Part 1
The 'ability' to speak is biological and it is what distinguishes our species from any other on the planet. It is by shaping our breath in sounds that we become human, and it is our command of that shaping that distinguishes us as adults from children, and poets from politicians.
The 'right' to speak is political because only once words have the weight of meaning do they acquire the power of consequence. Using language we created clans, kingdoms, empires, republics, countries and nations and divided the world with borders based on the subtle differences in the ways we shape our breath into sounds. Even within our own families and clans, the right to speak for oneself is unequally weighted by gender based hierarchies and the social construction of power. Regardless of intention, a man who speaks on behalf of a woman deprives her of the right to speak. The colonizer who speaks on behalf of the colonized uses the weight of their words to enslave their subject by predetermining what the subject is permitted, and not permitted to be. The artist who makes a work of art 'about' refugees is no better than a mercenary pimp profiteering off the voiceless status of their subject, superimposing their own identity, morality, culture and voice of privilege upon the disenfranchised silenced refugee.
The most basic and fundamental human right is the freedom to speak and be heard, defining whom, why and what one might be. In 1968 more than 1300 black men took to the streets of Memphis in protest, carrying posters and placards that read "I Am a Man." The simplicity of the words was a backlash against the prejudiced habit of white privilege that referred to a black man as a "boy", using a single word to subjugate an entire population by depriving them the right speak as adults and therefore as equals.
Having 'something' to say is cultural, because the power of language to either emancipate, or incarcerate its subject, is infinite. That 'poetic license' has enabled us to create our very definitions of good and evil, gods and devils, right from wrong. We have used our language skills to define gender and culture, dictating what is permissible, and what is not, by writing laws into documents and culturally indoctrinating them into habit. The Old Testament description of God is testimony to the blind faith that we accord our ability to shape breath into words, declaring unequivocally that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."[1]
According to the ancient Egyptians, language was given to us by the trickster god Thoth and "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist."[2] Language hides itself in plain sight, under the cloak of habit, transparently clear for all to hear what they cannot see. We assume to know that what has been said is what was meant, but nothing could be further from the truth, because language is a border that divides the world through understanding the uneven weight of words. The ability to speak will never evolve into the right to speak if you have nothing to say, unless you possess the right to believe in what you say. In his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the artist Kandinsky used capital letters to make the point that "THE ARTIST MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY, FOR MASTERY OVER FORM IS NOT HIS GOAL BUT RATHER THE ADAPTING OF FORM TO ITS INNER MEANING."[3]
Language is a transparent wall that simultaneously protects and imprisons the speaker or as Wittgenstein put it "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world."[4] This transparent wall of words stretches from horizon to horizon, and from the sacred above to the profane below. By shaping our breath we can discuss what the sacred unpronounceable name of god (יהוה)[5] might be, or define our social, political and cultural preserves, or we can use our words to curse, swear and profane. The limits between the sacred and profane, between habit and prayer, between my tongue and your cheek, are as fluid as our definition of art.
On the 10 December 1896 all hell broke loose at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris. The play was stopped after Pere Ubu[6] had uttered just one word, "MERDRE." It was not even a word proper, but a shadow of a word, an inflection of an exclamation that might translate as "Shite", an excremental cry with a posh accent. It took the remaining audience about fifteen minutes to calm down before the second word of the script could be uttered. Another "MERDRE" followed by an even greater riot and the rest of the script was never heard through the riot. William Butler Yeats, who had been in the audience that night, summed it all up with the words "After us, the Savage God."
Today, neither shite, shit, merdre or merde will even be noticed, but the work FUCK might raise an eyebrow. FUCK is so much more than a vulgar profanity because it embodies everything that we fear and desire. It is the linguistic equivalent of the canary in the goldmine through which we might determine the condition and health of Western culture.
