“Artists can’t shock people today,” said Marcel Duchamp in 1961. He should know: by 1961, Duchamp had become famous for painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa and displaying an upturned urinal in an art gallery, titling it “Fountain.”
But the artists didn’t listen. They went on trying to shock the public. They dropped crucifixes into tubs filled with urine and sharks into tanks of formaldehyde. They sang “I hate myself and I want to die” and “WAP.” And now Kanye West has crossed another line.
What’s the point of all this? Why does transgression matter so much to artists? Țara Isabella Burton tries to figure it out.
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
Transgression trends:
The artist formerly known as Kanye West is singing “Heil Hitler” onstage, and launching a “Heil Symphony,” and telling his haters to suck it;
The artistic Right is reviving Italian fascist art, launching its own version of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Regency of Carnaro. Last week in Chelsea, New York, these would-be provocateurs hosted a launch party for the new Fiume Gallery (devoted both to the “avant-garde and forbidden” and a “new rising class of artists for the regime ahead”). The event included a “strut of the Valkyries” (burlesque) and a “Theatre of Cruelty”;
In the post-Woke era, in both its mildly masculinist and more full-throated MAGA form, transgression seems an easy shorthand for self-identification: sexy, dangerous artists defining themselves against the sclerotic scolds of liberal bureaucracy.
There are plenty of trite things I could say about this. For example: Woke is dead; fascism is sexy; sexy fascism is passé; people who still write explainers for Yahoo News call “Heil Hitler” problematic; singing “Heil Hitler” onstage is many things, and problematic seems a nebulous but not inaccurate term to describe some of them; it is rare if not impossible to be dedicated both to the “avant-garde” and to a “regime”; even the Regency of Carnaro only lasted eighteen months, and everybody got syphilis.
But these days I find myself more interested than I once was in transgression. Not the transgression of the New Right, or the Alt-Right, or the Art-Right. Nor in its equally obsolescent, if more obviously-dated queer-progressive equivalent: think Lil Nas X selling 666 pairs of Nikes, each decorated with a drop of human blood. I’m interested, rather, in the teleology of transgression: what, if anything, is transgression for? Can transgression ever be a virtue, at least when it comes to art? Is there something that transgressive art, by transgressing, can do for us as people — or, even, for society? Or is transgression — at least in an era where little is truly transgressive — destined to be the purview of teenage boys and shock jocks: something, like pornography, that exists only to produce a limited hit of an effect?
I started thinking about this earlier this year, on one of my long afternoon walks through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I started my ramble with the paintings featured in the salons of the Academie de Beaux-Arts — quintessential specimens of classical art. Going by the informational plaques alone, they’re the kind of paintings I — with my moral absolutes and high-church sympathies — ought to like, or at least defend: affirmations (the plaques tell me) of the True and the Beautiful and the Good. Every figure is a Platonic ideal. Children are cherubic. Peasant mothers are tender and gentle.
The problem is: I don’t like those paintings. I prefer the paintings a gallery or two away — the avant-garde, the Salon de Refusés and the fin de siècle. These paintings do not, or at least do not seem to, represent an ideal. Franz von Stuck’s Inferno neither geometrically reproduces nor sentimentally improves upon reality, but it captures, in blazing eyes and textured brushstrokes, emotional reality: what it feels like, from our ever-contingent place, to be in despair. When it comes to late nineteenth-century art, at least, I worry I am not on the side of the angels.
I kept thinking about transgression, too, as I taught a class at the Catholic University of America on the philosophy and theology of fiction-writing. My students — bright, thoughtful, committed, and steeped as they are in the Catholic intellectual tradition — were less inclined to take, even for a class period, even for the sake of argument, the side of Bataille, Wilde, Nietzsche or Marinetti. I often played devil’s advocate — because someone had to. I assigned works by French writer Georges Bataille, who wrote books with titles like The Solar Anus. He wrote a whole novel — The Story of the Eye — about fetishistic and murderous and sacrilegious sex. And yet his “Preface” to his 1957 essay collection, Literature and Evil, contains one of the most beautiful and moving (and, intuitively-to me-as-a-novelist, true) passages about the writing of fiction I have ever read.
“Literature is communication,” Bataille writes. “Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.”
But evil, for Bataille, is understood narrowly. He defines it as what society does not want, and cannot allow. It is not amoral or anti-moral; Bataille tells us it demands hypermorality. But evil is an acknowledgment of the competing demnds of social life against individual reality. Social life requires a degree of harmony and order, and so society places collectively necessary (though not always right or justified) restrictions on who we are as individuals. For Bataille, evil — the anti-social realities of what we repress — is also part of who we are.
