Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century
by Geoffrey R. Stone
Liveright, 668 pp., $35.00
About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
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31.8.17
30.8.17
28.8.17
Sex
Our Trouble with Sex: A Christian Story?
In early spring, reports began to appear in the international press that authorities in Chechnya were rounding up and detaining gay men. Tales of torture, starvation, and murder soon emerged after some of the men were released and described their ordeals in captivity. According to one survivor, officials had instructed the families of captives to act preemptively and kill their gay sons, telling parents, “Either you do it or we will.” The Russian-backed government of this predominantly Muslim region declared the crackdown fake news, while Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov issued a flat denial. (Gathering and detaining gay men was impossible, Kadyrov insisted, because there were “no gay men in Chechnya.”)
As shocking as the Chechen campaign appears, it is nothing humans have not seen, or done, before. Ethnic groups, religious or racial minorities, and individuals who are different in some way have far too often become the objects of hatred and murderous intent. What is happening in Chechnya most immediately brings to mind the depredations of the Third Reich, which sought to rid Europe of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and others considered to be undesirables.
Even with knowledge of the human propensity to oppress fellow human beings, most readers would find the news of a violent repression of gays in 2017 particularly shocking. We in the United States, and some other countries in the West, have just experienced one of the quickest turnabouts in attitudes toward a disfavored minority in modern history. After Stonewall in 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, the pace of the movement for LBGTQ rights in the United States accelerated swiftly, much more swiftly than similar movements for blacks and women. The pollster Nate Silver, who is gay himself and has studied attitudes about gay rights over time, put it this way:
In the United States, gay marriage has gone from unthinkable to the law of the land in just a couple of decades. Homosexuality has gone from “the love that dare not speak its name”—something that could get you locked up, beat up, ostracized or killed, as is still the case in much of the world—into something that’s out-and-proud, so to speak.
Of course, terrible things still happen to gays in the West. Prejudices have not entirely disappeared. The specter of change, which forces people to reassess sometimes deeply held beliefs, often causes violent reactions.
Whether or not the success of the gay rights movement in Western countries provoked the barbarity in Chechnya, this social revolution has had an interesting consequence in the West itself: those who continue to maintain that same-sex activity is wrong are today subjected to the searching scrutiny—albeit without the same level of accompanying moral outrage—that was applied in previous centuries to those who condoned homosexuality. The change has been fascinating to watch, and as so often happens after the end of a long battle fought for dubious reasons, a question arises after the smoke has cleared: What was that all about, anyway?
Why the visceral hatred of the idea of men having sex with men, and women having sex with women? Why would the hostility be so strong that in Great Britain until the mid-nineteenth century, in the early American colonies, and in Chechnya in 2017, death would be considered a suitable punishment for those who engaged in this activity? Beyond homosexuality, what interest did (and do) people living in a supposedly secular and liberal society have in regulating perhaps the most intimate aspect of an adult’s life—consensual sexual behavior with another adult? How do people decide which sexual acts, conducted in private, have a public impact and, therefore, become the public’s business? For our purposes, why do Americans think as we do about sex, and how have we used the Constitution, and the laws of the fifty states, to instantiate those beliefs?
In his deeply researched new book, Sex and the Constitution: Sex, Religion, and Law from America’s Origins to the Twenty-First Century, Geoffrey R. Stone gives his answer to these and other questions about our country’s regulation of sex, with a special emphasis on same-sex activity. According to Stone, a scholar of constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Christianity has exerted the biggest influence on how we have addressed the issue from colonial times to today. The “central theme” of Sex and the Constitution “is that American attitudes about sex have been shaped over the centuries by religious beliefs—more particularly, by early Christian beliefs—about sex, sin, and shame.”
This history, Stone argues, has created “a nettlesome question” for the practice of constitutional law. Over the years, courts have accepted Christian traditions on matters relating to sex despite our nation’s commitment to the separation of church and state. When confronted with cases regarding restrictions on sexual behavior, or activities related to sexual behavior like contraception, abortion, or consuming pornography, judges have had to dress up in secular garb what were essentially religious principles. They did this by distinguishing between the “moral views” they said they drew on and the “religious views” they claimed they did not.
