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The issue of esapce contains nine short essays/polemics. They range in approach from autobiography (Steven Audia) to brief art history genealogies (Julie Lavigne, Peter Dubé, Charlene K. Lau) and some attempts at theoretical art criticism (AM Trépanier, Claire Lahuerta, Emma-Kate Guimond, Mayookh Barua). It isn’t pornography itself that is treated as art (which is unfortunate), but a meta or post-pornography that more comfortably slots into a far more traditional type of Contemporary Art narrative. This also helps to easily assimilate the material into a set of largely readymade theoretical frameworks (queer and feminist).
On the art history side, it runs through a fairly standard canon of homosexual artists (Tom of Finland, Evergon, Peter Berlin, etc. and avoiding far more complicated examples like Attila Richard Lukacs) or feminist post-pornographers like Annie Sprinkle, who have already been central to these sorts of discussions in academia for at least thirty years. Inter covered much of the same ground better a decade ago in the Fall 2012 edition.
Advertised at the back of the issue is the upcoming Sex, Desire and Data at the Phi Centre allows you to interact with AI-generated porn (it is “ethical” that way) following all the same generically privileged categories in this issue of espace. For about $40 (appropriately the traditional charge for a new release porn DVD) you can take part in an “interactive, multisensory experience that explores the connections between sexuality and technology.” Or, to put it in Adorno’s terms, it is the aesthetic expression of the castrated. Nothing quite this exciting is at play in the publication. Instead, the works and issues discussed tend to be closer to what Lisa Steele was doing nearly fifty years ago.
One of the more striking things about the espace issue is that everyone seems aware that there’s something almost antique about this topic. It feels rehearsed, both in the sense of a preparation for a future performance and a regurgitation of something pre-scripted. Hanging over all of it is the old porn debates that ran from the 1970s to the early 90s that were central to the “culture wars” that never seem to end or even develop into anything interesting, and which persist in even more dumbed-down form in things like Zombie Feminism.
What generally gets lost within culture war discourse is in no small part that the real issue is the problem of culture itself. The U.S. Commission on Obscenity that famously found that there was no plausible link between consuming sexually explicit material and much of anything (particularly violence) spawned two primary reactions. One: from President Nixon, who dismissed the findings because if taken seriously, they completely undermined the idea of culture itself, thus prompting a digging in of cultural conservatism. Two: by feminists (Barry, Brownmiller, Morgan, Griffin, Rich, etc.) who reacted by constructing even more convoluted conceptualizations of culture as the primary means for understanding the struggles of life. Both of these reactions, each devoutly and evangelically moralistic, had no basis in logical viability or empirical facts, but increasingly baroque variations on their underlying logic of culture became central to how the arts became institutionally taught and conceptualized (as practice and in marketing).
All of this came on the back of theories of sexual revolution, notably the works of Reich and Marcuse, who attempted to fuse Freud with Hegel and Marx and displace the “unconscious” into the “sociological,” treating culture with a revamped symptomology. Indeed, the cultural conception of art that the state has lumbered onto artists, not that they’ve shown much resistance, was itself symptomatic of it, as is the normative means for teaching art (including film and literature) in universities now, all quite despite the fact that there has never been a non-absurd or historically credible defense of the premise that culture (let alone cultures) exist at all (although cults and occult fantasies certainly seem to).
The history of pornography, either in aesthetic or (especially) in legal terms, has been highly local, although that is lost in this collection of writing and imagery. It is a specifically American framing that tends to sit at the back of most of the essays. They almost entirely privilege the cinematic model of pornography, taking Linda Williams’ work on hardcore (which she was thankfully explicit about only being applicable to a handful of American films made at a very specific moment and is non-generalizable to the analysis of pornography) uncritically as precisely what it isn’t. This is supplemented with occasional references to Thomas Waugh’s even more dubious scholarly endeavours, and frequent overcodings with references to keywords from queer theory and gender feminism, even if none of the actual theories that fall under these headings are ever meaningfully engaged with.
