GG Allin & The Culture Wars

GG Allin, [August 29, 1956 – June 28, 1993], was an extreme performer/punk rock singer. His performances involved defecation, coprophagia, blood, self-mutilation, and attacking audience members. AllMusic and G4TV's That's Tough have called him "the most spectacular degenerate in rock & roll history"^[2] and the "toughest rock star in the world", respectively. so he can rightly be seen as a practitioner of abject art. Allin's performances attracted notoriety, and he served prison time in 1989 for the US equivalent of GBH, as a result of extreme sex acts. Below is one of Allin's live performances.

Allin featured on an episode of the Geraldo Riviera show, which is a good look at the phenomena known as the 'culture wars', whereby right-wing groups attempted to impose censorship over art an music in the name of decency.

I've linked to the show, as it includes contributions from a many other artists who practices are transgressive, either by confronting and breaching Sexual taboos, eg Jeff Koons' series of photographs of having sex with his wife, or offending religious sensibilities, as in the case of Andreas Serrano's Piss Christ. Today, in the YouTube age of instant media, where it is possible to see live beheading videos online, [if you should choose to do so], it can reasonably be argued that it is no longer possible to shock an audience, and therefore the age of transgressive art has come to an end. Although I agree that it has become increasingly hard to create shock, I do not believe that trangression no longer has a role in art. Challenging social taboos, cultural religious or sexual, is still a valid direction for artists, and one that I attempt to make use of in my own work.

In my pieces I try to comment on the effects of our economic system on the body, especially the sense of dispossession and alienation that this produces in people; which is manifest in such things as addiction and obesity. By distorting the body in my firgurative paintings, & joining painted elements with collage, I try to create an image which is disconcerting and upsetting. As an aid to creating these kinds of works, the extreme performances of the underground punk scene are informative for my work.