When we think of art with the shock factor, we are likely to consider the twenty-first century or the late twentieth, perhaps thinking of artists such as Damien Hurst or Tracy Emin.
But that shock factor has been the driving force behind various art movements since records began, with examples found across cultures and throughout recorded history, changing over time to reflect society’s different morals and restraints, taboos and titillations.
Why Have A Shock Factor In Art?
Artists who incorporate shock factors into their art will have their reasons. Certainly, there is a commercial element to it. Art that is shocking and controversial gets talked about; and you know what the American showman and circus owner Phineas T. Barnum said? Any publicity is good publicity.
This notoriety can be highly lucrative. Banksy’s Girl With Balloon / Love is In the Bin sold at Sotheby’s auction house in 2018 for $1.4m before the hammer that confirmed the sale set off the mechanism that shredded it.
But artists are often motivated by factors other than money. Controversial art might be created to make a social or political point or to explore taboo subjects, as art continues to push boundaries.
When did the shock factor begin?
When the shock factor first entered the art world is impossible to say. To answer this question, we would have to know how people reacted to a work of art and for much of history that is not documented. Among the discoveries from the buried Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum are many lewd items, such as the sculpture of Pan with a female goat.
But without knowing what the Romans thought, we cannot say whether this was controversial or simply amusing. With its theme of bestiality, perhaps it has a greater shock factor for us than the Romans, who often drew spectacle and even humour from the subject.
Similarly, the Cerne Abbas Giant, the figure of a well-endowed man carved into a chalk hillside in southern England, has recently been dated to the Anglo-Saxon era, with the possibility that it was carved as a protest against the new abbey. But this is speculation, and we do not know if that was the intention or whether the monks were particularly outraged.
We can be on safer ground with 17th-century artist Caravaggio. His 1606 painting ‘Death of a Virgin’ was commissioned for a chapel in Rome. But Caravaggio’s decision to eschew the pomp expected from religious paintings and instead portray Mary’s death in a small, dingy room, followed by rumors that he had modeled Mary on a prostitute, led to the painting being rejected. Not that this controversy rendered the painting worthless – Caravaggio sold it the following year to the Duke of Mantua.
Impressionism
Looking back from the twenty-first century at the beautiful paintings of the Impressionist movement, it seems hard to imagine that these could ever be considered controversial. Throughout the middle ages, art had been in the service of the church.
This changed during the renaissance, but still, paintings reflected an idealized image with an emphasis on history, mythology, and the deeds of great men. Impressionism turned its back on this idealized past, and instead, their work reflected their impression of the ‘real.’
The work focused on the everyday, often with the lower classes as the subjects. The Universal Exhibition of 1855 caused controversy when after having some of his work rejected, Gustave Courbet displayed the controversial ‘The Artist’s Studio’ in his own tent next door.
Read: How to frame, hang and display your artwork to catch the attention of your guests
Into The Modern Era
The twentieth century saw an explosion of different artistic movements, many of them highly controversial. Picasso is one of the century’s best-known artists, yet his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon depicting five naked prostitutes, was not well received in 1907, although it sparked the Cubism movement.
As the century advanced, artists experimented freely with a variety of mediums, with the artist’s own bodily fluids not being off-limits, as can be seen with the 1961 Piero Manzoni’ Artist Sh*t’, a set of tin cans filled with the artist’s excrement and Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph ‘Piss Christ’, featuring a crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine.
The desire to push boundaries and break taboos has continued into the twenty-first century, extended by the opportunities of the digital age and the ever increasing options available for displaying digital art.
One such boundary pusher is Jordan Wolfson, who uses a range of media, from sculpture to video to digital animation, to explore enigmatic and often provocative themes such as racism, antisemitism, violence, and sexism in popular culture.
Examples of his work include the 2014 animatronic sculpture female figure that explores the violence of objectification and the 2016 ‘Colored Sculpture’ that makes use of cutting-edge but hugely controversial facial recognition technology.
The Future
The shock factor is likely to remain in art as artists push against society’s expectations. Technology advances, providing ever more exciting media for artists to explore. And with willing audiences still keen to be shocked, the only unknown is what form the controversies will take. We predict NFTs designed to shock and appall (and not only by their extortionate price) before the year’s out…