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One should not forget that what was at stake in the early days of what became queer theory - expressed in some ways by the distance between Califa and Butler and even more so in Butler’s role in domesticating Foucauldian theory in America - was a form of retrenchment given the prospect, increasingly theoretically plausible, that the grounds for understanding the world in terms of harm, violence, power and the therapeutic fantasy of the self were clearly weak, if not untenable, and this had substantial political implications (which no one involved seemed willing to face at the time and their offspring are even less willing to face today).
As I discovered in graduate school, if you work on anything even vaguely related to sexuality in the arts in academia, you are subjected to queer theory and feminism as de facto normative ideologies that you are expected to address the material within, and if not, to provide extensive justification for not doing so or face censure. This is rather disheartening given that there are millennia worth of discourses around the globe dealing with sex and the erotic that are not reconcilable to these extremely recent hypotheticals. What the authors term “marginality” is a puritanical form of parochialism with its own set of folk superstitions that go entirely unchallenged, an obfuscation ironically effected through appeals to critically. That the discursive enframing that is deployed consistently has no real explanatory value leaves one to wonder what the purpose of it actually is, as opposed to conducting concrete description and analysis.
In the collection, pornography, a term as notoriously protean and fluid as culture, is consistently reduced to representation and content and, somewhat less often, use or practice. It tends to be a content to be appropriated and practiced with.
The issue’s introduction explains that it is “dedicated to associating visual art and pornography” and opens with an ethical apologia. [4] The author appeals to Ruwen Ogien’s minimalist ethical justification of pornography on the grounds of a quasi-libertarian appeal to “do no harm” and allow adults to make decisions about what they consume for their benefit. Commercial porn is identified as capitalist and heteronormative. Post-pornography is defined as an anti-phallocratic minority practice that privileges the care of the self while Autopornography advances the “self’s creative subjectivity.” [6] Or as Lau puts it, the artists embrace “strategies of pornography” to put it to ethical ends, one could add, according to the basic tenets of civic religion (inclusivity, equality, subjectivity). [60] Likewise, pornography can be harnessed to a practical and pro-social agenda that aids in subjectification and the archival impulse in service to the reproduction of the anthropological image; or, as Barua claims, “pornographic material that both preserves history and enables sexual association becomes key to understanding certain queer cultures.” [78] This was already a claim generic to sexology at the turn of the twentieth century with Bloch.
Autopornography is advocated as a venue for critique, especially for those with a “marginalized” gender representation. Lavigne constructs a fairly unsurprising genealogy of such work from Carolee Schneemann to Hannah Wilke, Pierre Molinier, and Annie Sprinkle as they go through the play of various codes in the performance of gender. It promotes political change through sexual arousal and serves to affirm marginal identities against domination and expand sexual representation in public. There is no substantial justification for how any of the works she cites do the things she claims they do and it isn’t anything you wouldn’t have found in an introductory textbook on American Contemporary Art since the 1990s.
As a depressing instance of what Lee Edelman once castigated as queer theory’s implosion into “Left-wing kitsch,” what you get is utopian kitsch for the future and dystopian kitsch for the past and present. It continues the “pastoral fantasy” of sex that Leo Bersani had detected in Dworkin and MacKinnon’s anti-porn feminism and in early queer theory, which was already succeeding in the erasure of actual homosexuality to degrees that homophobia was entirely incapable.
When I worked in the gay porn industry in Toronto, the barriers between homosexuals, gays, and queers were very real even then. And certainly today, most of the people I know who would “identify” as gay or homosexual (male or female), tend to regard those currently claiming queer status as basically confused, or delusional straight people exploiting a label (and history) for cachet, whether online, in academia, or competing for NGO work, and as a prop against their horror of actual sex. Not that they would say this in public because of the policing role that “queerness” has taken on.
Queer theory, to the extent that the term delineates a coherent body of concepts (it is the “theory” that David Halperin insisted could “do anything” and everything), and despite its signifer’s elliptical function as a reactive form of dissidence to an ostensible norm, still relies on a set of normative claims, which are, if anything, even more reductive and questionable than the things it purports to critique.
