FREE SPEECH, PISS AND HERRING

The internet is both the future of human communication and a monumental waste of effort. It has unlimited potential and, in its current state, infinite frustrations. It is a boundary condition of the democratic process – any shitkicker with more than two fingers to type can have their own quarter-acre of cybernetic space, which is instantly and reliably accessible from anywhere on Earth. And while this means gay schizophrenic furries who like to be choked by fat women smeared in double cream get their own corner of the web, so do any number of the intelligent, the disaffected and the interesting.

Most of us who spend any appreciable amount of time online greatly pare down what sites we visit, in an attempt not to go completely batshit crazy with information overload. As a consequence, an issue’s importance to our own little cross section of the online world can be seen by how it reveals itself, where it becomes important.

This cartoon commotion raped and pillaged its way through my personal online world like Mongol horsemen through the Garden of Eden. No matter where you’ve been in the last week, online or not, I bet this story has been exploding like a sweating stick of gelignite right in front of you. And, of course, it’s another one of those tiresome issues where everyone has an opinion.

My opinion is simple: this is one of those rare issues where I see no benefit whatsoever in any of the arguments, and could cheerfully take the parties on all sides and gut them like trout.

Here’s a brief and vaguely accurate timeline:

• A Danish newspaper publishes cartoons of (or concerning) the prophet Mohammed. This is contrary to some versions of Islamic law.
• A local shit-storm ensues, and the paper apologises.
• The Danish Prime Minister blows off the issue completely, and refuses to discuss it with a group of local imams.
• These imams fit up a dossier (which included extra cartoons that weren’t in the paper) and a shower of abuse alleged to be the opinion of the Danish people.
• This dossier is widely distributed in the Islamic world, and starts a torrential downpour of shit which we still haven’t seen our way out of.

In fact, as we speak, some hijab-clad twat is vandalising a Swedish embassy because the Danish embassy is already in flames, and shit! those white people are all the same, really.

The whole thing is a grimy mess of painful mistakes and misunderstanding, and it says a lot on many topics, such as cultural pluralism, the divide between moderate and radical Islam, or just how much everyone should be killed. But we need to talk about the mother of them all, the grand old bitch whose bitten and scarred underbelly is the exposed nexus of this whole furore – free speech. Especially of interest to me is its relationship to bad art.

One issue has been largely ignored in this whole finger-pointing shambles... these cartoons really suck. At best, they’re marginally funny and at worst utterly gratuitous and completely pointless. They’re bad college journalism, wearing pants that are far too big, parading around the traps pretending to be Daddy. Have you actually seen them? Google them. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

I first saw this kind of hysterical fagdance when Serrano’s photograph Pisschrist toured Australia. There seemed to be two opinions...

*CUT TO STREET CORNER*

[White, fibrous hippy woman, wearing natural fibres and ‘earth tones’ holding a sign that says ‘HANDS OF OUR ART”. The “R” in art is backwards.]

“It’s ART. The Church has NO RIGHT to tell us what to think. This photograph is IMPORTANT. Wah, complain, spittle, etcetera. Also, choose natural childbirth.”

*CUT TO CHURCH RECTORY*

[Constipated-looking priest with three chins, dressed in full regalia, surreptitiously trying to brush the bloodstains off the front of his robes of office]

“This is OBSCENE. This is SMUT. This is MANY OTHER DOG-WHISTLE WORDS. This broadcast should inflame all primitive idiots within earshot. Write to your MP. Wah, complain, spittle, etcetera. Also, condoms are the Devil’s work.”

As with these cartoons, there seemed to be no middle ground between this is art and therefore important and this is obscenity. There is a position which comes before and excises this ugly wound like a scalpel...

This is not good art. This is tripe. This is the kind of querulous, talentless fluff that made Tom Wolfe write The Painted Word, the kind that grows entire generations of new artists who manage to mistake controversy for content, the kind which feeds that field which is the fucking abomination of the modern university, Cultural Studies.

Jesus in urine? You utter fag. What a boring, safe medium. Manzoni put his own shit in a can, priced it at the market price of gold and beat you in the deification of scatology by an entire quarter of a century. Get a new idea, you hack, you fucking coward. Preferably one which hasn’t lost its teeth on the back on the takings of a hundred thousand museum admissions, meaningless art prizes and associated merchandising.

Am I being too harsh? Let’s take the man’s own words on the subject.

“...Urine in this context is parallel to Catholicism's obsession with ‘the body and blood of Christ.’ It is precisely in the exploration and juxtaposition of these symbols from which Christianity draws its strength. The photograph in question, like all my work, has multiple meanings and can be interpreted in various ways.”

You’re missing the point, hairball. The Catholic tradition is entirely concerned with flesh. The body of Christ, the blood of the Lamb, the mortification of the flesh, the consumption of man by the Holy. God and man AS ONE, “at one with the Lord”! The symbolism of excreta has precious little to do with the obsession with flesh.

Here’s my interpretation – you’re a boring little turd with the artistic endowment of an accountant, and your art is a tired old gummy-smiling whore entirely propped up by controversy. You want the Body of Christ? You want to mortify the flesh? Enlist the help of a forward-thinking surgeon and weave a nativity scene out of strips of your own flesh and viscera. Swallow a lead crucifix and get a thoracic X-ray, so the Son of Man raises his head to the heavens next to your pyloric sphincter. Get a thobbing knot of hairy male fags to fuck in the shape of a crucifix and adorn them with a wooden female Jesus. A miserly message is no message at all. You can’t gently butt up to the boundaries of propriety, wait for the screaming to begin and expect people to understand, you have to crush these boundaries entirely and create something. You have to stop thought in its tracks, and make people being their own narratives again.

The crowd sheltering under the welcoming umbrella of free speech is by and large an unpleasant one. It is required to defend the actions of religious kooks, borderline psychotics and serial masturbators like Serrano who is by no means the worst offender in a modern art lexicon which has disappeared so far up its own arsehole it can tickle its own sinuses to sneeze. But unfortunately, these halfwits and hacks are our crew, and protecting them protects us. They are the people who exercise their right to speak, rather than merely observing how pretty that right is. They’re on my side by default.

But I’ll be damned if they’ll them get away with doing it badly. These cartoons and their resultant fracas is yet another one of those issues where the only thing that lets me sleep is the hope that I will outlive all the principle participants.

Fuck, I need a hug.

Dr. Cuntsworthy.