Writing confidently and expertly about several centuries of American laws regulating sex, Stone shows that the line between moral and religious reasoning was almost always illusory. For much of our history, legislators and judges drew on religious beliefs to decide what was moral and right for all citizens—and what ought to be legal or illegal. Christianity, as the country’s dominant religion, provided an obvious source of moral doctrine. These ideas are so deeply embedded in our culture, Stone believes, that to truly understand American attitudes about sex we have to go back to the very beginning of the Christian religion itself:
For more than two centuries, Americans have fought divisive social, political, and constitutional battles over laws regulating sex, obscenity, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage. These conflicts have been divisive in no small part because of the central role religion has played in shaping our laws governing sex. As the Framers of our Constitution anticipated, the incorporation of religious beliefs into the secular law inevitably poses fundamental questions about individual freedom, the separation of church and state, and the meaning of our Constitution.
To understand the roots of these conflicts, it is helpful to have some sense of the ways in which different societies addressed these issues in the past and how our own attitudes toward sex came into being. How did social, cultural, religious, and legal views of sex evolve from the ancient world to the founding of the American republic?
To answer this last question Stone set himself an extremely ambitious project. In a brief survey of sexual attitudes in the ancient world, he blames the early Christians for having taken all the fun out of sex. In pre-Christian times sex was considered “a natural and positive part of human experience” and not “predominantly bound up with questions of sin, shame, or religion.” He echoes previous scholars in finding that “classical Greek morality and law focused not on sexual sin, but on whether an individual’s conduct was harmful to others.” Stone quotes Arno Karlen’s claim that the early Romans thought the Greeks “cunning, effeminate, and degenerate,” while noting that they themselves were, in their own way, generally relaxed about sexuality. Indeed, they were so relaxed that “early Christian writers…attributed the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD to sexual depravity.”
That erroneous assumption lived on into modern times, and the ancient Romans’ blasé attitude toward same-sex activity in particular has been offered routinely as a cautionary tale for our own society. Even the ancient Hebrews, Stone suggests, were more freewheeling than the pietistic early Christians:
The Hebrew Bible contains no condemnation of sexual pleasure, “no paeans to celibacy,” and no suggestion that the sin of Adam and Eve was sex, rather than disobedience of God. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, the ancient Hebrews did not prohibit masturbation, premarital sex, oral or anal sex, prostitution, contraception, pornography, lesbianism, or abortion.
In truth, in Christian Bibles, both the sex-affirming parts, such as the Song of Solomon and Proverbs, and the condemnations of certain sexual practices that can be found in the Epistles of Paul, derive from the Hebrew Scriptures. One must consider the ways that religious practices and interpretations of texts diverge from the texts themselves—divergences that exist in every religion. What, for example, of Onan and Sodom and Gomorrah and the passages in Leviticus that condemn male same-sex activity? Stone convincingly invokes a wide range of scholarship to demonstrate that the stories of Onan (from which came the use of the word “onanism” to mean masturbation) and Sodom and Gomorrah have been distorted in order to condemn masturbation and sodomy.
Stone’s handling of the passages in Leviticus—“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death”—is weaker. Essentially, Stone argues, the ancient Hebrews didn’t really mean it. The language was just put there in opposition to “the then-prevalent Greek practice of pæderasty” and “shouldn’t be taken too seriously.” Well, why not? The language, unlike many passages in religious texts, is remarkably clear and to the point. And what did the ancient Hebrews have against pederasty? Why would it be wrong for adult males to have sex with teenage boys and fine for them to have sex with teenage girls, unless there was some underlying cultural hostility toward male same-sex activity?
The problem is that it is very difficult to speak of the “early Christians” or the “ancient Hebrews” as if these terms describe fixed, monolithic groups. There were, within both religions, sects that had their own practices and their own, often competing, interpretations of religious texts. Some of those interpretations and practices live on in the shadow of more generally accepted views—even into modern times. A man of the Enlightenment, like Thomas Jefferson, for example, living on a mountaintop in eighteenth-century Virginia, could call himself a follower of Jesus and a “primitive Christian” in contravention of the most common understandings about Christianity. Jefferson looked to the ancient Christian faith for his own unorthodox religious views, which concentrated on the beauty of Jesus’s teachings while denying his divinity and capacity to perform supernatural feats.
