article on Olympia by a minor hack, A Bonnin, a rumour is reported that Manet’s painting was just “a parti pris on his part, a sort of ironic defiance hurled at the jury and the public”. (It’s true, Bonnin adds, that other people also tried to argue for Manet’s sincerity, but in the end no one could really know: “His canvases are too unfinished for us possibly to tell.”)

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Pussy Riot perform in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, 2012. Photograph: Anna Artemeva/Getty

There’s something dubious about shock, something dirty and vulnerable to our purer disdain. Is shock anything other than a stunt tactic – an episode not from the history of art but of publicity? It’s that worry that lay behind the Salon chatter, and also the celebrated preface the Goncourt Brothers wrote, in the same year as Olympia, to their realist novel Germinie Lacerteux, where they posed the basic question: “Why have we written it? Is it just to shock the public and scandalise its tastes?” (Absolutely not, was the Goncourts’ noble answer. Their motives were entirely moral.)

 

Shock, it has to be admitted, is not chic. It is so often seen as juvenile, meretricious, boring. Even in 1865, shock was passé.

 

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The heroic era of shock begins about a century earlier, with the Enlightenment writings of Voltaire, Diderot and co. The Enlightenment was a criminal publishing operation – their manuscripts so shocking that they had to be sent to Amsterdam to be printed and then smuggled back into France, hidden under straw in fish barrels or in the baggage of sympathetic diplomats. When the network failed, the consequences were gothic. Of one seizure, when three people were arrested, Diderot wrote to Sophie Volland: “They have been pilloried, flogged, and branded, and the apprentice has been condemned to nine years on the galleys, the colporteur to five years, and the woman to the hospital for her entire life.” By hospital he meant madhouse, in the future Soviet punishment style. In their novels and essays, Diderot and his accomplices were intent on dismantling the ruling ideology, and in particular the religio-political complex of the church and the state.

 

The Enlightenment was a renegade movement. In works such as Candide, or crazier excesses such as De Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, all the ruling codes – political, sexual, semantic – are destabilised or rejected. (Edward Gibbon recorded one dinner he attended with the philosophes in 1763, where everyone “preached the tenets of Atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt”.) It’s the Enlightenment where the conjunction of art and shock began, and which is why 100 years later, by 1865, that conjunction was already suspect.

 

But one way of considering if our weariness is appropriate is to take a geographical sidestep. Yes, we might feel so over shock, in the liberal democracies, but it’s worth remembering the fate of shock in countries where the decor is less halcyon. one major heir of Diderot, for instance, is the feminist punk group Pussy Riot – put on trial for offending Russian Orthodox sensibilities after their brief performance, Mother of God, Chase Putin Out, in 2012 in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, in Moscow – of which the definitive study in English is Masha Gessen’s acidic book, Words Will Break Cement. Gessen offers the prehistory of Pussy Riot and their trial, including the art collective Voina – to which some Pussy Riot members belonged: “they wanted to confront a language of lies that had once been effectively confronted but had since been reconstructed and reinforced, discrediting the language of confrontation itself. There were no words left.” This was the problem Voina faced in the new era of Putin, which led to their happenings in supermarkets and subways – and it finds its retrospective analysis in the precise, restrained closing statements of the three members of Pussy Riot who were put on trial. As Nadya Tolokonnikova outlined it, these punk songs had a philosophical rationale: “We were seeking true sincerity and simplicity and we found them in the holy-fool aesthetic of punk performance.” just as the absurdist writers Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky confronted Soviet terror with nonsense poetry: “They paid with their lives to show that they had been right to believe that senselessness and lack of logic expressed their era best. They made art into history.”

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Charles Baudelaire c1860. Photograph: Corbis