Some of what society represses it does so by necessity or expedience. Some of what is repressed is doubtless evil in a broader, theological sense, rather than Bataille’s antinomian one. But some of what is repressed, maybe even most of it, are not brute or demonic urges but rather the painfully human ones: loves we cannot or should not consummate; lives we ought not to live, but maybe could have lived; could have lived, if we had chosen differently, or if other people did not need us, or if our brothers had not died in civil war over Thebes and need burying that morning. That it is right or just or moral or even socially and pragmatically necessary not to live those lives does not mean that they are not a part of us. They are not merely authentic — a word I dislike because I think it too often equates desire with reality — but they represent one of the holiest things about us: our individuality. The desires I cannot fulfill, and do not fulfill, are a part of what makes me me.
Good literature — I think Bataille is saying this — addresses this part of ourselves. It acknowledges the existence of that part of ourselves. At times it acknowledges one of life’s inherent tragedies — that that part of ourselves cannot, ethically, exist alongside our promises and commitments and the other goods that come from a life that is never private. At other times, though, this acknowledgment of the individual — Bataille’s “evil” — goes further. It calls attention to the contingent nature of the social order — man-made and makeshift and flawed. Literature, especially transgressive literature, does poke fun at, maybe even destabilizes, the social order. It calls attention to the social order as play-acting. And that’s a good thing.
Society’s laws, even in some hypothetical theocracy, are not, after all, God’s laws. We may do our best to organize a right or just or equal society; we may draw up requisite social contracts as necessary. But we are human beings, whether as individuals or collectives, and so our institutions are as rife with complication and complicity (Christians might call it sin) as individuals are. To place society as merely some kind of bulwark against the individual is to forget that all parts of society, from laws to language, come from the imagination of human individuals.
And the part of us that dreams — the part that desires the wrong thing or invents the right thing or wonders how else might it be, whether in fantasy or imagination or political possibility — is the part of us that holds society accountable, and the part of us society in turn ought to protect. It is, I think, the best of us. And this, I think, is what makes Ye, or the Fiume project, or any other self-consciously transgressive art-pop project, not just moral failures but artistic ones. They fail to take into account that transgression — like any other form of literary or artistic genre — has its own structure and maybe even its own rules.
After all, it’s rules — followed, bent or broken — that make all art, not just self-consciously transgressive art, interesting. The expectations of genre, followed or subverted, are what makes new art intelligible to the audience. And if we think of “transgression,” as a kind of genre — the way we might tragedy, or science fiction — this helps us think more clearly about how transgression works, and what it in fact does.
Transgressive art is about the limitations of our assumptions. It is about our hypocrisy, about our prejudices, about self-protection disguised as morality and control disguised as order. It takes seriously the idea that there is something irrepressible about the individual human being, that no human being can ever fully and only be a member of society, that humanity both stains and sanctifies whatever it is we create. Historically, of course, that’s meant that transgression gets equated with either desire (most violently, in the work of the Marquis de Sade), or digestion (the shit and farting and piss-jokes we get in Rabelais). Desire and digestion are stand-ins for emotions. More recently, transgressive art has taken the form of the banally blasphemous (Piss Christ, Satan Sneakers), or else the “racism for racism’s sake” of most anti-Woke comedy, which, sure, throws Molotov cocktails at the foundations of the liberal cathedral, but which lacks the humanistic joy of the most interesting transgressors.
It’s probably a Christian cop-out here to say that I think we can, and should, distinguish between transgression as something with a purpose, from the kind of nihilistic transgression that seeks to destroy the idea of purpose altogether. There are plenty of people who might fairly take issue with the idea that there can be “good” and “bad” transgression. But there are, I think, two kinds of transgression: the humanistic and the nihilistic, represented, in the literary canon, by the aforementioned Renaissance satirist Rabelais and the Enlightenment-era pornographer Sade.
Francois Rabelais is lusty; he is smutty; he is gross. He writes, in novels like Gargantua and Pantagruel, about sex and shit and passion plays gone wrong. But he does so from a fundamentally humanistic perspective: a recognition that to be human is to be chaotic, and to desire wrongly, and to try to legislate and moralize ourselves out of cognitions and urges we cannot understand, let alone control. The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing on Rabelais and His World, characterizes Rabelais’s transgressions as the “carnivalesque”: a fundamentally comic place where hierarchies and status get overturned, where taboos are inverted — a necessary space to restructure an old order in order to dream of the new. Rabelais’s carnivalesque transgression opens us up to, in Bakhtin’s words, “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order”; it is “the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.” It’s a celebration of our humanity; and an acknowledgement that we are always fallen, imperfect, corporeal, and — as long as we are alive — in an unfinished state of becoming.
Then there’s the Marquis de Sade, who is whatever the opposite of a humanist is. A sexual predator in real life (despite what the movie Quills would have you believe, most of his several imprisonments were for rape, not literary infamy), Sade wrote thousands of pages of scopophilia, necrophilia, child pornography and torture porn. His erotic works are celebrations of the power of human beings to use their imaginative and erotic capacities to turn other human beings into furniture, fuck-toys, meat or machines. They are, perhaps, celebrations of the individual — at least, the imaginative individual who can use his imagination to separate himself from the collective crowd he mutilates and rapes — but they are celebrations of an individual entirely outside of society, one who exists alone.