The historian Peter Brown has written of a sect of early Hebrews—in pre-Christian times—who did, in fact, practice celibacy and evidently influenced Jesus and his disciples:
When Jesus of Nazareth preached in Galilee and Judaea after 30 AD, the options open to him and his followers were already clearly mapped out on the landscape of Palestine. Toward the Dead Sea, the wilderness of Judaea harbored sizable settlements of disaffected males. Ascetic figures whose prophetic calling had long been associated, in Jewish folklore, with sexual abstinence, continued to emerge from the desert to preach repentance to the nearby cities. One such, John the Baptist, was reputedly a cousin of Jesus. The fact that Jesus himself had not married by the age of thirty occasioned no comment. It was almost a century before any of his followers claimed to base their own celibacy on his example. At the time, the prophetic role of Jesus held the center of attention, not his continence. His celibacy was an unremarkable adjunct of his prophet’s calling.*
The early Christians did not think up religiously inspired sexual continence all by themselves. The odds that any people adopting new traditions would do so without reference to stories, beliefs, and practices that already existed around them are decidedly slim.
What the early Christians did have was a set of highly effective salesmen for their beliefs, beginning with Saul of Tarsus, later Saint Paul the Apostle, who, a number of theologians believe, brought to Christianity many of the beliefs about women and sex that he had learned from the Judaism he left behind. But it was Saint Augustine, Stone argues, “who crystallized the early Christian understanding of sex and who, in so doing, ultimately helped shape traditional American views of sexuality more than a millennium later.”
Augustine’s story is well known. After a youth of debauchery, he experienced a conversion and used his scholarly influence to preach the gospel of sex’s inherent evil. Fixating on Adam and Eve, he turned aside the Hebrew notion that the story of the pair’s fall and expulsion from the Garden of Eden was about disobedience. It was instead a cautionary tale about sex. Stone explains Augustine’s view as follows:
Every sexual act is born out of evil, and every child born out of evil is born into sin. It is through sex that man passes on sin from one generation to the next.
Even marriage was not enough to cure the evil. Under the influence of Augustine’s teachings, couples were cautioned that marital relations were for procreation only, not for pleasure. Augustine’s view triumphed over other competing, less baleful views of human nature and sexuality.
If Stone holds Augustine responsible for promoting the idea of sex as an evil force, he presents Saint Thomas Aquinas as “the man most responsible for the hardening of the Church’s attitude toward same-sex sex.” Aquinas “systematized and expanded upon Augustine’s thinking.” His Summa Theologica(1265–1275) “rewrote the whole of Christian moral theology” and pronounced same-sex activity, which could not be for procreation, “especially contemptible in the sight of God.” Aquinas distinguished sinful acts carried out by opposite-sex couples from the sexual activity of same-sex couples. The latter activity was per se the “more grievous sin.” The church conferred formal authority on Aquinas’s views on these and other matters at the Council of Trent in 1563.
Stone’s suggestion that there is a direct line to be drawn from these ancient and medieval teachings to modern American attitudes is greatly complicated by his own research and erudite presentation. As a current example, consider contraception. Stone ends an excellent chapter on the subject with a section entitled “Sanger’s Triumph,” suggesting that Margaret Sanger, the famous proponent of birth control, has won the battle. Almost unbelievably, there is still cause for concern on this front. One would have thought that Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)—the landmark case that upheld a couple’s right to use contraception—and its successors would have settled the matter. Yet as the recent fights over the Affordable Care Act show, the issue is not settled for some segments of the population. Many who continue to oppose birth control on religious grounds were adamantly opposed to the ACA’s requirement that employers cover contraception for female employees.
