One way to tell the history of art since the Second World War is as a sequence of scandals. Each decade has its outrage: a work that was denounced in parliaments and newspapers, defended by critics who had not quite seen the point, and eventually bought by a museum. The outrage fades. The work remains, in a climate-controlled room, with a small label explaining why it was once upsetting.
This essay offers a rough taxonomy of the art scandal. In keeping with the archive's practice it describes the works rather than naming the people who made them, most of whom are living and none of whom needs further publicity. Readers who know the period will recognize every case. It then asks the question raised in What Transgression Was For: what, if anything, the outrage revealed.
Subtraction
The first family of scandals consists of works that took something away. In 1953 a young artist asked a celebrated older painter for a drawing so that he could erase it. The painter, after some thought, gave him one that would be hard to rub out. The erasure took weeks, and the result, a sheet of paper bearing faint smudges and a careful label, was exhibited as a work in its own right.
Others followed the same logic further. An artist sealed ninety small tins, labeled them as containing his own excrement, and priced them by weight at the current rate for gold. A later artist won a major prize with an empty room in which the lights went on and off. Most recently, a museum advanced an artist a large sum in banknotes to recreate two earlier works made from cash; he delivered two empty frames and gave them a title instructing the museum to take the money and run.
The subtraction scandal is aimed less at the public than at the institution. It asks what exactly is being bought when art is bought, and answers: the signature, the label and the room. The library holds a document from the far end of this line, The Bonfire Accounts, in which the subtraction is total.
The body as material
The second family made the artist's body the medium, and the audience's response the content. In 1964 a woman sat still on a stage while members of the audience came up one by one and cut away her clothes with scissors. Ten years later another woman stood for six hours beside a table of seventy-two objects, from a feather to a loaded pistol, and told the audience they could use any of them on her. By the end, her clothes had been cut and her skin broken, and someone had put the pistol in her hand and pointed it at her head.
Elsewhere an artist had a friend shoot him in the arm with a rifle. Another lay concealed beneath a gallery ramp for days, murmuring fantasies about the visitors walking over him. In Vienna, a group of artists in the 1960s staged long ritual actions involving animal carcasses, blood and the imagery of crucifixion, and one of them was sentenced to six months in prison for a performance at a university, a sentence he avoided by leaving the country. In Beijing in 1994 an artist sat for an hour in a filthy public latrine, his body smeared with honey and fish oil, while flies settled on him.
The audience, given permission, turned out to be the exhibit.
These works were called exhibitionist, and some were. The best of them were experiments with real results. The six-hour piece in particular is now cited by psychologists as well as critics, because what it showed was not the artist but the audience. Given permission and a crowd, ordinary gallery visitors proceeded within hours to violence. The audience, given permission, turned out to be the exhibit.
The sacred and the profane
A third family of scandals concerned religion, and they were the ones that reached the legislatures. A photograph of a small crucifix submerged in the artist's urine, glowing a deep amber, became a national controversy when it emerged that public funds had supported its exhibition. A painting of the Virgin Mary incorporating elephant dung and cut-outs from pornographic magazines led a city government to threaten the funding of the museum that showed it.
The interesting thing about these cases is that the works themselves were ambiguous. Both artists said they were religious, and both images can be read as devotional. The scandal arose not from the images but from their location: in a public institution, at public expense. The limit being tested was not blasphemy as such but the question of who pays for it.
Substance and specimen
A fourth family brought the materials of death and the body into the gallery. A large shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde. A self-portrait head cast from nearly ten pints of the artist's own frozen blood, which has to be kept permanently refrigerated. Live pigs tattooed with designs and raised on a farm abroad, to be sold, eventually, as their skins. These works belong to the old tradition of the memento mori and the anatomical cabinet, and the archive's own grotesque gallery stands in the same line. Their shock was the shock of the specimen jar: the reminder that the body is meat and that meat can be priced.
The private made public
A fifth family exhibited what is normally hidden. An unmade bed, surrounded by the debris of a bad week, shortlisted for a prestigious prize. A video of the artist's sexual encounter with a collector, who had paid for the privilege of participating in the work. Enlarged screenshots of strangers' photographs from a social network, lightly annotated and sold for large sums without their subjects' consent.
The common thread here is exposure, and the scandal it provoked was about privacy and ownership: whose life is this, and who is entitled to sell it? Closely related were works that paid poor people small sums to be used as material, most notoriously by having a line tattooed across their backs for the price of a single dose of the drug they were dependent on. The artist's stated intention was to expose the economic system that made such a transaction possible. The transaction took place all the same.
The machine itself
Step back from the individual cases and a mechanism appears. A scandal has parts. There is the work, which must be in some way legible as an affront. There is an offended party, ideally a politician, a cleric or a newspaper. There is the press, which needs the outrage, and the institution, which needs the visitors. And there is the market, which learned some time in the 1980s that a work denounced on the front page could be sold for more than one praised on the arts page.
Once the market had learned this, the scandal machine ran by itself. Outrage became part of a work's provenance, as reliable as a good exhibition history. Artists, dealers and even offended parties came to understand their roles, and played them. A protest outside a gallery is now, often, a scheduled part of the opening.
The empty frames delivered to the museum with instructions to take the money and run may be the machine's last product. The work consisted entirely of the scandal it would cause, and the scandal duly arrived, and was purchased.
A test
The test proposed in the archive's earlier essay still works. Ask of any shocking work what limit it revealed, and who drew it. The erased drawing revealed that the art market buys names. The six-hour performance revealed what a crowd will do when given leave. The publicly funded crucifix revealed that a society's tolerance depends heavily on who is paying. These are findings, and they were bought at a price, usually by the artist.
Other cases reveal nothing that was not already known, except that outrage sells. A useful corollary follows. The scandals that last are those in which the artist risked something of their own, their body, their money, their reputation or their safety. The scandals that fade are those in which the only thing at risk was the audience's comfort. Shocking people is easy, and has been profitable for some time. Paying for the shock yourself is rare, and remains the best evidence that something was at stake.