“To hold a camera is to be at war.” – Tony Comstock

Artist’s Shit, aka Shit in a Can

Two museum goers contemplate photos by artist Jeff Koons

When engaged in a debate there is a risk that you will arrive at a point when you realize that your opponent is not only incurious and ill-informed, but also willing to say almost anything, no matter how irrelevant and inflammatory, to score rhetorical points. When that point is reached, you realize that any light that might be shed by the debate will be blotted out by the heat; that there’s no point of any further engagement. I didn’t reach that point when Alison Croggon said this:

”…the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice…”

Nor when she said this:

“I do find much pornography - especially the stuff you get on the internet - absolutely horrifying: yes, I’ve looked, young Russian women getting fucked by dogs with the emptiest eyes I’ve ever seen, what is that story? That’s not freedom, that’s slavery and imprisonment and rape. That’s not about life, that’s about killing something.”

Or even this: (more…)

I’m afraid things are not going well between me and Alison Croggon.She is a critic, and as such she is deeply wedded to the parsing of “artistic merit.” Debate about the merits of one work or another is, after all, the meat and potatoes of a critics life.

I have offered my own excoriating criticism of various erotic (I use the term loosely) films, and I have no problem with the critical assessment of work. Not all artwork is equal, nor or all artists; and certainly not at all times. Changes in fashion and taste may, over time, lift some artists from obscurity or derision. Others who had been ascendant may drift into oblivion. Everyone knows the name Mozart. Salieri is a footnote.

Where Alison and I disagree vehemently is on whether or not “artistic merit” has any place in place in the law, any place deciding whether or not a work may be banned, or whether or not an artist may be imprisoned.

(more…)

Alison Croggon is an Australian writer and critic. She is also the driving force behind the 2020 Open Letter in Support of Bill Henson, a letter signed on to by a couple dozen luminaries of the Australian arts and culture scene. The night before last I decided I would e-mail her, and she’s been kind enough to assent to my posting  the resulting correspondence:

From: tony@comstockfilms.com
Subject: CensorshipDate: May 29, 2008 2:57:51 PM EDT
To: alisoncroggon@xxxx.net.au

Where were you and your friends when police were sent to prevent the screening of my film last year in Melbourne? Or the year before that in Sydney?

Rather stark, but it does get to the point. It also got a response… (more…)

Another really nice review of one of our films from Essin’Em. Last time it was ASHLEY AND KISHA, this time it’s DAMON AND HUNTER. It’s a very positive, dare I say insightful review. This is my favorite part:

Oral, hand jobs, anal, general fucking, kissing; you name it, these boys are doing it. After hearing them talk, and then watching them fuck, you can really see how much respect and love for one another there is in this relationship, (more…)

“a love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes… it allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word…while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt…All I have written above is only a moment or two of brutal madness. The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices.”

Guess who?

“Adult sexual conduct is not illegal and it is in fact constitutionally protected. See, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). The regulation of visual depictions of adult sexual activity is not based on its intrinsic relation to illegal conduct.”

That’s from the Sixth Circuit Court’s ruling 2257 regulations unconstitutional, and gets to the heart of why I am fascinated by, and passionate about making sexual imagery.

Some few years ago I directed a film about Hutu refugees in Eastern Zaire. The imagery from the camps themselves was appalling enough: emaciated men, women, and children dying as the camera rolled; bodies being stacked into the bed of trucks like cordwood. But also included was footage from the Hutu genocidal slaughter of their Tutsi countrymen (carried out largely by machete,) including footage of a man being murdered by decapitation and the desecration of corpses.

I thought long and hard about what shots I would and would not include this film. I wanted my audience to vividly understand the horrors that had played out, but I did not want to them to withdraw, to down emotionally. I wanted them to stay with the film, through to the end, and hoped that they would find meaning in what I chose to show them. I thought a lot about the line between enough and too much. But never, not even for a moment, did I think about whether or not the footage I chose to include was prosecutable.

By contrast, nothing I show in the films I make about sex is awful. In fact, it’s all quite wonderful! People who desire each other giving and receiving pleasure in the most intimate and delicious ways! Yet in choosing to document and then distributed these consensual, loving, pleasurable, and entirely legal acts, some how through the magical powers of the camera, I may be committing a crime. Depending on where my films are watched, and by whom, what I do may not be protected by the First Amendment, what I do may be considered obscene, what I do may be against the law.

“The regulation of visual depictions of adult sexual activity is not based on its intrinsic relation to illegal conduct.” That’s what the Sixth Circuit Court says. I don’t see how that squares with Miller v. California. I’d like to find out, but I don’t want to lose my house or go to jail.

Controversial and explicit documentary explores the moral and social conflict over terminations:

“The most shocking section of the 152-minute film is footage shot by Kaye himself of the abortion of a 20-week foetus. It shows the foetus’s head and eye staring straight at the camera, its hand in a metal collecting tray and its foot placed on a ruler and measuring just over 3cm.”

Coming to a theater near you.