Today, I received your request for a brief progress report about the research project on pornography and art (running since the spring of this year as part of the "World of Art" project), which your organisation is kindly supporting.

The research project is still in progress. We are currently in the process of rounding up our gathering of facts and beginning to analyse them, so the results I shall mention here are only partial and provisional.

The decision to research this theme comes at a time when the body, as the carrier and object of artistic expression, is gaining extreme popularity again. The (ab)use of the body as material and object is also typical of pornography, which has been gaining presence in Slovenia. Initially, our research project set out to define the border between eroticism and pornography, the sublime and the obscene, the sensual and the sexual, the 'good' and the 'bad' depiction of the body. We departed from the hypothesis that the limit of what is culturally acceptable (eroticism) is the limit of what is sexually acceptable. Thus, we wanted to define the degree of sexuality which is still acceptable within legal culture. After conducting a short theoretical and field study, we realised that the original assignment we had set out to define was too broad for the time we had at our disposal. So, in continuation we focused solely on pornography and works stemming from the symbiosis between art and pornography - works of art which thus employ principles similar (related) to those typical of pornography to depict the body and sexual act. After determining the subject of the study, we then proceeded to carry out a historical and theoretical analysis of it, the findings of which are presented here in short:

The distinction between art and pornography (or the obscene) was prompted by legislation, embodied in legal designations of the obscene from the 19th century onwards.(1) As Lynn Hunt states in The Invention of Pornography, the modern notion of pornography, as a special category of the clear depiction of the genitalia and sexual practices intended to cause sexual excitement, took shape in the 19th century. Till then, pornography was almost always a supplement to something else; in early modern Europe (from the Renaissance to the French Revolution) it was most often used to criticise religious and political authorities and as such also an important constitutive element of modern Europe. The control of works with pornographic content was also generally carried out on behalf of religion and politics, and not decency. In the 19th century, when pornography ceased to (also) be a form of social and political criticism, censure was introduced purely for reasons of morality. The law focused on regulating public morality, and no longer private, individual behaviour, which could be seen in the harsher control over the public display of pornographic material. The category of the obscene, which was thought to motivate 'harmful sexual behaviour' and surpassed standards of what was still acceptable for public viewing, became narrower and narrower (medical, technical, educational, artistic representations were no longer included) and more and more identical to the definition of pornography (2). With the polarisation of art and pornography, the latter was defined in the sense of its absence of artistic value, cheapness, illegitimacy; it became a synonym for cultural worthlessness, if not also harmfulness.

The aim of this study, which takes a look at pornography and works of contemporary art, was to verify the validity of the definitions of what constitutes something as a "work of art" or "pornography". Namely, the definition - according to which art transforms the sexual incentive into the sublime, in contrast to pornography, which depicts sexuality in a direct manner and whose only purpose is to arouse - seemed insufficient. The explanation which defines art as a reflective, contemplative activity that, in contrast to pornography, excludes any kind of incitement towards action, forgets, to quote Dr. Carolyn Korsmeyer, "that we can be involved in art totally, not merely through observation, but rather with our whole body and its unpredictable reactions".(3) We were also interested in determining whether art really can always and unconditionally justify the obscene, that is pornographic contents, and thus legitimise it, and to what degree a suggested understanding of an image is achieved through the manner and location of its display, in this case - the gallery. The project directed special attention to works of art with pornographic content, the selection of which was limited to four different mediums: photography, video, internet and the comic strip. These mediums were selected because of their coldness (the absence of a living human record), the (at least apparent) directness, cheapness (not in the sense of the trivial), swift reproduction and easy accessibility, all of which best suit pornography. We put special emphasis on the role of photography in pornography which, due to its (apparent) realism and directness, is essential to pornography's effect. These are automatic images which seem to exclude any human (photographer's) intervention and thus enable the consumer direct access to the object and immediate sexual satisfaction. Studio and study work were followed by a field study, which was unsuccessful. Art with pornographic content proved to be very scarce in Slovenia and we were thus not able to pursue our research. In order to ensure the completion of the project and objective results, we were compelled to create artificial, laboratory conditions for the confrontation of art and pornography as two extremely different mediums. We invited artists to participate and gave them the assignment of creating individual projects which would reflect and comment on pornography. Goran Bertok, Rajko Bizjak, Vuk Æosiæ, Darij Kreuh, Jurij Perpar, Marija Mojca Pungerèar, Teeny and Brane Zorman were selected on the basis of work they had created prior to this.

A decisive factor was their having worked in the four media, which we had already discovered in the first stage of the project to be the most suitable for pornography, and their being involved with issues related to the field of pornography: kitsch, the role and importance of contemporary technology in personal communication, cliché depictions of the body, the role of women in contemporary society...etc. In addition to the already mentioned interests in relation to art and pornography, the project was directed primarily to the content and type of communication which the artists would establish with the pornographic contents (affinity, identification, condemnation, cool analysis, an equal-standing dialogue etc.).

The project's change in emphasis was brought about by the nature of the experimental laboratory work, the final outcome of which is not wholly known. This kind of work also introduces intense cooperation between ourselves and the artists, which is particularly invaluable to us young researchers.

As I have already stated, the study is still underway, communication is still being established, the works are in the process of being created. And yet, we have already been able to observe that, in spite of the trend towards erasing the borders between popular culture and everyday life (in this case pornography) on the one hand and contemporary art on the other, this is not typical of the projects being created as part of our study. In the continuation of the project, we would like to find out if this is so because pornography as a specifically visual presentation is too extreme, marginal and taboo a phenomenon for Slovene artists to get their hands dirty with, or whether the reason lies elsewhere. It seems that the definition that links pornography with popular culture, and art with authenticity and uniqueness will not need to be disproved.

We realise that the study will not provide absolute answers concerning pornography or its relation to art, but what is important to us is that through it we are making space for further research and discussion. I hope that this report on the progress of the research project to date and its results will be sufficient to justify your continued support for the project, which has gone on longer than anticipated due to the sensitive nature of its subject. On behalf of my fellow young researchers and myself, I would like to thank you in advance for your consideration.

Urša Jurman

Notes: (1) Nead Lynd: Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, p. 89, Routledge, London, New York, 1992. (2) Ibid, p. 92. (3) Bojana Kunst: "O gnusu kot estetski emociji", Delo, Sobotna priloga, 12 September 1998, p. 42