Transgressive art only works if there is a line to cross
A shop-bought urinal signed 'R. Mutt' was refused by exhibition organisers in 1917, and Marcel Duchamp quit their society in protest. That porcelain object became a founding example of transgressive art, a label critics usually attach after the fact to work that deliberately breaks the rules of its own time.
Transgression can target the conventions of art itself, an audience's moral or religious feelings, or the law. Anthony Julius, in his 2002 book Transgressions: The Offences of Art, sorted it into three kinds: breaking artistic rules, violating taboos, and defying legal or political authority. Shock alone does not qualify. The French thinker Georges Bataille tied the idea to taboo: an act can only transgress if some boundary already exists for it to cross. What counts therefore shifts with place and period, and yesterday's outrage can become tomorrow's convention.
Duchamp's gesture blurred the line between artwork and everyday object; decades later, in 1961, fellow Dadaist Hans Richter told him he had flung the urinal in the public's face as a challenge, and Duchamp marked the letter approvingly. In the 1960s the body took centre stage. The Viennese Actionists staged performances aimed at the conservatism of post-war Austria, and in 1968 Günter Brus was sentenced to six months for degrading national symbols, fleeing to West Berlin instead. Carolee Schneemann used her own body in works such as Meat Joy to unsettle expectations about female sexuality.
By the late 1980s the fights had moved into courtrooms and legislatures. Dread Scott's 1988 installation invited visitors to stand on an American flag; in 1990 the Supreme Court, in United States v. Eichman, held that banning flag desecration of that kind breached the First Amendment. The same year, a Cincinnati museum director, Dennis Barrie, was charged with obscenity over a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective and cleared on every count. Andres Serrano insisted, as a lifelong Catholic, that his notorious crucifix photograph was never meant as blasphemy.
Literature has its own long record of such clashes. Baudelaire and his publishers were prosecuted over Les Fleurs du Mal in 1857, and six of its poems stayed banned until 1949. Joyce's Ulysses was legally obscene until 1933, and Penguin was tried in 1960 for publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover in Britain, winning acquittal.
Source: Transgressive art
