The world is base, messy, and equivocal. In this political climate, the suspicion of deviance is epidemic. This cultural moment is exemplified in three terms: Pornography. Kitsch. Morality.  Within a social system that depends on binaries to understand value, each of these concepts are revelatory in elucidating the high/low divide.  Seemingly simple oppositions are invoked with each term: pornography vs. art, kitsch vs. good taste, morality vs. perversity.  Distinctions between high and low are dramatic -- above the neck / below the belt; appropriate / inappropriate; the refined / the vulgar; the beautiful / the grotesque.  The ever-present fear is that the privileged term will be overwhelmed and enveloped (perhaps inevitably) by the other. 

Since the 16th century, pornography has been closely linked with political and religious subversion.

In it, cultural taboos and the complexities of class, gender, race and power are manifested in the most troublesome and intriguing ways. The disruptive power of pornography, attacked by liberals and conservatives alike, embodies the most problematic of cultural fears - fear of the abject, of defilement, of uncontrollable desire. My interest is in recuperating the word, playing with its social mark of disgrace, and moving it both performatively and theoretically from the private to the public realm.

I have used sex as subject matter for more than 25 years in combinations of photographic images, videos, theoretical writings, and sexually explicit monologues. I often call my current work pornographic -- when I don't, I can always be sure someone else will.  When I do, it becomes an unstable signifier.  What does it mean for a middle-aged woman, a professor, a teacher of theory, a feminist - to write like this, to speak like this, to think these thoughts, to exhibit such bad behavior? I like playing with the vulgar, with the low-class, low-brow, language of traditional porn. I'm suspicious of distinctions that elevate erotica over porn as well as create an incommensurability between art and pornography.  I'm fascinated by what happens when private language and action enter the public domain, when vernacular "pornographic" vocabulary intersects with cultural analysis, when everything we believe about political correctness is subverted by intemperance, indulgence, desire out of control, and logical reasoning.

My work is not a critique, but rather an embracing of what has been vilified.   It is also an acknowledgment of the ways in which pornography [locates/implicates] [me/us] in a realm of what Judith Butler has described as "psychic excess," that which is systematically denied by the notion of the volitional subject.  "The refusal to conflate the subject with the psyche marks the psychic as that which exceeds the domain of the conscious subject." It is that realm of the unconscious she describes that that becomes so problematic, the consciously inaccessible that creates such turmoil because it compromises volition -- what we think we are or what we're told we should be.  In a vain attempt to keep this excess under control, priests deny their obsession with little boys, evangelists with prostitutes, business executives with infantile humiliation fetishes, and feminists with rape fantasies.  These are not accusations but rather recognition of the fact that fetishes, whether horrific or benign, become part of this psychic excess. 

In 1994 after my NEA Visual Artist Fellowship was revoked because of the sexual content of my work, I became more determined to explore the extreme, and to use pornography as a site of disruption.   Ironically over the past 25 years since I began working with sexual imagery, and specifically the male body, my work has often been called pornographic for nothing more than photographing naked men.  It has also been censored many times, vandalized several times, and in two cases destroyed because someone has found it offensive. Why is the sexual body still a such site of discomfort?

I came to Chicago in 1994, in the waning years of the public "culture wars."   Those "wars" haven't ended, only taken a different trajectory.  In 1996 all fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts to individual artists ended, bringing to a close a 30 year history of support by the federal government for some of the most cutting edge work in contemporary and conceptual art.  I believe it also marked a shift in the way artists are regarded as cultural producers and in the way artists have to now consider if what they are producing will be seen as violating a law or crossing some nebulous legal boundary.

We can survive without government funding but we can't survive without academic freedom or with censorship - and the most insidious censorship right now is self-censorship. How has individual freedom become such a heretical construct? We have gone so far to the other side that we can't even see what a democracy is anymore, what free speech actually is, or what a cultural agreement of mutual respect could look like.  Pendulums swing, and part of my responsibility as an artist and a teacher is to try to make it swing in the other direction.