By Michelene Ough
A well-endowed naked man with his arms folded across his chest. One man performing fellatio on another. A man’s naked midsection, complete with erect penis.
While considering photographs of Carl Stewart’s exhibit Blue for Boys for publication in the Oct. 29 issue of Centretown News, I started thinking about how I define art.
Art or pornography? The question is as old as pornography itself, and the social taboos that have come with it.
It’s a grey area, to say the least, one where conservative sensibilities might claim to be offended at the sight of Michelangelo’s David, and left-wingers might defend the hardest of hard-core porn at their local triple X shops as examples of fine art.
Like many people, I’m sure, I think of myself as middle-of-the-road when it comes to my idea of what constitutes a piece of art versus a piece of ostensibly artless porn.
But the Boys for Blue exhibit, which recently showed at the seventh annual Enriched Bread Artists’ studio, led me to scrutinize what actual boundaries I have placed on my personal acceptance of something that claims to be art.
My first reaction to the pieces of work was one of mild disbelief. The works, created by Stewart, involve first downloading images from gay porn sites, manipulating them, and weaving them.
Now, to be clear, I don’t consider myself a prude about images of nude men, or of men engaging in sex acts together. Stewart’s works didn’t offend me in that respect.
But I did find myself wondering what it is about a series of woven images taken from porn sites that makes them art.
Is it the inspiration behind them, the emotion of the artist? By that definition, would a passionate director be considered an artist and his work a masterpiece even if his film was of more the Forrest Hump variety than one with true creative merit?
Or is it the craft itself that makes a work of art, so that the act of weaving the images adds the artistic aspect?
I wonder whether the gay community could call this type of ‘homoerotic’ work “art” legitimately because of the still-remaining social stigma attached to gay sex? Does controversy, then, make a work more artistic?
For me, no matter how artistically presented, Carl Stewart’s works are pornography. I don’t deny his ability to manipulate images and make them look interesting, nor do I deny his weaving skills, but I can’t get my mind around calling the final product a work of art.
A woven picture of a naked man crossing his arms across his buffed chest might be considered erotic by some, but to me, it remains simply a textured variation of a cheesy pornographic photo.
Maybe I’m scrutinizing the content of the art too deeply. Maybe I should be looking at the process, the medium, the energy of it. Maybe I’m ignoring the fact that some people believe porn and art can exist mutually in a work. And maybe I’m just a little more conservative than I like to admit.
But at the end of the day, all I can see is a piece of cleverly disguised pornography. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’ll have a hard time convincing me to call it art.