I'd like to briefly return to this...
Hmm, maybe the "art" vs "craft/design" thing comes into play here. A chair, however nice a chair it is, is designed with one specific purpose- to be a chair. A good chair is a good example of the craft of chair-making. It's not supposed to facilitate philosophy or trigger emotions, it's meant to support a human arse comfortably. Whereas a thing that's meant to be art will of course include some sort of craft (painting or sculpting etc) in order to exist physically but will also create a space where we're forced to challenge stuff and swill ideas and emotions around.
Someone once said something like "Art is what white men produce; Craft is what women and natives make." If Picasso made a teapot (and I'm pretty sure I saw some of his teapots and definitely saw some of his posters advertising a festival in the South of France), we would decide that it's creating a space for exploring ideas, and its tea-making function immediately becomes secondary.
Feminist scholars and postcolonial scholars, in other words, would ask that we explore the ways that women and non-whites always wind up on the devalued side of so many of these binary conditions. What kind of culture wants/needs there to be a bright line between the utilitarian objects of daily life and a "transcendent" space called "art"? Who benefits from this distinction?
Not to pick on you, but look at the implicit binaries in your example: engaging the mind (art) is more important than engaging the body (chair). This plays out in the porn/erotica/art distinction in obvious ways: if the 'mind' is not engaged in a way that is recognized as 'higher' the object or experience must not be 'art' (or 'erotica').
But, again, a lot of postcolonial and feminist scholars would have us look at, for instance, your chair. Not all cultures produce chairs. I'm going to be lazy and not check this fact, but I recently read somewhere that, actually, Western chairs derive from thrones. They wouldn't have been found in peasant homes in early Europe. And what do they do? They elevate us from the floor, from the earth, and--if no one else has one or if the biggest one is put up on some stairs and has a bigger back to it--it elevates us above everyone else in the room and marks us as the one in command.
So we need to ask: why do some cultures repeatedly and across genres repeat actions and create structures to separate them from the earth? What kinds of cultures tend to do that? Might such structures be related to hierarchical power structures? Does it have anything to do with where their philosophical systems have traditionally told them (male) divine power lies, and where (female) death and inertia is? Or are those claims too broad?
We can't ask those questions very well if we've decided that "chair" is simply an almost "natural" or at best "utilitarian" object, one that does not put us in a place to swill ideas and emotions around. Put it on the "craft" side, and it is trivial. Domestic. Simple. Not art. Not elevated.
Likewise, pornography is partly discomforting because it engages and serves the body, and specifically serves its sexual functions. It also, one must add, has been traditionally used to reify 'male' and 'female' behaviors; it has traditionally imagined a het male viewer and most would say that traditional porn has reified and enforced a white, het, male worldview, for men of various classes (Hustler, in the US, deliberately targeted and appealed to working class men, for example, while Playboy presented itself as being written by and for "sophisticates").
Pornography has, therefore, tended to objectify women in problematic ways and as an industry it has exploited women workers. This has led many feminists to reject pornography, tout suite, as inherently tainted, as furthering the goals and aims of patriarchy--Catherine MacKinnon and our much-maligned friend Andrea Dworkin, in particular. But many other feminists would point out that these exact same claims could be leveled against "art", and that the art (erotica) /porn distinction, like the art/craft one, is rooted in masculinist assumptions about what's important, and often stop us from asking the kinds I was asking above about the chair. Candida Royalle and others were early, active validators of porn for women (and non-hets) challengers to the way porn business has been done, on many levels: treating workers with respect and challenging gender stereotyping in porn. |
