Lean Left

Startlingly clear-headed, absolutely right-on interview at Salon with Ira Isaacs, the defendant in a long-running censorship trial, about the absurdity of the obscenity doctrine and the stupidity of the government’s prosecution.

Trigger Warning: censorship

What do you make of the renewed push for more obscenity prosecutions?

I think a political year is coming up and some of these things you do just to get votes. I don’t know how serious they are or not. Personally I think it’s absurd that the government is wasting all this time and energy.

As far as your upcoming trial, one of your goals is to prove that your videos have artistic merit.

I have to do that to sound not guilty.

Right. And so how are you going to go about doing that?

Well, post-modern art, which has been around for 20 to 30 years, has celebrated disturbing images. I’m gonna show exhibits at the trial of Marcel Duchamp’s”Fountain,”Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” to talk about how things sometimes are deeper than they look on the surface. Kiki Smith did a sculpture in the Whitney Museum a couple years ago of a woman on all fours with a ten foot turd coming out of her rear end. There are all these things that are scatological in legitimate artistic venues.

All the prosecution is saying is, “Watch these DVDs and get so emotionally charged by them that you don’t think anymore and you just go by your gut reaction.”  . . .

What’s the artistic thinking behind your films [depicting scatology and bestiality] then?

Shock art has been getting its day in the last 15 to 20 years and I wanted to do something different, something shocking. I wanted to challenge all of the taboos of the government. Except for the possible prison part, this is kind of like the Academy Award for an artist. Basically, they’re saying to me that my stuff is so wild that — it’s kind of like that movie “Reefer Madness” back in the 20s — they think that if people watch my stuff they’re gonna go crazy and they need to throw me away to protect society. That’s a big compliment for an artist. . . .

What’s your artistic message?

My mission is to challenge, offend and offend again. Postmodernism is based on nontraditional things. . . .

The whole idea of any piece of art is that it challenges the viewer to think about it and what it means. Even if it’s Rauschenberg’s painting — it makes you think, “Anybody can do this — it’s just a white painting! Why is it in a museum?” It gets people to think and be challenged and to ask questions. And I think my movies did do that. If it wasn’t art before, this whole trial has elevated it to the level of serious art. . . .

So you see yourself as standing apart from the porn industry?

Absolutely. First of all, the porn industry doesn’t like me. Believe it or not, they want to be very respectable, and I’m not respectable enough for them. They feel that my stuff is making them look bad and that they’re really good guys and really, like, Hollywood. Second, I don’t think [what I do is] porno in the strictest sense. A lot of porno people are artists. But I have to make these distinctions because I want to win this.

You’ve been offered pretty handsome plea deals — why haven’t you taken them?

‘Cause sometimes you gotta stand for things. I want to have my day in court. They offered me four months and I just couldn’t take it. I looked in the mirror and said, “Can I live with myself after lying to the judge just to save myself a lot of inconvenience?” And I said I just can’t do it, I can’t live with myself as a person knowing that I’m not standing up for something. . . .

I now have the Kafka defense from his famous book, “The Trial.” The character’s name, by the way, is the director’s credit I’ve used from the beginning — either it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy or I predicted the future [laughs]. But, anyway, I am now like this character that finds himself arrested for this crime and no one can tell him what it is, and it’s very similar in a sense.

How so?

There’s no phone number I could have called to say, “Am I going over the line by doing this?” There is no hotline. If they really didn’t want this stuff they could have made it clear. They could have said, “You can’t do bestiality, you can’t to scatology” — but what they say instead is, “You can do it if it’s serious art.” Why say that? Just say you can’t do it!

People can film [scatology], they can engage in it, they can watch it — they just can’t sell it or distribute it. It’s a legal product [i.e., a legal practice] that I can go to prison for [showing on video] . . . .

Where should we draw the legal line?

I don’t think you should use kids. You shouldn’t use non-consenting people, and kids can’t consent.

What about the Dutch bestiality film that you distributed?

I tell ya something, people have said to me, “Isn’t that animal cruelty?” And I would say to them, “Listen, do you remember Eight Bells in the Kentucky Derby? The one who broke his leg and they came out and shot the horse right there in the head?” That’s animal cruelty. . . .

What would you say to people who are horrified and offended by the material in your –

I’m offended by Christians who keep telling me that I have to be like them! That’s what I’m offended by. I’m offended that they’re making people’s lives miserable based on their phony beliefs and phony gods. . . . These are modern day religious witch-hunts. If they want to protest me, picket me, write bad articles, they’re welcome to — that’s their right. If they want to ostracize me as a person, that’s their right, I respect that. But the government should not be in this. For the government to come after me with all their force and all their money is outrageous. Offending people should be a constitutional right.