On 4 October 1961 Lenny Bruce was first arrested for obscenity after using the word fuck on stage. Three more arrests and further 'fucking' obscenity charges, he was found guilty in 1964 and sentenced to four months in prison. Just before he died in 1966 he said "Take away the right to say fuck, and you take away the right to say fuck the government." A decade after the Sex Pistols shocked the world when BBC journalist Bill Grundy dared Steve Jones to say "something outrageous." The Sex Pistol guitarist replied "You dirty bastard… You dirty fucker" followed by "What a fucking rotter !"[7] The following day, the Daily Mirror described them as "The Filth and The Fury."
On the 31 December 2009 I wrote that "The magik of the word 'FUCK' lies in its contradictory ability to live in multiple words simultaneously. It is both an extremely positive as well as negative word. If I invited you to "Fuck Me", my proposal would embody an entirely different emotional condition than had I shouted "Fuck You!" Besides its strength as an Anglo-Saxon expletive, "Fuck" is also trans-linguistic, for it retains much of it meaning and explosive potential, without translation, in most European Languages and used to similar effect for example in French, German, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese to name only a few. For me, it remains unquestionably the most evocative and powerful single word in use around the world today."[8]
In the same essay I also warned that "The power and magik of this mere four letter word is best exemplified by the fact that it remains forbidden on MTV, the fortress of everything transient and fashionable" and yet "if you want to destroy something make it into a fashion and that is precisely the function of MTV (or "EMPTY V" as I prefer to call it). Every subversive concept or revolutionary idea from Punk to Ché Guevara gets digested and destroyed into a three-week makeover on MTV, only to then be re-issued as a perfume or t-shirt."[9]
In 2017, eight years after my warning, Tom Ford created a perfume called "Fucking Fabulous" and around the same time Supreme began producing fuck sweaters using designs stolen from artists like myself. The once powerful swear word is now so banal that in 2022 Will Smith can scream without any hesitation "keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth" at the Oscar ceremony, live on television, watched by 15.36 million American viewers. It is therefore hardly surprising that a year later Michelle Yeoh would have no trouble simply saying "Fuck" in her acceptance speech at the 2023 Screen Actors Guild Awards, for her role in the film "Everything Everywhere All at Once."
The once upon a time shocking expletive is now endemic, fully domesticated and lives happily ever after in full public view within every facet of Western culture. The reasons why nipples are forbidden on Social Media, but fuck is as banal as ice in Winter, is indicative of the extent to which language has been shorn from our bodies, and placed in quarantine from meaning. Will Smith was not banned from the Oscars for 10 years because he yelled fuck at the black tie event, but because he theatrically slapped Chris Rock on stage.
Also in 2023 a Miriam Cahn painting was the subject of a censorship row at the Palais Tokyo in Paris when a French reporter Caroline Parmentier posted a tweet in which she wrote "I denounce this painting by Miriam Cahn which presents a scene of pedo crimes for all to see. In the name of child protection, as a member of the Children’s Rights Delegation, I ask the Minister of Culture that he be taken down." The artist replied that "These are not children. This painting deals with how sexuality is used as a weapon in war, as a crime against humanity. The contrast between the two bodies shows the bodily power of the oppressor and the underdog, kneeling and oppressed, during war." Nobody mentioned the word Fuck in the title!
What is freedom of expression when freedom has been turned inside doubt? The meteoric rise of Fake News, and viral proliferation of Social Media, have destroyed the very fabric of language. Words are unhinged from meaning and signifiers float, like flotsam and jetsam, on riptides of political expedience and economic determinism. The banalization of the word fuck is testimony to the death of language and demise of Western culture. There is no longer any difference between the sacred and the profane, and for that reason we no longer have any words with which we can curse or swear. Now that we can say, and do anything, everywhere, all at once, nothing has consequence. Now that we can say "Fucking Fabulous: Everything Everywhere All at Once" without breaking a sweat, the words "Fuck the Government" are as meaningless and banal as a Che Guevara T-Shirt.
Part 2
The biological ability to speak is closely connected to the biological ability to use our long opposable thumb to firmly grasp and manipulate objects. Together they enabled us to transform our shaped breath into writing. The opposable thumb also enabled us to develop farming, cooking, building, designing and in the creation of weapons to defend ourselves against other humans who shape their breath different from ourselves.