Stone’s survey of the history of sex in Europe up to colonial times in America presents a world in which the teachings of Augustine and Aquinas were contested and defeated in some eras, only to rise again in other forms and be defeated again. What are we to make of those long stretches, described with great skill in this book, when people on both sides of the Atlantic were not listening to Augustine and Aquinas, and in fact soundly rejected the ideas they espoused? What of Martin Luther, who with Protestantism brought a different dispensation?
Luther believed (as did the American Puritans, by the way) that sex was a normal and joyous part of life for married couples. The mutual pleasure it brought existed to bind husband and wife to each other. For Luther it was celibacy that was devilish, while sex was as “necessary to the nature of man as eating and drinking.” If the early Christians had especially dire views on these matters, then Protestantism, which has been the dominant religious tradition in America from the beginning, rejected those views.
Sex and the Constitution is most persuasive when Stone turns to America, and his comprehensive knowledge of constitutional law is put on full display. He is especially good on the eighteenth century, bringing a bracing and much-needed dose of reality about the Founders’ views of sexuality. No prudes were they:
At the time when Americans adopted their Constitution, a time when they fervently believed in “the pursuit of happiness,” there were no laws in the United States against obscenity, there were no laws restricting the use of contraceptives, there were no laws forbidding the dissemination of information about contraception, and, following the English common law, there were no laws restricting abortion pre-quickening. Moreover, although there were still laws on the books against consensual sodomy, those laws had not been enforced anywhere in the United States for almost a century. That was the world of the Framers.
The Second Great Awakening, from the 1790s to the 1840s, effectively ended this situation. According to Stone, it set off a “nationwide campaign to transform American law and politics through the lens of evangelical Christianity. Indeed, it was in this era that the claim that the United States is a ‘Christian nation’ first took root.” In Stone’s discussion of the early nineteenth century, readers can begin to discern an American religious identity that is almost totally familiar. Legislators, egged on by their constituents, looked to Christian teachings to assess the issues of the day. Prosecutions for blasphemy, which had fallen into desuetude, “suddenly reemerged.” Some argued that the common law was divinely inspired, thus making law (and government) the vehicle for transmitting and maintaining religious values. The first laws seeking to control the dissemination of “obscene literature” were also enacted during this period.
Curiously, Stone pays scant attention to perhaps the most consequential issue for many of the nineteenth-century moralists—their crusade against slavery, in which sex figured prominently. The widespread southern practice of concubinage was one of the principal targets of their brief against the institution. Stone’s decidedly northern emphasis leaves the sexual habits and preoccupations of the South largely out of the picture. Sex and the Constitution has almost nothing to say about the topic of interracial sex, although outlawing it was one of the earliest examples of the regulation of sexuality in North America. Those laws almost certainly affected more people than prohibitions of same-sex sodomy, and it was to them that courts and activists looked for analogy during debates about gay rights.
So-called antimiscegenation laws grew out of and helped cement racial attitudes that have affected the course of American law and history for centuries. The 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down these laws, Loving v. Virginia, is mentioned only in passing. Stone’s neglect of this history probably grows out of his determination to see religion as the driving force shaping sexual attitudes. While opponents of interracial sex often tried to justify their views by citing the Bible, those efforts come across, at best, as lame covers for white supremacy.
This raises an important issue. If you believe that the religious views espoused by the early Christians were divinely inspired, that God set these notions forth, then there are no more questions to ask about them. If you think, however, that religious rules likely grew out of extrareligious concerns (such as the desire for racial purity), then you must try to understand what some of those concerns were and from whence they came.
One of the tortures described by the Chechen men who were detained earlier this year was that their tormentors, in addition to subjecting them to beating, starving, and electrical shocks, called them by women’s names. This in fact is another example of a way of thinking that is pervasive in the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution: nearly all—if not all—of them, in one way or another, implicate the status of women in society and give evidence of the recurrent misogyny in views about sex that has been present and powerful throughout history and across cultures.
Consider the swinging Greeks and Romans. They had no problem with same-sex activity, but the participants were not viewed equally. The receptive partner during anal or oral sex was cast in that most dreaded role: woman. That was fine for a boy before he reached manhood. It was not so great for an adult to have his manhood taken from him by being made to resemble the inferior female. Even during the most sexually open periods described in Stone’s book, women were judged by a different standard than men. They were given less freedom and suffered for their participation in sex even in cultures that were supposedly sexually progressive.
