reviewed by Christophe
A surreal experience, repeated often enough, becomes a culture critique.
One such experience is that of someone picking up a copy of my company's
catalog of adult books, videos and toys, flipping through it, and then
asking me, about a particular product or the catalog in general, "It's not
pornographic, is it?"
How can I answer that? How can anyone except the person doing the looking?
Why appeal to someone else to decide for them?
I could be flip, and just note that "pornography" means, etymologically,
"depictions of prostitutes," and note that I don't believe that there are
any such pictures in the catalog, at least not the most recent one. But,
of course, that's not what they are asking; they are asking if this is the
Good Kind of erotic material, rather than the Bad Kind.
The fact that such kinds exist is considered self-evident, barely worthy of
notice. Even among civil libertarians, the Bad Kind of erotica is defended
only because the Good Kind might accidentally be censored. The arguments
for and against COPA, the successor to the Communications Decency Act, are
entirely structured in these terms: the proponents claim that the law only
applies to commercial suppliers of sexually explicit entertainment (the Bad
Kind), the opponents scoff and say, no, the Good Kind (sex education, and
so forth) will be affected as well.
What is this Bad Kind? Well, of course, there is no consensus on that,
none whatsoever, but among the often-stated characteristics of the Bad Kind
of work are:
1. It's very explicit, it leaves nothing to the imagination. Genitalia,
penetration, nonstandard sex, it's all right there in front.
2. It's not about anything besides sex. No plot, no "literary values,"
nothing but sex sex sex.
3. It's not about people as people, but about people in their role as
creatures who have sex.
Then, just when you think you might come to some kind of agreement where
Pornography, the Bad Kind, begins and Erotica, the Good Kind, ends, along
comes a work that is hell on any reasonable objective standard.
In fact, along come two works: Porn Art and Porn Art 2.
Dahmane is a Belgian photographer. His photos are sharp, clear, black and
white. Chloë des Lysses is the model, who appears in each and every photo
in both books. She is a slim brunette, very pale, with an aristocratic,
coolly stylish and gorgeous face.
And she does all sorts of very, very nasty things in these pictures. She
gets penetrated in both orifices with things much larger than most people
find comfortable. She poses nude in very unusual circumstances. She has a
great deal of sex with a great deal of people. And she does this while
leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.
The title of the books could not be simpler or more accurate. There is no
question that these books are porn. And there is no question that they are
art. They are as explicit as they possibly could be. They are not about
anything but sex. We don't know anything about Chloë des Lysses besides
her amazing sexual abilities and willingness to display herself while using
them.
And yet, her utter composure, her cool yet welcoming expression, have more
to do with the model in an Old Masters painting than anything in a men's
magazine. In most of the photographs, she is looking directly at the
camera, acknowledging that she knows just what she is doing, and
challenging the viewer to make anything dishonorable of it. And we cannot.
The quality of composition and technical skill in the photographs, and the
range of imagination in their situations, puts Dahmane among the best of
the sexual documentary photographers.
If there were ever two books which clearly show the absurdity of the "Is it
porn?" distinction, it is these two books. There is no such thing as "bad
pornography" vs. "good erotica"; there is just good art and bad art, and
these books are definitely good art, as well as being very, very arousing
erotica.
