1. Bod mods. Forms of bod mods are getting more severe: bifurcated manly bits (I'm trying to be delicate) held together with loops of metal (ow), ritual scarification, branding, stretched earlobe holes, you name it. In other words, alteration of the body as art or self-expression.
2. Appropriation of images. You see it in those slick Net 'zines like Mondo 2000 and Axcess; it's a topic that has people worried...what is appropriation and what is tribute? (I could go on about Beavis at the NIN/Bowie concert griping about the "Vanilla Ice and Nirvana covers" [der], but I won't, other than to say the former is appropriation and the latter is tribute...in my opinion.)
3. "We're coming for your daughter!" (Sounds like a Steve Jones song lyric. "'Ave yoooooooo got big tits, then?") Sexual expression in all forms is a big trend, as it seems to be every other five years or so. This is good, don't get me wrong. The glitch is that some folks can't deal with it. You start hearing mutterings about "Where will the line be drawn?" What's acceptable erotica? What's acceptable expression? What's criminal? What's yucky? The lines blur. In a lot of ways, blurred boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable make for a less condemning society. But there are people who have poor impulse control even in the most repressive eras, and it gets worse when violence is glamorized OVER sexuality. The worst is when sexuality is condemned and violence is acceptable entertainment. I hear Seven is a study in pain, torture and the degradation of the human body. It's bound to make a lot of money.
4. Grossness in art in general. From DuBuffet (chicken feces and cigarette butts and dirt as art tools...hell, Pollock used to drop and lose his cigarette butts on his paintings, too) to de Kooning (smears, swirls, meaty-looking pastes of paint) to Kiefer (dark, smeary, depressing, visceral art), etc. Art is getting progressively more into the "shock" statement -- or, more precisely, art always wants to elicit a reaction of some sort, and "shock" seems to be the one a lot of artists go for. (I tend to gravitate toward art with tongue-in-cheek humor, myself, but I digress.)
From the altered portrait of Pope Innocent X sitting snarly-toothed between two dripping shanks of raw beef to Serrano's objets de body fluid (urine, blood, spit) to Orlan (sic)'s performance art pieces in which she has live plastic surgery to S&M artists having their tallies whackered all out of line...OUCH...and you've seen the animated hunk of animal heart in NIN's "Closer" vid.
You'll note that the first reaction to videos like "Closer" isn't "yuck" but "cool." The shock is wearing off. Art is less the application of a dainty brush to a smooth canvas these days. You're just as likely to see an artist shoot paint pods from a rifle at a raw sheet of unprimed canvas, or slash and sew up the surface, or use a palette knife with extreme aggression. A far cry from the ultra-stark and sanitized Op canvases, wouldn't you say? Art is giving itself permission to be uglier than ugly, and it is strong, gripping stuff. Art isn't always La Gioconda and flowers. Sometimes it's pain and excrement and a liberal application of Sherwin Williams Ultra-Red (sooper-sticky formulation).
5. Glamorization of the serial killer as pop icon. Or any killer. I won't go into the recent L.A. trial, you know what I mean there. But we have serial killer trading cards, Guns 'N' Roses covers a Manson song, there's a band called Marilyn Manson, Dahmer and Bundy and others are cult icons. Murder becomes a postscript on the TV news. "Boy kills entire family, no reason given." Sin of the City is a rare protest of the waste of human life when it is devalued and objectified. Jane's Addiction: Nothing's shocking.
6. Self-loathing in pop. I'm sick of myself, I'm a creep, I'm a loser why don't you kill me, I don't have a gun, rape me, I'd rather die, etc. We've come full circle from the grabmewilly '70s rock attitude. Now it's PLEASEdontsneeratme. If you can't love yourself, how can you have compassion for others to the necessary extent? Lack of compassion breeds detachment. Detachment breeds dehumanization of others.
7. The emphasis on youth, even on adults, ranging from kinderwhore fashion like Mary Janes and shortie dresses and scuffed-up knees to Ck-1 commercials with young androgynes wandering about. And the "Hey, what are you wearing?" kid with the ladder in the CK commercials that raised such a ruckus. The victim on the Outside CD was young by design. The cult of youth is alive and well. Give me someone with mature brain cells and an adult attitude, I say. But the world disagrees. I value an honest wrinkle over a plastic expanse of clear-eyed vacant youth. Mr. de Mille, I'm ready for my closeup, better smear vaseline on the lens. Won't do to look REAL.
8. The ME decade of the '70s. It's baaack. The clothes first, and now the attitude. "Out of my way, I'm here to grab the goodies. And I look MAHVELLLOUS. What I want is more important than your rights. The swing of my fist may not stop where your nose begins. Fuck you if you don't like it, I'm proud to be a bitch." This doesn't exactly engender that warm, fuzzy "Peace, y'all" feeling that everyone spouts off about. It's actually not a shiny, happy worldview at all. When did assertiveness become aggression by default? I see hints of this on Outside as well: distress with the "my way or the highway" boundary-breaking behaviors we all are supposed to think are cute and cool.
9. "The world is too much with us, late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in nature that is ours, we have given our hearts away, a sordid boon" (Wordsworth). Acquiring over spirituality; surface over depth. It's not a new problem, but it's glamorized more than ever.
All something to think about. Outside is here, now, or no more than a breath away. That's scary.
(Someone has since posted a brief comment about the case of the artist whose husband cut her into teeny bits, spraypainted them, and scattered them hither and yon in Arizona (?). She wasn't ID'ed until her severed head was shown publicly. So Outside IS here. Bummer.
-- malinda mccall