Many of the regulations described in Sex and the Constitution could be found in places and among people who had never heard of—or certainly can’t be said to have been affected by—the early Christians, Augustine, or Aquinas. This suggests that we may have to look beyond the influence of any one religion to understand how and why we have set the rules of sex by which we have lived. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? These are questions humans have struggled to answer, probably from the beginning of human history. Religion is only one way we have attempted to establish answers to them. Engaging with other possible influences more fully—specifically efforts throughout history to control women and perpetuate negative attitudes about womanhood—would have made Stone’s very important book longer, but it would have brought a needed perspective to his analysis.
- *Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 40–41. ↩
26.8.17
25.8.17
ART
On the trend away from art in art history.
HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
POLONIUS: By th’ mass and ’tis—like a camel indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale.
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
POLONIUS: By th’ mass and ’tis—like a camel indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale.
POLONIUS: Very like a whale.
[W]here art history is concerned, in the beginning was the eye, not the word.
—Otto Pächt
—Otto Pächt
Why do we teach and study art history? A question that elicits a complicated answer. To learn about art, yes, but also to learn about the cultural setting in which art unfolds; in addition, to learn about—what to call it? “Evolution” is not quite right, neither is “progress.” Possibly “development”: to learn about the development of art, then, how artists “solved problems”—for example, the problem of modeling three-dimensional space on an essentially two-dimensional plane.
Those are some of the answers, or some parts of the answer, most of us would give. There are others. We teach and study art history—as we teach and study literary history or political history or the history of science—partly to familiarize ourselves with humanity’s adventure in time. We expect an educated person in the West to remember what happened in 1066, to know the plot of Hamlet, to understand (sort of) the laws of gravity, to recognize The Venus of Urbino when he sees it. These are aspects of a huge common inheritance, episodes that alternately bask in and cast illuminations and shadows, the interlocking illuminations and shadows of mankind’s conjuring with the world.
All this might be described as the dough, the ambient body of culture. The yeast is supplied by direct acquaintance with the subject of study: the poem or play, the mental itinerary a Galileo or Newton traveled, the actual work of art on the wall. In the case of art history, the raison d’être—the ultimate motive—is supplied by a direct visual encounter with great works of art. Everything else is prolegomenon or afterthought, scaffolding to support the main event, which is not so much learning about art as it is experiencing art first hand.
Another question: What has happened to the main event? Suppose you dropped into Art History 101 at your local college, haunted the annual meeting of the College Art Association, perused the major journals and new books devoted to art history: what would you discover? Doubtless a wide variety of things. Here and there you would find art history pursued as outlined above: as an educational endeavor concerned with genuine scholarship that aimed above all at facilitating the direct encounter with important works of art.
But the dominant trend—the drift that receives the limelight, the prizes, the academic adulation—is decidedly elsewhere. Today, the study of art history is more and more about subordinating art—to “theory,” to politics, to just about anything that allows one to dispense with the burden of experiencing art natively, on its own terms. This is accomplished primarily by enlisting art as an illustration of some extraneous, non-artistic, non-aesthetic narrative. Increasingly, art history is pressed into battle —a battle against racism, say, or the plight of women or on behalf of social justice. Whatever. The result is that art becomes an adjunct to an agenda: an alibi for … you can fill in the blank by consulting this week’s list of trendy causes.
In a word, what we are witnessing is the triumph of political correctness in art history. Political correctness operates by transposing life to an alien jurisdiction, judging our endeavors by the peremptory diktats of presumed virtue. It is worth stressing that the chief issue, the chief loss, lies not in the particular program being espoused: the war on patriarchy, the struggle against capitalism, the march against “formalist values” or “bourgeois ethics.” Whatever one thinks of those campaigns—love them or hate them—the chief diminishment lies in the displacement of art, its relegation to the status of a prop in a drama not its own.
