RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPiTER

unplanned obsolescence

So I’m in a mood tonight and my mind is attached wholly to ideas that I believe are clear and wide encompassing. This evening I discuss art or more specifically, the merits of photographing one’s own (if one is male) stream of ejaculate.

Why am I writing about this? I was reading Zoe Straus’s blog when I saw this post. Her photo of Mummer spewed silly string may have been unconsciously derived from photographer Andres Serrano’s ejaculation series.

Geoff Dyer wrote an entire book about street photographers influence on one another over the past 100 years. I strongly recommend buying and reading it. But that’s not my point.

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My point and my opinion is that Serrano’s work has reached a position of total and almost embarrassing obsolescence. The internet killed it. Photographs of blood and semen? Photographs of a semen stream?

Let me add here that at one time, the series wasn’t pointless. It roused all sorts of pretentious and important questions to do with freedom of expression and the limits of art. That time has long past.

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There was an argument in the Mexican muralist movement that muralism smashed the idea of easel painting. Painting in Mexico City (as it is in 2700 different ways in Philadelphia) was a public. It was not contained within a frame and exhibited in a prohibitive environment. It was vibrant, colorful and most importantly free and open to be witnessed and experienced by anyone at any time.

In contrast, museum art, or easel painting is restrictive. It’s selected and promoted by an elite class for an elite class. Even in the rare cases and selective times that they’re not cost prohibitive, museums are not inviting to proles. They’re constructed by upper and upper-uppers, mainly for the middles and above. (or to a lesser extent for the creative class itself)

That’s not to say there isn’t a place for museums. There absolutely is. But when a form or genre of artwork becomes so utterly separated between the world of the museum and the world of the world… that form or genre becomes wholly obsolete.

To come back to Serrano. Never again should a photo series of human semen find its way onto a museum wall. To illustrate this, turn your google safe search off and look for images of “cum.” Not extreme enough? Try “dog fucking” “dead bodies” “war dead” or “cock splitting.” Keep in mind that google image search is nowhere near comprehensive. The photo results you get barely skim the top layer off of a very deep and disturbing cesspool.

While muralists brought artwork outside the museum, technology and the ability to share and distribute any and all information, has given any individual with the access the means and the aptitude, the capacity to create and share a tremendous quantity of material with an unlimited audience.

This is the crux of the argument, so pay special attention here. I’m not saying that every citizen is now an artist or that every cumshot caught on camera makes every person who photographs semen an artist. I’m saying that any artist who takes a well balanced and aesthetically pleasing portrait of their own semen, isn’t really accomplishing anything.

So many photoblogs are filled with beautiful photos of apples, flower petals and housecats. There’s nothing wrong with them except that they’re boring. There’s nothing wrong with the photographers except that I see nothing truly significant in a perfectly composed still life.

New technology and the ability to share raw information freely and instantly has destroyed the significance of Serrano’s ejaculation series and the vast bulk of his other projects. There are millions of photos of semen. Nuns mastrubating, men drinking piss, blood, gore? It’s been done and published thousands of times.

Making a fine art portrait of one’s own semen is at this point about as edgy or artistically relevant as taking a really fine art portrait of the head of broccoli I’m about to eat. As muralists brought art out of the frame and into the public, the internet is storming the museums and tearing the frames apart.

As a person with a concern for the viability of freedom of expression, I can’t think of better news than the obsolescence or Andres Serrano’s art. Remember Jesse Helms damning Serrano’s Piss Christ on the Senate floor? The debate is over. People rightfully worry about so many of our rights being ceded and destroyed, but freedom of expression has never, in the history of the world been stronger. Serrano’s cumshot is now just a lonesome drop in a vast ocean of semen.