What queerness promotes is likewise motivated by an extremely limited framework, one which, in Canada at least, is not that different from the thing it is ostensibly contrasted to and is not even coherent with itself. One artist (MariaBasura) may be “queer” because they identify neoliberalism with fascism and another artist is queer because their work is entirely neoliberal (arkadi lavoie lachapelle) to the extent that the term is more than a vapid epithet, much like “queer” itself once was. Historian Gary Kinsman has been earnestly trying to construct a queer narrative for decades but has failed to the point that the only thing he’s come close to plausibly demonstrating, quite unintentionally and in ways that he refuses to address, is that queerness was a symptomatic by-product of the evolutionary vagaries of “capitalism.” At least two of the essays in espace effectively define post-porn and queerness as anti-capitalist activism.
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There is an interesting tension in queer theory between the term as a description for a particular kind of (“neoliberal”) subject and for a process. So while queer is an identity (or “disidentity”) signifier, queering tends to evoke a process of identity erosion and manufacture. The former is a fairly traditional (but severely compromised) retread of the notion of the political subject, but the latter could be anything from global warming to colonialism, pollution of the environment with estrogens, or the use of drones to bomb the public sphere (to use examples I have seen academic queer theorists argue). Queering may make queers and queerness but queers don’t seem to queer all that much. Either way, in practice it tends to just be another consumer identity, one which commodifies and exploits a metanarrative of oppression and liberation.
One particularly humorous development in the collection comes when Jessica Ragazzini outlines the extent to which algorithmic censorship that she thinks is afflicting the internet is clearly in its formal qualities an almost perfect instance of queering since its stress on codes and indifference to their encoding in “context” or in terms of “social impact” radically undermines the normative categories of art appraisal and notions of sexual content, collapsing distinctions between art and pornography and much else. [26] That big tech censorship can readily be read as queering isn’t acknowledged, of course, nor is what this says about obscenity, which is now less about an image per se than its indexing terms. While the texts are rife with appeals to social premises, there is no concrete analysis of context at all. In fact, the theoretical and ethical framing the authors defer to does the same thing the algorithm evidently does.
The “post” of post-porn tethers the running subject of the issue to an even more vaguely defined pornography that tends to be called “mainstream porn” in contrast to this “marginal” material that straddles and appropriates it. Trépanier, for instance, describes it as a stress on close-ups of genitalia, which the post-porn she discusses distances itself from, but this is hardly unique to mainstream pornography and to a large degree hasn’t been the case for twenty years, a matter in both cases which has had far more to do with practicalities of filmmaking than any ideological significance. Besides which, early feminist erotic art was often focused on the “cunt power,” as Rose termed it, of genitalia-centred imagery so a shift from genital stress works more convincingly as a “post-feminist” gesture.
What is mainstream porn? Wicked? Evil Angel? Piss Vids? Brazzers? Corbin Fisher? Each of these studios rely on fundamentally different aesthetics and visual logics which don’t have anything to do with whatever ostensible sexual orientation their content appeals to. Does the mainstream include anal prolapsing or not? Have the people writing these articles actually thought about these pretty basic things? Is the mainstream distinguishable from something like the Italian company CentoXcento, which for decades has created chaotic swinger orgy porn involving almost any variety of legal sex act and shot in rough gonzo style in the decaying provincial homes of those who are part of its decentralized online community? The company’s producer-director-star Alex Magni has probably shot some of the most remarkably effective and often ugly porn in the past decade, coming close to a kind of visual equivalent to noise music.
If you look at the data from AEBN, for instance (and the “content” may vary unpredictably by month), the desires that dominate in mainstream porn consist of videos of bi-cuckolding, wife swapping, gloryholing, interracial sex, the privileging of middle-aged women as sex objects and to a lesser degree trans content for straight audiences, while gay porn is saturated by fantasies of incarcerated sex and sex in the military. Both are filled with incest fantasies, although almost exclusively of the “step” sibling or parent variety.