This generally happens in one of two ways. The first involves a process of spurious aggrandizement. You hail the mediocre as a work of genius, for example, or pretend that what is merely repellent actually beneficently transforms our understanding of art or life. If art is no longer to be judged primarily in terms of aesthetic achievement, it is vulnerable to usurpation by any importunate bandwagon: the one marked “egalitarianism” just as much as the one marked “anarchy,” “opportunistic nihilism,” or “fatuous revolutionary politics.”
Footnote: One of the most insidious expressions of this process of de bas en haut involves a travesty of traditional aesthetic judgment. One thinks of those cheerleaders for Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the sado-masochistic demimonde who pretended to admire them for their formal excellence: the exquisite triangulation of the bullwhip being reminiscent of, etc., etc. (Their sneer: “You want aesthetic appreciation? We’ll give you aesthetic appreciation—of garbage.”) The vocabulary of aesthetic delectation was reforged into a demonic parody of itself. The moral is that art is no more immune from perversion than any other realm of human endeavor.
Spurious aggrandizement describes one strategy in the war against art. It blurs the distinction between high and low, elevating the detritus of popular culture to the status of fine art. (Andy Warhol: “Art is what you can get away with.”) The second main strategy proceeds in the opposite direction. It operates not by inflating the trivial, the mediocre, the perverse, but by attacking greatness. Sometimes the assault is direct: a moustache planted on the upper lip of the Mona Lisa. More often, it is by some strategy of indirection. The work of art is seized as an occasion for critical lucubration, for political sermonizing, for theoretical or pseudo-theoretical exegesis. Here, too, there is an element of spurious aggrandizement: of the interpreter. But for the work of art, the result is a despoliation, the rape of the masters.
In “The Authorship of In Memoriam,” the English essayist Ronald Knox “proved” that the real author of that familiar poem was not Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as many of us have supposed, but Queen Victoria. Knox’s essay is a delightful jeu d’esprit, an amusing poke at the poor souls who believe that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays commonly attributed to Shakespeare. But Knox wrote with tongue in cheek. His essay is funny because it is meant as satire. Those academics who undertake the rape of the masters might be funny were they not in earnest. But earnest they are. They write to traduce, not satirize. More precisely, they poach upon the authority of art in order to pursue an entirely non-artistic agenda. Their interest in art is ulterior, not aesthetic.
Some examples. In “Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters,” an immensely influential article published in Smithsonian Studies in American Art(Winter 1989), Albert Boime argues that Winslow Homer’s well-known painting The Gulf Stream (1899) “reveals [Homer’s] understanding of the relationship of economics to the plight of blacks and their survival.” Yes, well. The canvas portrays a lone black man struggling in rough waters on a dismasted sloop; in the distance, a storm threatens; closer to hand, a group of sharks thread through the waves. It is a powerful painting. But Professor Boime, who teaches art history at UCLA, is not interested in powerful paintings. He is interested in the plight of blacks in nineteenth-century America. So he seizes upon Homer’s painting (and Watson and the Shark [1778] by John Singleton Copley) in order to illustrate his morality play.
Three or four stalks of sugar cane sprout from the hold of the boat in Homer’s picture, jumbled tentacles that reinforce the sense of swelling visual drama. But according to Professor Boime, “Homer’s conspicuous representation of the stalks, totally out of proportion to the boat and its lone passenger, assumes a symbolic and metonymic connotation in its intimate relationship to the history of slavery in the West Indies.” Does it? Or is it rather the case that Professor Boime “assumes”—perhaps “imports” would be better—that “symbolic and metonymic connection”?
When some clients asked about the fate of the man pictured in the boat, Homer told his dealer that “You can tell these ladies that the unfortunate negro who is now so dazed & parboiled will be rescued & returned to his friends and home, & ever after live happily.” Homer’s tone betrays understandable exasperation: he had offered the public a painting, not a news story. But for Professor Boime, the artist’s comment justifies an additional sermonette:
Homer’s ironic tone carries with it the masculinized aura of the Victorian male who admired risk-taking situations remote from the realm of “ladies,” but it also signifies the opposite of what he stated… . [How does Profesor Boime know this?] Homer’s black man is both hero and victim, collapsing the old categories of triangular formalism into a powerfully condensed metaphor of implicit power blocked.