This is all just absolutely brilliantly correct at every point. It’s remarkable to see somebody with so much at stake maintain such a clear sense of the scope of the issue of censorship, and of the irrelevance of blue-nosed distinctions between what is “art” and what is not. (The obscenity doctrine currently in place does not require that a work meet some positive test of artistic value – only that it not sink below a threshold of “lacking serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”, which in practice almost any work can do.)

He correctly notes the irony in the fact that the government’s obscenity trial has given his work salience in that debate, and therefore rendered it legally non-obscene! And he’s amusingly honest about himself, correctly identifying parallels between his case and the persecution of great artists, but pointedly refusing to call himself one. The horse analogy is brilliant, too: society has implicitly defined a level of brutal treatment of animals that it does not regard as cruelty, and which is clearly far worse than what is done to them in bestiality videos (I presume these are not snuff bestiality videos); given that, it cannot consistently argue against his videos on grounds of cruelty – it can only offer the censor’s standard whine “I don’t like it!”, which is of no importance. (To be sure, I think there is an argument to be made against such things, but he is correct in noting that that argument would also outlaw a lot of other things that are already common, which is clearly never going to be done.)

He has reasonable standards – his point about the importance of consent, and why it calls out children in distinction to adults, is precisely correct – he just wants not to be held to standards that are unreasonable or purely emotionally-based. The fact that he’s willing to risk a lengthy sentence to make that point is inspiring.

As he points out:

The witch-hunters are always the witch-hunters — it’s just the narrative that changes.

And coincidentally, but in no way unrelatedly, that article appears on the same day as this, from Salman Rushdie, who knows a bit about the subject:

Mr. Ai’s work is not polemical — it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist . . . has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China’s often inadequate responses to disasters . . . . The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive. On April 4, Mr. Ai was arrested by the Chinese authorities as he tried to board a plane to Hong Kong. His studio was raided and computers and other items were removed. Since then the regime has allowed hints of his “crimes” — tax evasion, pornography — to be published. These accusations are not credible to those who know him. It seems the regime, irritated by the outspokenness of its most celebrated art export, whose renown has protected him up to now, has decided to silence him in the most brutal fashion. The disappearance is made worse by reports that Mr. Ai has started to “confess.” . . .

The great writer Liao Yiwu has been denied permission to travel to the United States to attend the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, which begins in New York on Monday, and there are fears that he could be the regime’s next target. Among the others are Ye Du, Teng Biao and Liu Xianbin — who was sentenced last month to prison for incitement to subversion, the same charge leveled against the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, now serving an 11-year term. . . .

Not all writers or artists seek or ably perform a public role, and those who do risk obloquy and derision, even in free societies. Susan Sontag, an outspoken commentator on the Bosnian conflict, was giggled at because she sometimes sounded as if she “owned” the subject of Sarajevo. Harold Pinter’s tirades against American foreign policy and his “Champagne socialism” were much derided. Günter Grass’s visibility as a public intellectual and scourge of Germany’s rulers led to a degree of schadenfreude when it came to light that he had concealed his brief service in the Waffen-SS as a conscript at the tail end of World War II. Gabriel García Márquez’s friendship with Fidel Castro, and Graham Greene’s chumminess with Panama’s Omar Torrijos, made them political targets.

Rushdie notes that the dangers are worst under the most repressive governments. But in certain times and cases ours has been among them. It’s true that no American artist is currently under house arrest – but this filmmaker has been subject to actual arrest, and the threat of extensive jail time, for selling videos of people doing legal things that they agreed to do, for sale to people who want to watch those things. When he refused to plead guilty, the feds added further charges. (The case just gets more and more absurd: the original judge on the case had to recuse himself after he was found to maintain a personal Web site also containing bestiality porn. He was not charged with a crime, however.)

This case is far from unusual. In the past, thousands have been entirely blackballed from perfectly mainstream artistic industries and even regular employment, for perfectly legal political activities. Many have gone to jail, again for providing pictures of people doing things it was not illegal for them to do. CBS was fined over half a million dollars for accidentally showing one-half second of part of one of Janet Jackson’s nipples (before winning reversal on appeal). And the climate is clearly getting worse for civil liberties of all kinds, especially including speech – dozens of current GOP Senators recently signed a letter demanding more porn prosecutions as a top priority. If we’re not going to drown in bullshit while the economy and the environment spiral the drain, somebody has got to take a stand for decency and common sense.

I do hope this guy wins his case. Our nation needs pornographers this smart, insightful, and brave.