This essay was submitted to the Goethe-Institut “Sapere Aude” Essay Competition, where it earned third place among college entries. Originally written in English, it is presented here in its original language without translation.
In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant writes about aesthetics and his ideas on beauty. However, postmodernism has taken a decisive and radical turn by elevating medium and material in interpreting and appreciating art. This is most shockingly apparent in transgressive art, which uses unconventional materials to incite outrage from the viewer. Faced with how postmodern art challenges traditional notions of beauty, Kant’s critique provides us with specific guidelines for “ugly” and “disgusting” art, which will be expanded to make a judgment about this genre. Two particular works will be considered: Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary.” Transgressive art utilizes vulgar materials in its composition and, therefore, disrupts the free play of imagination and understanding that is crucial for Kant’s concept of beauty, effectively barring it from being considered beautiful.Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” is a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a container of the artist’s urine (see Appendix A). It has a reddish-yellow surface that is darker around the edges and lighter at the center. The crucifix “glows in a soft, golden light cast from the right” that gives off the ambiance of a “devotional image” (Sanyal). This physical description betrays some sense of a compositionally pleasing artwork. Still, the fact of a holy object being drowned in urine causes disgust and uproar, even to the point of the work being vandalized. It is a sacrilegious image, and yet the artist himself argues that the discomfort swelling up in religious viewers “should motivate one to ponder the violence and ugliness of the actual Crucifixion” (Sanyal). Sister Wendy Beckett, a nun and art historian, has commented her own interpretation of the piece, seeing it as a condemning and bell-tolling work: “We put Christ in a bottle of urine—in practice … It’s what you make of it and I could make something that could make me feel a deep desire to reverence the death of Christ more” (Beckett). This art piece is called disgusting and vulgar by devout Christians, and yet it has some aesthetic significance in its composition and detail. Still, can the use of urine in this piece be called beautiful?
First, we must explore what Kant believes to be the 'beautiful.' He calls beauty the product of the relation between the faculties of imagination and understanding, where the former is "the composition of the manifold of intuition," and the latter is "for the unity of the concept that unifies the representations" (AA 5:217). Our minds allow for multiple interpretations, variations, and musings through imagination, but they are also collected under a general concept through the faculty of understanding. Aesthetic judgment ultimately lies in the mind, and these cognitive faculties engage each other in a harmonious process that allows the viewer to grasp an artwork as beautiful. This is Kant's practice of free play in judging an artwork since "it is the mere apprehension of form that excites aesthetic pleasure" (Eaton 41). The artwork is not limited to its concepts but allows room for aesthetic contemplation through imagination, which allows for the possibility of various perspectives that we enjoy playing with. In this framework, a judgment of beauty conforms to a disinterested pleasure one receives in free play because there is no ulterior motive. It is crucial here that free play responds to representation and form instead of what the artwork is, such as its concept or material.
Artwork that 'misses the mark' of beauty can be described as ugly, a different judgment of taste that represents the disruption of harmonious free play. A piece is judged ugly because there is a "dissatisfaction with the disagreement between formal qualities" within the piece (Kuplen). The represented object may not be ugly itself and could be portrayed beautifully, but the way the artist has styled it produces negative reactions in how our minds take in the artwork. The formal discord in the object's portrayal is the cause of the judgment of ugliness. However, ugliness is not the negation of the beautiful in a binary sense but an alternative aesthetic judgment. Kant himself writes that "ugliness is something positive, not merely lack of beauty" (Wenzel 129). This means that 'ugliness' is a factor that can be under the same process of free play in a disinterested way. Instead of the harmonious free play of a judgment of beauty, the free play of a judgment of ugliness is a "disharmonious free play" (Wenzel 131). Just as beauty fascinates and occupies the mind, the ugly holds our attention and allows us to contemplate it, even sometimes be obsessed by it, in our cognitive faculties. Ugly artwork, then, occupies a space in aesthetic judgment that is useful when we look at postmodern art like "Piss Christ." The work is formally pleasing with established depth, contour, and composition, and so not ugly. At this point, it appears as if it can still be appreciated as art as Sister Wendy claims.
Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" is even more scandalous with its portrayal of the mother of Jesus using elephant dung and collaged pornography (see Appendix B). The gold background and the front-facing Virgin are reminiscent of Medieval icons, but plastered buttocks and open vaginas accent the "blasphemous" vulgarity (Allison). The depiction of a Black Madonna, albeit in a crude physiognomy, is contrasted with a mound of elephant dung replacing her right breast. It is a painting that demands disgust. Mary is believed to have been a virgin all her life, and so the collaged porn acts as a symbol of the lust of the world against her purity. Does this unique interpretation, however, justify the ugly composition of the painting and its disgusting material use? While "Piss Christ" obscures its use of disgusting material through the medium of photography, "The Holy Virgin Mary" makes the problem blatant. How does disgust relate between the two pieces, and can they both be labeled as disgusting art? If interpretations can be made about these artworks, where does the free play process end?