Maybe. Or maybe the whole idea of “collapsing the old categories of triangular formalism” was invented lock, stock, and barrel by Professor Boime, who is more concerned to declare his correct attitudes about race than to appreciate Homer’s painting in its own terms. “Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters” is twenty-five closely printed pages of social history in which Winslow Homer and Copley are enlisted to support a thesis about how two “North American artists from privileged white middle-class backgrounds … . transmitted the attitudes of their peers toward blacks.” The art is incidental.
Art is incidental for the influential English feminist Griselda Pollock, too. But she adds “gender” and sexual politics to Professor Boime’s concern with race. In Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Color of Art History, she eviscerates Paul Gauguin for supplying
the fantasy scenarios and the exotic mise-en-scène for not only masculinist but also imperialist narratives. Gauguin, like Picasso, is regarded as a major father of modern art, a term rich in both reproductive and sexual connotations.
Thanks for that gloss on the word “father”! Would Professor Pollock be happier if Gauguin were described as “a major mother of modern art”? Note that Avant-Garde Gambits is no obscure piece of academic makework but rather the text of the Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures, a series that has included such eminences as Lawrence Gowing, John Pope-Hennessey, Kenneth Clark, and John Elderfield.
Professor Pollock lavishes a great deal of attention on Manao Tupapau(1892) (the title means “spirit thought”), Gauguin’s famous homage to Manet’s Olympia. The painting portrays a young Tahitian woman lying belly down, naked, on a bed, her head turned toward the viewer. Standing in the background is a spectral figure representing the spirit of the dead. In several letters, Gauguin explained that his aim in Manao Tupapau was partly to capture a particular harmony of color and movement and partly to communicate the woman’s fear as she sensed the presence of death. A particular challenge, he said, was to portray the naked woman without suggesting “something indecent.” “As soon as the idea of a tupapau has occurred to me, I concentrate on it and make it the theme of my picture. The nude thus becomes subordinate.”
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For Professor Pollock, however, Manao Tupapau is less a painting than an indictment. It is racist. It is sexist. It is colonialist. It is capitalist. Drawing on such figures as Franz Fanon, whose Wretched of the Earth is a fashionable document in the library of pro-terrorist literature, and Jacques Lacan, whose radical Freudianism has been a godsend to sex-obsessed obscurantists everywhere, Professor Pollock charges that
[i]n Gauguin’s work as it circulated in Paris, the body of Teha’amana [the woman depicted in the painting] is a fetish doubly configured through the overlapping psychic structures of sexual and racial difference. In art, as the nude, the female body is refashioned fetishistically, in order to signify the psychic lack within bourgeois masculinity which is projected out onto the image of “woman.” The culturally feminized and racially othered body also carries the projected burden of the cultural lack—the ennui—experienced by some of the Western bourgeoisie in the face of capitalism’s modernity.
Professor Pollock criticizes Gauguin (and others) for creating “an imaginary world named ‘the Tropics.’” But she has populated a far more tenuous venue with her fervid imaginings. One need not be a particular fan of Gauguin’s work to see that Griselda Pollock has left it far behind in her effort to disseminate (if I may use the term) her feminist gospel.
Overt political fantasy is not the only popular method by which the rape of the masters is accomplished in the academy today. There is also hermetic over-interpretation—or perhaps hermetic non-interpretation would be a more accurate description. This assault on art operates by owlishly menacing irrelevance. There are many accomplished and influential practitioners, each of whom contributes his (or her) own distinctive quotient of absurdity. For sheer preposterousness, no one can top the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In his book The Truth in Painting (1987), Derrida offers his readers—what a patient lot they are!—some 130 pages on Van Gogh’s famous painting of a pair of peasant shoes.