From the perspective of art, it makes far more sense to interpret pornography from the vantage of its techniques and forms than its supposed “orientation” unless one understands this term in its geographic register. Japanese, Italian, German, French, and American, etc. pornography are all more generically artistically distinct from one another than “mainstream” versus queer or gay versus straight. One could even make the distinction by production company. The work produced by MG is aesthetically interchangeable, whether it is ostensibly providing straight, gay, or trans content. They have even created variations on the same pseudo-narrative set-ups with the same sets, props, colour schemes, sex positions, angles, framing, tempo, sound design, and jokes, interchanging the performers so the action can be gay, bi, straight, or trans. This is all done self-consciously, parodying pornographic tropes and those of online discourses, winking at the camera, insisting on the performativity of sexuality, etc. Pornography is already thoroughly postmodern, entirely promiscuous in its epistemology and aesthetics. Post-pornography, by contrast, is a reductive, moralizing kind of masterly irony.
(Does the fact that the pornography made explicitly by and for a Québécois audience, opposed to that produced by Anglo-Canadians for a transnational audience that contains no “Canadian content,” make it a minoritarian art by virtue of its nationalism and exclude it from the mainstream? If mainstream porn is just capitalist porn, which some of the authors seem to suggest, does that mean that OnlyFans, the primary vehicle for the sex workers they laud, is somehow not mainstream?)
Bruce LaBruce, who comes up once or twice in passing, is an interesting example of post-porn. Like Evergon, the quality of his work has steeply declined over the past twenty years from its peak with Skin Gang (1999), but his recent work provides what could have been a useful point of argument. One of the artists that the collection lionizes is Tom of Finland and LaBruce was recently involved in a four-part film celebration of his work for porn studio Men.com. A different director took on each episode so there is some variance in style, but they are all notable for having precious little in common with Tom’s aesthetic or the general perspective expressed in his narratives (which in many ways do not sit comfortably with contemporary queerness [he’d be a “homonationalist,” a “homonormativist” and a “misogynist”]).
Although Tom’s work does not fit into the post-porn category even at a stretch, LaBruce’s works does. The comical and exaggerated treatment of violent sex and the maximization of erotic value through stereotyping, iconic degradation, and erasure of historical meaning of the former is all domesticated into a queer “historical” fantasy of liberation and futurity saturated by sentimentalizing nostalgia and progressivist fantasy in the latter. The results are analogous to the distance between a Russ Meyer film and an Audi commercial if it was channelling vague nostalgia to coincide with a national holiday sales event.
The distinction between Men.com’s mainstream porn and post-porn are unclear beyond the monetary question. Taking place outside of the “traditional” circle of Contemporary Art institutions (itself a generic feature of the most basic Contemporary Art institution, the biennial) doesn’t do much to assuage this. Appearing on the internet or at local festivals is not any more radical as a gesture than appearing on the rest of the internet or at a Lions club picnic. As LaBruce acknowledged in his autobiography, his attitude to porn and sex is ambivalent, anxious and neurotic and it’s this, far more than “critical” appropriation that seems to inform post-porn.
If the “critique” of art ratio in post-porn is low, the difference from generic porn seems to hinge more on the removal of most of the genitalia and sex, displacing sex into clichéd political fantasies (anti-capitalism, patriarchy, decolonizaton, etc.), and using a series of crudely appropriated second-hand rhetorical filtering to supplement this (such as Camp, or “gender without genitalia” as it is sometimes known, and which has been an institutional art technique for well over half a century).
Effectively, appeals to queering, etc. in this instance are a way of “squaring up,” in the same way that in early sexploitation films a moralizing ending or an intermission from a health professional would be introduced so that the film could conform to anti-obscenity laws by creating “socially redeeming content.” The difference is that sexploitation makers understood this was nonsense. It was a way of scamming authority through the perverse exploitation of a legal loophole. Post-porn is different than this: a deathly earnest application of “scientia sexualis” to discipline and police desire while demanding recognition. The following is a good example of these tendencies.
