Tantra relief, 11th-13th centuries. Marble.
Lovers. Marble relief with Greek motif.
Indian miniature painting.
Sexuality and its associated matters have more than 10,000 representations, different ones in different cultures. In India, eroticism is sanctified in Hindu temples. In Greece, it culminates in the cult of beauty, joining the pleasures of the body with those of the mind. Greek philosophy understood the world as interplay between Apollo and Dionysus, between reason and ecstasy.
Only Christianity began to view eroticism in a context of sin and the world of darkness, and thus creating irreconcilable differences. “The devil Eros has become more interesting to man than all the angels and all the saints,” a tenet held by Nietzsche, which would probably find no sympathy in Far Eastern Japan: Eros was never demonised there. In fact, that which Nietzsche lamented in the West never occured in Japan, nor in many other Eastern cultures. “Christianity,” in Nietzschean words, “forced Eros to drink poison.”
In Western Europe, erotic depictions were banished to secret galleries. The floating, transitory world was held in chains, and only with great difficulty was science able to free sexuality from prejudices and association with sin. It is, therefore, no wonder that sexology developed wherever the relationship between sexuality and eroticism was especially ambivalent or troubled. It is to celebrate this relationship that a monument has been erected in the shape of the Magnus Hirschfeld Museum in Berlin.
Our cornucopia of a colourful, erotic world of images and objects shows that Eros can be an all-encompassing and unifying energy. These items provide an opportunity to steal a glimpse of an essential, human sphere – usually taboo – through the eyes of many artists with a continuously changing point of view.
Pornography? “That which is pornography to one person, is the laughter of genius for the other,” countered D. H. Lawrence.
Unlike pornography, which often lacks imagination, erotic art allows us to partake in creative joy. Even if some of the pictures seem strange to us or even annoy and force us to confront taboos, we should still open ourselves to that experience. Real art has always caused offence.
Only through a willingness to be affronted can this journey through the geography of pleasure also be profitable, namely in the sense that this fantasy journey enriches our innermost selves.
The humour evident in many of the exhibits is only accessible to those who can feel positive about claiming the erotic experience.
Pictures of the pleasures of the flesh promise a feast for the eyes, albeit a distanced pleasure. Yet, is not the essence of eroticism that it should be just beyond reach?
Aspects of the cultural history of humankind in this museum can help to extend the limits of tolerance by helping to expand the visitor’s points of view. They can liberate minds from clichés, which may occupy our fantasies and imagination today, but hopefully not after this book has been read.
Indian temple relief (copy), 19th century.
Arab slave trader, c. 1910. Bronze.
Paul Avril, illustration for De Figuris Veneris, 1906. Coloured lithograph.
Erotic Art or Pornography?
The term ‘Erotic Art’ is muddied by a miasma of ambiguous terms. Art and pornography, sexuality and sensuality, obscenity and morality are all involved to such an extent that it seems almost impossible to reach an objective definition, which is not unusual in the history of art.
How is it possible to speak of erotic art?
This much is certain: the depiction of a sexual activity alone does not raise a work to the nobility that is erotic art. To identify erotic art only with its content would reduce it to one dimension, just as it is not possible to distinguish artistic and pornographic depictions only by describing their immoral contents. The view that erotic works are created solely for sexual arousal and so cannot be art is erroneous as well.
Does the creative imagination brought to erotic art distinguish it from pornography? Yet pornography is also a product of imagination. However, it has to be more than just a depiction of sexual reality, or who would buy it? Gunter Schmidt states that pornography is “constructed like sexual fantasy and daydreams, just as unreal, megalomaniacal, magical, illogical, and just as stereotypical”. Erotic daydreams – they are the subject of erotic art as well.
Anyhow, those making a choice between art and pornography may have already decided against the first one. Pornography is a moralising defamatory term. What is art to one person is the devil’s handiwork to another. The mixing of aesthetic with ethical-moralistic questions dooms every clarification process right from the start.
In the original Greek, pornography means prostitute writings – that is, text with sexual content – in which case it would be possible to approach pornography in a freethinking manner and equate the content of erotic art with that of pornography. This re-evaluation would amount to a rehabilitation of the term.
The extent to which the distinction between art and pornography depends on contemporary attitudes is illustrated, for example, by the painting over of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. Nudity was not considered obscene during the Renaissance. The patron of this work of art, Pope Clement VII, saw nothing immoral in its execution. His successor, Paul III, however, ordered an artist to provide the Last Judgement with pants!
Otto Schoff, c. 1930.
Otto Rudolf Schatz, Tit Fuck. Watercolour.
Jean de l’Etang, Tit Fuck, from the Trente et quelques attitudes series, c. 1950. Coloured lithograph.
Paul Avril, illustration for De Figuris Veneris, 1906.
Coloured lithograph.
Another example is the handling of the excavated frescos of Pompeii, which were inaccessible to the public until the dawn of the 21st century. In 1819, the Gallery of Obscenities was established in the Palazzo degli Studi, which was chosen as the national museum. Only people of mature age and known high moral standards had access to the locked room. The collection changed its name to the Gallery of Locked Objects in 1823. Again, only those with a regular royal permit were able to view the exhibited works. The reactionary wave after the unrest in 1848 also affected the erotic collection of the museum. In 1849, the doors of the Gallery of Locked Objects closed forever. The collection was transferred to a still further removed section of the museum three years later, with even the doors leading to that area being bricked in. Not until 1860, when Guiseppe Garibaldi marched into Naples, was reopening of the erotic collection even considered. The name of the collection was then changed to the Pornographic Collection. Over time, many objects were removed from this collection and returned to the normal exhibits. The history of the Gallery thus provides an overview of the mores of the last three centuries.
Not