Sade’s rapists are the only real human beings in his texts. To read Justine is to imagine oneself at the end of that Twilight Zone episode where there’s only one sentient person left in the whole world. It’s telling, I think, that Sade has become, both on the Left and the Right, the poster child for exciting transgression (as one Sade expert puts it in a Smithsonian interview, describing his experience of the French student riots of 1968: “look[ing] at all the placards, reading ‘It is Forbidden to Forbid,’ and ‘Do Whatever You Desire.’ I suddenly understood that our revolutionary phrases were actually from Sade”).
And yet. For all of my fondness for Rabelais and Bataille (if not Sade) I joke, sometimes, of being in support of a new Index of Forbidden Books, modeled on the old one once used by the Catholic Church. More seriously, I believe that there are immoral books that ought to be recognized as such. But I think the greatest and most humanistic challenge to Sade, maybe even the Rabelaisian answer to Sade, is not to ban Sade, but to read (before eating, through one’s fingers, slowly a couple of passages at a time) Sade the way Bataille might, as nothing more nor less than the communication of one messed up, brain-rotted human being to another. The intimacy we encounter, when we read any transgressive text (at least, any one written by a human being) is that of opening ourselves up, at the level of that imagination orthogonal to our social lives, to the imagination of another. It is the intimacy of an erotic encounter — it is an erotic encounter, as the best writers and the more zealous censors both know — between individual human people, mediated through language, and yet, at both ends of the encounter, something other than language.
Which is to say, maybe we think about transgressive art the way we think about sex. We may well, and rightly, recognize its dangers; we may well, and rightly, have guidelines of ethics but also prudence but also safety but also purpose; we may believe, that in a fallen or broken or just plain perverted world, that every encounter between two people falls short of the immediacy, vulnerability, self-abnegating presence and perfect love. But that doesn’t mean we lie to ourselves that what draws us to transgression is the messiness of disclosure, of intimacy outside of norms we both need and recognize as incomplete.
Which is all to say, I am not particularly interested in whether Ye wants to say “Heil Hitler” onstage or not, or whether or not some art gallery in Chelsea wants to perform a new version of Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty” with some guy named Skinless Frank or DJ Octopussy. If art is communication, then I suppose one day, when the culture wars have died down, and I have run out of Rabelais to read, I will be curious about what anguish is being communicated, intentionally or not, by individual human beings for whom transgression seems, like Sade’s, to be a rejection of humanity in the guise of celebrating its freedom. Future historians, with less skin in the game than I have, might well wonder what regime-approved transgression tells us about the people who tried to make it. And it may well be that we are so ideologically kaleidoscopic these days, that true culture-striding “transgression” itself is now a nonsense term — if we have no shared cathedral, in fact, no cathedral at all, how can anyone tear it down?
Lil Nas X can go on selling Satan sneakers to rich Bushwick witches, and the Art-Right can fund their galleries by displaying racial epithets, and everybody will make money and get decent reviews from the publications that cater to their specific micro-demographic. But insofar as we are human beings, we will always be caught between being us, and being part of something that is not us. We will always have to give up some of that us in order to make the not-us work. If the best that we can hope for from a novel is an encounter between us and someone else, even if that someone else is dead, or a pervert — an encounter that reveals that both parties are not identical but are still, somehow legible to one another — that is a moment of carnival, allowable once a year.
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I came across this essay because I was morbidly curious about what happened with Rachel Haywire, who I came across in my Twitter feed when I was still on there and who made quite an impression on me as someone with grand pretensions and a complete lack of taste and intellect. That doesn't feel sufficient to justify my curiosity, but man is weak.
I think you nailed both the impulse behind transgression (assertion of the individual against its universal oppressor, society—which can however be imagined in a thousand different ways by the individual) and what makes it succeed or fail in an aesthetic sense, that is, whether or not it reveals something new about what it means to be human (as Rabelais does magnificently, and there are no doubt many good arguments for Sade here as well). But vulgar transgression is a powerful tool for non-artistic purposes in that it attracts attention, and does indeed liberate the individual—who is freer than the Sadean subject?—the volatility of whose bond with 'society' can then be exploited for particular ends. Also adolescents (and adults with adolescent minds) just eat that shit up.
Tara, this frames the issue better than any hot-take on shock art: transgression isn’t automatically depth—it only becomes art when it exposes the tension between private desire and the social order that contains it. The humanism of Rabelais works because it unmasks our shared mess without erasing it; Sade fails because his “freedom” depends on turning every other body into scenery. When transgression stops at spectacle, it isn’t courage, it’s market segmentation. What we need now isn’t louder provocation; it’s work that risks real intimacy—writing that lets two flawed consciousnesses meet without the buffer of branding or tribal applause. Anything less is just another micro-demographic hustle dressed up as revolt.