Given that arkadi lavoie lachapelle’s work is the only one I have encountered in situ (at Atelier circulaire last year), of the three texts more actively engaging with an artwork, I’ll address it. Author Trépanier and lachapelle were both involved in the L’imaginaire radical II: désœuvrer la valeur exhibition at VOX last year, the latter providing an unintentionally humorous therapeutic “intervention” while the former created a typically antiseptic corner in the “neoliberal” aesthetics mode.
lachapelle’s exhibition of linocuts on a variety of media was framed by Trépanier in this manner:
With the concept of alchemical masturbation, arkadi puts in service to the community the healing practice developed “like a raft with which to surf the waves together.” In a text written for Tristesse magazine, they reflect on the consciousness raised by their masturbatory practice: “[...] is the fact that my pleasure is bound up with those I look at a kind of spiritual practice? An experience that affirms that I am inextricably connected to a network of others?” [p] These others, who lend their voices to this exhibition, differ from the artist in culture, gender, age, in traumas, and in ways of relating to themselves. Each one of these co-conspirators was invited to share their deepest fantasies and to describe the place masturbation occupies in their lives. […]Manifold, their voices run through graven lines to fertilize and promote revolutionary sexuality as a cure.
Rehearsing the performative framework that distances the art from the taint of uncritical porn, Trépanier argues “the artist played the role of pornographer.”[30] Pornography is conceptualized as a transmission of affects that can create “carnal resonance,” a resonance (arousal) that risks being “non-consensual.” [30] This is a topical concern. “We are immersed in a period of sexual healing,” Trépanier insists, referring to the #MeToo movement as a sign of the return to the “spiritual mother” to overcome racism and heteropatriarchy, etc. [28] The principle of “consent” is the key to this and she takes lachapelle’s practice of healing through masturbation, which is analogized with a Black feminist model of transformative justice.
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Arguing that with the scope of the work, the use of distortion and abstraction from clearly legible bodies, and the displacement from genital focus (something that trivially recalls Norman O. Brown’s utopian orgasmic body only completely divorced from its radicality), lavoie is thought to rely on the creation of “somatic vibration” slowly so the viewer can consent and adjust to the pulsation of the imagery. [As though “consent” were a matter of the durational ease of a gesture, and as though this lulling into it were less rather than more “rapey.”] This is also cast as a critique of "capitalist" production although the implications of the work as a form of state funded and bureaucratically approved masturbation are completely ignored.
Healing is conceived as a “perpetual process of moving a past body, to look for other paths to voluptuous pleasure.” [30] And, offering a purely idealized variant of liberal ideology, claims “Autonomy is the final step towards socialization, affirmation of desire though pleasure activism.” [34] Certainly, one could add, from the perspective of the art of pornography, “anti-capitalism,” “care,” “trauma,” etc. are just more interchangeable masturbatory fantasies.
The claims are complicated somewhat in the zine, “Histoires graveleuses et pratiques onanistes,” that Trépanier authored as a supplement to the Atelier circulaire exhibition. There, Trépanier argues that the works are an intentional practice for the purification of the body by magic. [“Histoires graveleuses et pratiques onanistes,”1] lachapelle’s use of queer and feminist porn, said to be “sexually explicit and transgressive,” to fuel fantasy is a “utilitarian” one. [Ibid., 2] In seeking “self-representation,” lachapelle likewise appropriates the traditional form of the linocut to deal with the “taboo.” [Ibid., 16-17] But in this strategy, the explicit and transgressive has been largely undermined (abstracted and made vague) by the technique and its orchestration into the realm of “care.” Creating the work through a pairing of appropriative strategies essentially transforms the “queer” and “feminist” into objects of critique without adding anything to them.
One might argue that if porn is essentially a masturbatory conception of sexuality and masturbation is, as Eve K. Sedgwick once put it, essentially the definition of queerness, then what the distinction is becomes increasingly unclear. The thing about lavoie’s work is that it entirely decontaminates and undermines the power of masturbation, socializing and moralizing it through the process of the creation of the work and then interpolating an ostensible viewer that it treats with “care” in the manner of “neoliberal” biopolitics. This is theoretically extended in the zine, which historicizes the work as a part of a feminist praxis. And in doing so, far from breaking from the “traditional” attacks on masturbation as self-pollution, it continues them.
