All art is bad for you. There is no argument you can make to prove that art has no effect or that its effects are anything but adverse to your mind, soul, and sometimes body without compromising the power of the art itself.
But even if the truth is accepted, there’s nothing stopping you from making errors about it. It is one thing to accept the reality that all art is bad for you, but quite another to say that all art is bad for you to the same degree. And it is still another thing to say that, while most art is bad for you, a small percentage of art has some positive nutritional value. Both leave their adherents vulnerable to art’s hazards with no compatible means of defense. For my purposes it is important to scrutinize the second error in particular, as its severity is compounded with an additional layer of error.
Those that hold out an elect of healthy art use that standard to condemn all art that is not healthy as being depraved. In this sense, the second error is an amendment to the first: segregating the sickening from the wholesome and making no distinctions in the nature of the inducements to sickness. But because healthy art is a myth, unhealthy art cannot subsist for long on a uniform standard. It is not merely that you must face the distinction between art that is well and truly depraved and art that is deformed, but you must come to see how the former is misunderstood and the latter is misidentified, where it is not ignored.
You see depravity everywhere because depravity makes every effort to be seen. But the most depraved art, like the subtlest demon, is deceptive about its nature. The Idol was praised for its transgressively grim intertwining of intimacy and violence, its claustrophobic nastiness, and its unapologetic cynicism. It exposed a culture of exploitation using exploitative means. It made, in Adam Lehrer’s words, “you, me, and all of us” complicit in that exploitation. The Idol is depraved because it wants to hurt you. But that didn’t square with others who appreciated the show for its candor, its Baroque painting-style cinematography, and its relentlessly straight-faced narrative tone. For these viewers, The Idol is depraved for showing you the world as you would have hoped to find it.
In truth there is no fixed source of a work’s depravity. Depraved art functions on a broad scope, opening the artist to a series of options and contingencies with which they may accentuate the depravity of the creation. Pornography, Robert Mapplethorpe, and The Idol all have a single broad subject: sex, nihilism, and celebrity respectively. Where pornography chooses to be inert in its art, Mapplethorpe allowed himself more flexibility; though both were shrewd in how they went about it. The Idol, in thinking it actually covered all three of those subjects, created variety through chaos and fell into its own inertia. Depravity is an instrument that an artist can play crudely or elegantly per their desires. It is ironic that The Idol’s creator, a musician, played it out of tune.
Deformed art seems at first like a misnomer; at least to those who make the mistake of conflating deformed with defective or grotesque. In reality the best examples of deformed art are nothing if not perfections of their chosen form. But because it is determined by the strictures of its circumstances, and must make do within a narrower thematic scope, the form must make concessions from which the broad thinking of the depraved work is exempt. The result, by comparison, is at once a limited reach and a more intense impact.
“The Hamburger Lady,” released in 1978, is the crowning achievement of Throbbing Gristle, an English post-hippie performance art troupe that evolved into one of the founders of industrial music. No single song, whether in the underground or the mainstream, has garnered so much legendary status and unequivocal response. Pitchfork called it “a nauseating masterpiece.” My old editor at Treble calls it a “bizarre psychic parasite of a song.” “Song,” to virgin ears, may also seem like a misnomer. The lyrics consist of a prose description, provided by artist Blaster Al Ackerman, of a burn victim in hospital, fragmented by the distorted and detached voice of Genesis P-Orridge. It is buried still deeper by layers of soundscapes that mimic the clinical ambience of someone confined to a hospital bed: a slowed heartbeat, labored breathing, sirens in the distance, and inaudible speech. Its narcotized pace stretches it beyond its modest four-minute duration. Only Suicide’s more exhausting “Frankie Teardrop” comes close to matching its devastating results. Certainly little else in Throbbing Gristle’s indistinctly provocative repertoire has managed anything approaching its status as the exemplar of deformed art.
The weakness of depravity lies not in its excess of content and style but in its totality of theme. Everything is provided for, as if the art was a slurry to be consumed by the audience through a straw. Deformed art, by its circumstantial minuteness, provides no guidance and makes no pronouncements. Any grand theme that appears is merely a component to the scenario as it unravels—such as in the case of our present example: suffering, mortality, and isolation—it is closer to a puzzle that you must assemble as you think fit; though one assembly may be no more correct than another.
“Hamburger Lady” presents you with certain facts. Someone is in prolonged distress and probably being kept alive beyond the point of mercy. You are privy perhaps to what they hear and do but not what they think or see. Someone else is doing the observing. Someone, evincing the aloof gallows humor of a doctor, sees the patient (“When somebody tells you that there is a level of pain beyond which the human mind …”) just as they see an orderly reacting to the patient (“Then the medic came and when he came out and saw one of the burn nurses at the desk/He was eating a can of chili-mac/And he flashed on the carpet, flashed on the floor”). Even through the disorienting delivery, a diorama forms in your mind, and it is up to your judgment as to where you will assign your own consciousness within it, and to explore why you came to the assignment that you did. The deformation is mutual.
This dynamic is not without its risks. Deformed works cannot be anything more than what their world allows them to be. You with your sense-memory free of any relation to that world may complete a volatile pairing in an already unhealthy situation. If that is not the case with “Hamburger Lady,” then it might be with A Modest Proposal, “The Lottery,” Eraserhead, 4.48 Psychosis, or Melancholia. At the same time, the singularity of conception and the demands it makes upon the audience offer deformed art protection against public scrutiny. The same security cannot be guaranteed by depraved art’s arbitrary grandiosity. So someone of sufficient cultural maturity can see how the trial of Naked Lunch was more just than the trial against Ulysses.
Not that depraved art is particularly threatened, having arrested culture in a cycle of impositions. The depraved artist imposes upon their subject; the resulting depraved work, like a thousand-legged behemoth, imposes upon a willing audience. The depraved world imposes upon art, emitting deformity as its byproduct. It submits and accentuates to its pressures, seeps back up culture’s more neglected rivulets, and sees into and through everything, even as many fail or refuse to see it in turn.