By Mita Tate
Everyone loves controversy. Since the beginning of man, there has always been someone around who lives to cause some sort of contention among the masses. From Mozart’s controversial masonic opera “The Magic Flute” in 1791, to centuries later when Ed Sullivan declared Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips too risqué for television audiences in 1956 to just a few years ago in 2000 when Chinese avant-garde performance artist, Zhu Yu cooked and ate an aborted fetus live on television. Controversy is something that will exist long after we are dead and buried.
Several decades ago, people tried to ban music genres such as jazz and traditional rock-‘n’-roll, saying they would corrupt the youth and lead to an anarchistic society. Today these genres are known as just that-traditional. They are American staples and seen as relatively tame by today’s standards.
If Mozart or Dussek traveled to the future in Bill & Ted’s magical telephone booth and heard today’s popular music, or even contemporary classical music of Judith Weir and Steve Reich for that matter, you can pretty much assume they would not be happy and automatically deem it noise. However the same goes for Leonin and Perotin if they were to travel to Mozart or Dussek’s time. Do you honestly think they’d like the dissonant sounds of Mozart’s Symphony K550 in G Minor or Dussek’s 1791 sonata, The Naval Battle and Total Defeat Of The Dutch by Admiral Duncan?
Or maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about so let me put it this way. Art-music, film, books, sculpture, etc.-are all subjective and controversial in their own way. Why can Duchamp display a urinal in an art museum and call it art, when if I were to bring one of the toilets in Constitution Hall to MoMA, they would hardly appreciate my contribution to the art world?
Who is to say what is art and what isn’t? This is one of the medium’s biggest controversies and it is because of this that there will always be envelope-pushers ready to try something new and (usually) edgier. This in and of itself is also a controversial concept. Is it the envelope-pushing artists who determine what is controversial or is society itself actually causing the controversy and art is just imitating life? A good example of this is the fact that sex and violence, in recent decades, have become more and more acceptable, gaining ground each and every year. So if someone like Vincent Gallo or Sally Mann decides to use this as a way to make a point about society as a whole, while inadvertently pushing the envelope a little farther, does that mean they just added to the world of controversy? Or are they just imitating what they read in the news and saw on television and just bringing it to a wider audience?
OK, so enough with the philosophical ponderings though. In this bi-weekly column, I plan to spotlight an individual moment in the controversial history of art, music and film-three mediums commonly known for constantly pushing the envelope. From the mainstream controversies, such as the infamous Britney/Madonna kiss at the 2003 “MTV Video Music Awards,” to the underground world of serial killer art exhibits. While they may seem to have nothing in common, they are all controversial in nature and have offended someone somewhere, whether it be a dairy farmer in Texas or an entire race of people; and I plan to cover everything and anything that has caused a stir somewhere in the world.
Who knows, by the time the next column comes out, maybe live televised orgies and public executions will come back into style.