Perverts and narcissists

Perverts and narcissists

Channel 4's cashing in on a Chinese artist eating a dead baby is a greater outrage than the cannibalism itself

• • Ros Coward
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  • The Guardian, Wednesday 1 January 2003

Channel 4, which last month brought us the first "performance" autopsy, is now offering us the chance to see pictures of a Chinese performance artist eating a dead baby's flesh.

 Last year they also attempted to make us laugh at the sexual abuse of children. Around each there have been complex intellectual debates, especially amongst the liberal intelligentsia, but somehow the simple question always gets overlooked: whatever happened to simple good taste, limits and taboos?

From all accounts, Beijing Swings is a serious programme about why Chinese art is so "dark". Even the presenter, Waldemar Januszczak, distances himself from Zhu Yu, the artist, describing him as "deluded". But he goes on to justify the act, including the cannibalism, because it exposes differences in Chinese attitudes to death and because the artist is "very honest" in presenting his world-view "that we are all meat".

Doubtless this justification alone will guarantee Zhu Yu a one-man show here. Because this is the space that UK artists are exploiting. There are no laws prohibiting a public performance of autopsy. Nor - until recently - any explicit laws prohibiting sex between adults and children. That's because what normally puts a brake on such acts is taboo not legislation. To enact them is to cross a boundary that protects our humanity. To break these taboos isn't anti-social. It's degrading,disgusting ,and de-humanizing.

But contemporary artists do it all the time and we've got used to their adolescent preoccupation with breaking taboos. More worrying is Channel 4's readiness to cash in on this. TV is different because it comes into our homes and is often watched indiscriminately. With this comes responsibilities. Yet Channel 4 often sides with the artist's desire to shock rather than with public broadcasting's responsibilities.

Some broadcasters are like jaded old masochists and nothing rouses them now except the frisson of hostile commentary. Like these same perverts they know not to pursue these pleasures explicitly. So nothing thrills more than extreme public responses to programmes that can be justified intellectually as "exploring public attitudes to death or autopsy". Channel 4 is reluctant to offend deliberately but gleefully capitalizing on controversies, as now around Beijing Swings. But however much they hide behind the artistic justifications of Gunther von Hagens or Zhu Yu's belief that "we are all just meat", it's clear that Channel 4 does not understand it is wrong to break these taboos.

It doesn't matter whether some alcoholic old tramp gave Von Hagens permission to dissect him or an impoverished Chinese mother accepted a small fee to allow her dead baby to be cannibalised. That just makes it sadder. Broadcasters should know it is dehumanising to show such acts to what could be an indiscriminate audience. To have such a thing flashed up on a screen, or watched out of passing curiosity, undermines an unspoken collective feeling that however insignificant a person has been, we regret death and treat it with respect. These events differ from fiction, however much critics claim Von Hagens' work is like Prime Suspect, or the Chinese cannibalism as "just like" Hannibal Lecter. The death of a real person is not a spectacle but a rite de passage, an event, perhaps THE event.

I am not trying to sentimentalise death. Long ago, I went to see the Stan Brackhage avant-garde film, Autopsy, believing it would make serious points about how dead people are often treated without respect. In fact everyone in the cinema walked out because it turned out to be a pointless spectacle of gore. But when a society starts colluding with the views of narcissistic conversationalists such as Von Hagens then we are in trouble. When critics insist this is a kind of fiction, it's because they have lost the ability to make the distinction: if it's on the screen or in art then it's not real, so anything goes. This is the beginning of a dying descent into a computer game world where the human body is for target practice and just so much "dead meat".

These controversies about the body in art show how morally equivocal we have become. No one is prepared to say something is wrong or offensive. Indeed if you use the word offensive, you are the one likely to end up on the psychiatrist's couch rather than those who have crossed the boundaries. If a society can't hold the line on something as fundamentally wrong as cannibalism or a "performance autopsy", then no wonder we are having problems with less fundamental, but nevertheless important, issues of shared social values.
Sad!