The zine is heavily reliant on the work of Thomas Laqueur, but the underlying implication of his arguments, which, as a cultural historian he was professionally blinded from facing, was precisely that the masturbatory’s threat to the “self” was a threat to the credibility of the social as a concept and representation. It is the interpolation of the social into masturbatory practice and its exploitation of it to utilitarian political rather than wasteful ends that lachapelle’s work practices. All of the squaring up analysis is saturated with what are probably the most resolutely “bourgeois” and conservative (or “heteropatriarchal”) notions of what art is and does possible: its use value, its value as a social representation or reflection (rather than their undermining), its therapeutic or hedonic functionality.
Lau registers skepticism about rehashing the debates on eroticism vs. pornography. This is ridiculous of course because, if anything, those debates never went nearly far enough. Hypotheticals concerning eroticism are far older than what the twentieth century would recognize as sexuality and involve a wide range of ontological and cosmological assumptions that are basically at odds with it. One could say that one can think of pornography sexually or erotically, which would be more productive. It is assuredly the former that the authors engage with and the latter is hardly broached at all, a substantial point of distinction from earlier anti-porn feminism, but certainly not one in their favour. This is hardly unsurprising since several of the authors in the current collection are or collaborate with sexologists, but beyond the blindness of professional self-interest, this bias does nothing for their capacity to analyse art.
Ironically, it is something of a rehashing of the opposition between porn and erotic art that the term post-porno evokes because it replays both the structural fantasy of the earlier gesture and the basics of its polemics. Generically, this was stated in a bifurcation between porn (mechanical, dehumanizing, violent, hateful) and eroticism (sensuous, inter-subjective, caring, loving). From Steinem to the more radical anti-porn feminism was retained an adamant insistence on this bifurcation, and the promotion of a largely lesbian or proto-queer aesthetic of erotic art. But the debates about porn’s dominion, and especially “women’s pornography” (soap operas, romance novels, Cosmopolitan, etc.) at the time were actually far more subversive than they became by the 1980s when feminist-Marxist analysis largely stultified any insight into these forms.
More ironically, the collection’s opening essay positively cites Walter Kendrick, whose work, in part, sought to vitiate the distinction and point out that the distinction was about moralizing power fantasies, with the pornographic (effectively synonymous with the obscene) an epithet cast as the taboo versus the good erotic. This distinction is what he detected in the rise of anti-porn evangelism and feminism, but it’s also the distinction that most of the essays in the espace collection rely on to varying degrees. The term post-porn itself is symptomatic of this.
As ludicrous (historically and logically) as Dworkin was, her work did possess a fascinating, almost hypnotic power that was aesthetically interesting and impressive as writing if nothing else. That’s entirely absent here. It is not just that almost every article is rife with scholarly incompetence (badly researched, lazy and trivial theoretical appeals) which results in bland or half-baked arguments that terminate in platitudes, it is that they also contain almost no convincing engagement with any of the works they tend to superficially describe.
Almost all of the contributors are members of the ideological state apparatus writing in a state-funded publication defending a set of moral and sociological claims that are hardly distinguishable from the practical normative claims of Liberal governance. Several of its authors and its theme were central to the promotion of this year’s art fair, which affirmed, without the slightest degree of irony, that queerness and Afro-futurism were perfectly co-extensive with the aesthetic taste and worldview of bankers and the state.
In its transnationalism, its stress on fluidity, its lionization of personal autonomy, civil law, and the therapeutic, the works described encapsulate the “neoliberal self.” The aesthetics of most work designated as “queer” rarely seems distinguishable from that produced by evangelical Christians (the shared stress on performance, meta-commentary, self-portraiture, camp, satire, use of video, local communities and distribution networks), which to an even greater degree operates outside of the mainstream of the Contemporary Art world. This partially explains, fittingly enough, why countries like China and Russia frequently ban queer art as an expression of American imperialism. Curiously, this retread of the 1980s and its total incapacity to get beyond a kind of nostalgic reverie trapped in an almost totally trivializing fantasy is entirely in keeping with Contemporary Art’s generic senility.