Disgust is distinct from the aesthetic judgments of beauty and the ugly because it is a rotten emotion that has the power to disrupt the free play of imagination and understanding. Kant believes that this response "rest[s] on sheer imagination" and imposes on aesthetic enjoyment, making it so that "the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished in our sensation itself from the nature of the object itself" (AA 5:312). This destruction of aesthetic satisfaction is due to the imagination failing to differentiate from representation and the object being represented due to the arousal of sensual associations like taste, touch, or smell. Disgust is not a response to formal defects in the artwork but a "response to objects that represent the gross and squalid aspects of life" (Korsmeyer 61). Unlike how beauty and ugliness focus on formal configuration, disgust attaches itself to the material nature of the object. This damages the relationship between imagination and understanding, causing not disharmonious free play but utter dysfunction that ruins all aesthetic pleasure and disinterested reflection. This is how Christians view, process, and react to both artworks, even to the point of vandalism. However, for an analysis and critique of transgressive art, disgust must be expanded beyond Kant's traditional understanding of artwork.
The heightened importance of material in postmodern art reveals how Kant's idea of disgust can be extended to what makes up the representation itself. His traditional view is that the artistic representation is "no longer distinguished in our sensation itself from the nature of the object itself" (AA 5:312). Artistic depiction incites emotional distress because imagination heightens the senses, effectively dismantling free play. However, disgusting material is essential to the production of these postmodern artworks (urine and elephant dung, respectfully), and this element shuts off any true free play for the consideration of these pieces being beautiful. Disgusting objects already arouse a sense that they are "incompatible with dignity and honor" (Korsmeyer 61). Imagination disrupts the mind's free play by heightened sensual associations with the represented object. How much more is the imagination exacerbated when the representation itself is disgusting? The object is disgusting in its nature, and its representation is disgusting in its material. This double incompatibility is because transgressive art fundamentally aims to obscure the separation between an object and its representation. It demands aesthetic breakdown and the collapse of difference, thereby refusing any real disinterested viewing that can be pleasurable and lead to a judgment of beauty.
This new standard of disgust is how both of these artworks and transgressive art in general may be called disgusting and utterly not beautiful. Andres Serrano's piss submerging a crucifix can bring about interpretation and novel thoughts, but to try and admire the piece and lean into a disharmonious free play is to let the fact of his piss dilute the back and forth between understanding and imagination. Sister Wendy suggests this in the same interview: "It was a very admonitory work. Not a great work, no one would want to go on looking at it once seeing it once" (Beckett). Offense because of sacrilege or material disgust are two different judgments, but "Piss Christ" can universally be called disgusting because of its gross material. Disgust ultimately takes over because of imagination's emotional, physical, and sensual sectors. Free play cannot overcome imagining the smell of urine, its gross color, and its associations with dirty places. The material used for this postmodern artwork is disgusting and makes the representation disgusting as well. Although the accusations of disgust mainly come from religious fervor, "Piss Christ" utilizes the gross material of urine in its artistic representation, effectively dismantling the possibility of full free play and making the artwork aesthetically invalid.
The same concept can be applied to Christ Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary." Not only is the painting formally disharmonious, but its materials are also disturbing and unsettling. The images of vaginas plastered across the canvas incite uproar and demonstrate Kant's traditional view of disgust. It is not similar, however, to the dung used to prop up the entire canvas and conceptualize the Virgin's breast. The smell, reality, association, and feel of elephant dung destroy free play because of its inherent grossness. In this piece, negative reaction—which is joined to the imagination—is more centered on the materials themselves rather than the object being represented, demonstrating how Kant's idea of disgust can be taken further. It may be unique and visceral in a new way, but it violates what it means for an artwork to be beautiful. In "Piss Christ," the fact that it is piss collapses disinterestedness because it is a revolt against the imagination which links the materials to the senses. In "The Holy Virgin Mary," the fact that it is elephant dung causes a violent reaction to the representation instead of the object, revealing how Kant's disgust is applicable and relevant to new movements in postmodern art. The art isn’t just blasphemous, it’s just plain disgusting.
The trend of transgressive art in the postmodern scene utilizes extreme material to elicit violent attention and uproar. Although this art can be the cause for appreciation or interpretation, Kant’s ideas of the beautiful, the ugly, and the disgusting help us to judge it as not aesthetically pleasing. Beauty requires disinterested pleasure and the faculty of free play, which requires the back and forth between understanding and imagination. The ugly can still be considered in disharmonious free play, but disgust collapses any chance of aesthetic pleasure because imagination revolts against the object. Taken a step further, disgust is also the appropriate reaction to the extreme materials used to represent the object in art. Since transgressive art in the postmodern art scene employs gross material like urine or elephant dung, it corrupts the imagination by heightening a visceral and poignant reaction, making this genre incapable of being beautiful.
Works Cited
Beckett, Wendy. Interview with Bill Moyer. PBS, 1997.
Eaton, Marcia Muelder. “Beauty and Ugliness In and Out of Context.” Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 39-50.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer & Eric Matthews, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Kant, Immanuel. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. De Gruyter, 1900ff.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. “Terrible Beauties.” Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, edited by Matthew Kieran, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 51-63.
Kuplen, Mojca. “Disgust and Ugliness: A Kantian Perspective.” Contemporary Aesthetics, vol. 9, Dec. 2011, p. 9. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=vth&AN=66864867&site=eds-live.
Ofili, Chris. The Holy Virgin Mary. 1999, MoMA, New York.
Sanyal, Sunanda K. "Andres Serrano, Piss Christ." Smarthistory, https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/. Accessed September 25, 2024.
Serrano, Andres. Piss Christ. 1987, Smarthistory, https://smarthistory.org/andres-serrano-piss-christ/.
Wenzel, Christian Helmut. An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics: Core Concepts and Problems. Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Young, Allison. “Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary.” Smarthistory, smarthistory.org/chris-ofili-the-holy-virgin-mary/. Accessed 24 September 2024.