Long before any book was written, pyramid constructed, or village built, artists stole fire from heaven in order to light their way through to the innermost chamber of the darkest caves. There they created powerful images on the cave walls, bridging the abyss between their quotidian three physical dimensions, and the metaphysical multiverse. The language of art stands in opposition to quotidian habit because it speaks without words and is written in pain, desire, love, subversion, excess, ecstasy, excitement, eroticism, fear, panic, in contrast, through contradiction, and in harmony with heresy. As soon as it becomes understood art sheds its skin to give birth to itself once again, but differently. As soon as it can be defined once more, it turns against itself, devours its own tail, and burns itself down to ashes so that it might rise again as a differently coloured Phoenix.
The ancient power of art derives from the faith that it embodies and that faith is dependent upon a culture possessing a language of signs and symbols powerful enough for artists to have something significant to say. This naturally begs the question what the function of art might be in a world without faith and in which the Phoenix has been locked up within a gilded golden cage of Designer Dissent? What might the function of art be in a world in which there is nothing sacred because there is nothing profane? The banalization of the word fuck cannot be separated from the banalization of art. The decline of signification, and quarantine of spirit, that emptied the expletive of emotional weight, subversive content and cultural weight, was cut from the same cloth as the banalization of art – Neoliberal economics.
Following the 2008 financial crisis the unregulated nature of the art market began to attract an entirely different kind of patron. The global art market transformed into a playground of money laundering, market manipulation and insider trading, that was increasingly being regulated in every other financial industry. The transient definition of art, exacerbated by the fact that the art system had locked itself up in ivory towers, translated into a public ignorance that was easy to manipulate, and as a result the market threw itself out of the bathwater, to play directly into the hands of the highest bidder. If the value, meaning and importance of a work of art could be reduced to its price exclusively, then it might even embody the ultimate commodity exchange and quintessential definition of Luxury Brand. The only obstacle would be to filter out everything that might cause discomfort and discontent.
The art historical languages of Pop Art, Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction and Conceptual Art, displaced into an age in which the author was dead, provided means, motive and opportunity. The historical and intellectual reasons for purging human emotion and expression from the work of art in protest against the proto art market, ultimately proved to be their downfall, and so historical works of Pop Art, Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction and Conceptual Art slipped without resistance into Luxury Bland. Frank Stella’s statement "My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. . . What you see is what you see"[10] provided the market with the perfect alibi and an inoculated asset to trade whatever investors wanted to see by defining the work of art as whatever they needed it to be.
The only problem was that there was a limit to the number of historical works available that could be traded. There was also the potential risk that the art historical integrity of the works could potentially destabilize the market by throwing sand into the Vaseline with metaphysical statements like Sol Lewitt’s, "Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."[11] The historical roots of abstraction are not about emptying out the meaning of a work of art, or evacuating content, but the contrary – the intensification of form into a social, political or spiritual essence. The so-called father of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky rallied against a materialist reading of abstraction in 1911 saying that "The vulgar herd stroll through the rooms and pronounce the pictures 'nice' or 'splendid.' Those who could speak have said nothing, those who could hear have heard nothing. This condition of art is called 'art for art's sake.' This neglect of inner meanings, which is the life of colours, this vain squandering of artistic power is called 'art for art's sake.'"[12]
-
John 1:1.
-
Charles Baudelaire.
-
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning The Spiritual In Art, 1911.
-
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logigo-philosphicus, 1922.
-
Tetragrammaton.
-
"Ubu Roi", Alfred Jarry.
-
"Today" programme, BBC, 1 December 1976.
-
"The Penis Might Ier Than Thes Word" Kendell Geers, 31 December 2009.
-
"The Penis Might Ier Than Thes Word" Kendell Geers, 31 December 2009.
-
"Questions to Stella and Judd" Interview by Bruce Glaser, Edited by Lucy R. Lippard.
-
Sol Lewitt "Sentences of Conceptual Art".
-
Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning The Spiritual In Art, 1911.