The competition for the most ludicrously overinterpreted painting in the world has yet to be held. But the odds are strong that Van Gogh’s little painting would win hands down. It has, after all, been the subject of a long essay by Martin Heidegger (“Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth”) as well as a prolix essay by Meyer Shapiro taking issue with Heidegger. And those essays unleashed a torrent of words words words from which poor Van Gogh labors to this day.
Reading Derrida is like plunging from the sunshine into a darkened hallway hung with mirrors. It takes a while to get your bearings, and even then … Derrida opens his book with a section called “Passe-Partout.” It’s a passport to Oz. Someone tells him, “I am interested in the idiom in painting.” “What,” Derrida asks, “does he mean?”
Does he mean that he is interested in the idiom “in painting,” in the idiom itself, for its own sake, “in painting” (an expression that is in itself strongly idiomatic; but what is an idiom?)?That he is interested in the idiomatic expression itself, in the words “in painting”? Interested in words in painting or in the words “in painting”? Or in the words “‘in painting’”?
One thing is clear: that Derrida is not interested in painting but only in “painting.”
When he gets around to Van Gogh’s shoes, Derrida pretends to be tormented by the “problem” of whether the shoes are really a pair of old shoes as Heidegger blithely assumed.
—If the laces are loosened, the shoes are indeed detached from the feet and in themselves. But I return to my question: they are also detached, by this fact, one from the other and nothing proves that they form a pair. If I understand aright, no title says “pair of shoes” for this picture. Whereas elsewhere … Van Gogh speaks of another picture, specifying “a pair of shoes.” Is it not the possibility of the “unpairedness” (two shoes for the same foot, for example, are more the double of each other but this double simultaneously fudges both pair and identity, forbids complementarity, paralyzes directionality, causes things to squint toward the devil), is it not the logic of this false parity, rather than of this false identity, which constructs this trap? The more I look at this painting, the less it looks as though it could walk.
But how about talk? The more Derrida looks at it, the more it looks as though it might talk.
Derrida is one of the most adulated, highest paid, and influential academics in the world. What does that tell us? That celebrity is a license for unbridled intellectual masturbation? In part. But it is worse than just that. Figures like Boime, Pollock, and Derrida are not exceptions in the world of academic art history. They and their many confrères (Svetlana Alpers on Rubens, say, or Michael Fried on Courbet, or Anna Chave on Rothko) are the academic vanguard: they define the heights of their discipline. It is they who set the trends, start the fads, shape the discipline. Graduate students emulate them. Publishers chase them. And for what? “What is disturbing about Rubens’ Munich Silenus,” Svetlana Alpers writes about the painter’s Drunken Silenus,
is that in it gender difference is unclear. Difference is denied, or at least not marked: the body is not clearly male, nor is it female. In appearance and in behavior he exists, on Rubens’ pictorial account, in a curious no man’s and no woman’s land, between or eliding genders… .
Why would a male painter in our tradition represent flesh in this manner? I think it has something to do with the problem of male generativity. How are men to be creative, to make pictures, for example, when giving birth is the prerogative of women?
Professor Alpers proceeds with some verbal embroidery about “the gaze” and “the Lacanian notion of finding oneself through being looked at,” but anyone who looks at that Rubens painting can see that gender, far from being denied, is robustly proclaimed. For one thing, the tipsy, balding Silenus is heavily bearded: a subtle hint for most of us that he is male.
There is something unutterably depressing about wading through this academic gobbledegook. It’s not just the rebarbative pseudo-thought, the clichéd political sloganeering (“Eurocentric patriarchal colonialist bourgeois racist capitalist”), the minatory, all-knowing tone. That’s bad enough. But the tragedy of this reader-proof verbiage is that it acts as a prophylactic, effectively sealing off students from any direct contact with works of art. We turn to art history to open the door to art. More and more what we get is a cordon insanitaire preventing any contact with the work. In The Practice of Art History, the great Austrian scholar Otto Pächt argued that “where art history is concerned, in the beginning was the eye, not the word.” Pächt was a passionate proponent of the idea that art was “more than a mere illustration of the humanities.” It is more, too, than a mere illustration of politicized nihilism and empty theorizing. Looking at the way art history is taught today, however, you’d never know it.
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