Transgressive art refers to artistic practices that violate or challenge established boundaries, conventions, or taboos. Transgression may be directed against the conventions of the art world itself, the moral or religious sensibilities of an audience, or wider social and legal norms. Subjects that transgressive art might engage with can include sex and sexuality, violence, the body, religion, or obscenity or profanity.
Well-known examples of transgressive art include Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987), and Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). In literature, works commonly associated with transgression include American Psycho (1991) and the work of Kathy Acker, while cinematic examples include Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom or underground films connected to the Cinema of Transgression.
The term is often applied retrospectively by critics and art historians rather than adopted by artists themselves. What constitutes transgression also varies considerably according to the social, cultural, and artistic conventions of a particular time and place; what is transgressive in one context may become conventional in another.
Definition There is no single form of transgressive art. Anthony Julius, in Transgressions: The Offences of Art (2002), identifies three broad forms of artistic transgression: works that violate established artistic rules or conventions; works that break taboos or offend the beliefs or sensibilities of their audiences; and works that challenge or disobey legal and political authority.
'Transgression' is therefore not synonymous with shock or controversy. Rather, a work may be transgressive through its rejection or artistic conventions or confrontation with religious, political, or institutional boundaries.
The concept of transgression has also been influential in philosophy and critical theory. In the work of Georges Bataille, for example, transgression is closely linked to taboo. For Bataille, an act is transgressive because if violates an existing rule or taboo: something can only be transgressive if there is an existing social, moral, or cultural boundary for it to violate.
In visual art Transgression has taken a number of forms in visual art, ranging from challenges to artistic conventions to the deliberate violation of social, religious, and bodily taboos.
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a porcelain urinal submitted to an exhibition under the name 'R. Mutt', became an important precedent for art that challenged conventional distinctions between artworks and ordinary objects.
The work provoked heated debate among the exhibition's organisers, and ultimately they refused to display it; Duchamp resigned from the Society of Independent Artists in protest.
Its use of a urinal as an artwork, though open to interpretation, was deliberately provocative: in 1961, fellow Dadaist Hans Richter wrote to Duchamp that he had "[thrown] the bottle rack and the urial into their faces as a challenge". Duchamp marked his approval of this statement in the margins of the letter.
1960s and 1970s During the 1960s, transgressive practices in visual art became increasingly associated with performance and the body. The Viennese Actionists, for example, staged provocative public performances involving nudity, blood, bodily fluids, and religious imagery, designed to challenge the social conservatism of post-war Austria.
The Actionists' deliberate violation of taboos frequently provoked public outrage and in some cases resulted in prosecution. On one occasion, at the Kunst und Revolution event at the University of Vienna in 1968, Actionist Günter Brus performed an 'Action' involving urination, self-harm, defecation and masturbation – all while singing the Austrian national anthem. This causes a public scandal, and Brus was subsequently sentenced to six months' imprisonment for "degrading Austrian symbols"; he later fled to West Berlin to avoid his sentence. In a 2018 New York Times interview, Brus claimed that his aim was "to break taboos... My art doesn’t just stink in the physical space but smells in the souls of the people."
Transgression also became an important strategy in feminist art, where artists would use their bodies to challenge conventions around female sexuality, nudity, and representation in the art world. Carolee Schneemann, a pioneering figure in feminist performance art, worked to "disrupt and displace the conventional expectations of what an appealing looks, appealing, arousing body could do or mean in its culture." Discussing her work in a 2009 interview, Schneemann described her artistic vision of articulating "the pleasures of the body, the energy of the body, the intelligence of the body. I couldn't find it anywhere as I imagined it might be.
In Meat Joy (1964), Schneemann writhed with other nude performers in raw fish, chicken, paint, and paper; one performance was temporarily interrupted by an angry audience member who dragged Schneemann off the stage and began to strangle her, before being stopped by two other audience members. In Interior Scroll (1975), Schneemann pulled a scroll from her vagina and read from it, the text addressing the marginalisation of women's bodies in the art world. Other women performance artists including Yoko Ono, Marina Abramović and Ana Mendieta have also used the body as a site of transgression, testing boundaries around sexuality and socially acceptable behaviour.
Transgression was also characteristic of the underground comix movement. Robert Crumb, one of its most prominent figures, used explicit sexuality, racist stereotypes, and grotesque charicature in work that deliberately violated conventional moral standards and conventions within mainstream American comics. Writing in The Guardian, Crumb says that he "got tired of the label America's Best-Loved Cartoonist... I decided to be more brave about what was coming out. I still wanted to entertain, but I wanted to push the boundaries."
1980s and 1990s By the late 1980s, debates around transgressive art increasingly moved beyond the art world into wider political and legal disputes over obscenity, censorship and feedom of expression.
Dread Scott's 1988 installation, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, which invited visitors to stand on an American flag while responding to his work, provoked national controversy. In 1990, in United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court eventually ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government to prohibit an artwork that desecrates the American flag, finding that it was protected expression under the First Amendment.
Another artist, Robert Mapplethorpe, became another prominent figure in such debates. His retrospective exhibition The Perfect Moment, which included photographs depicting BDSM and sadomasochism, led Contemporary Arts Center director Dennis Barrie to be indicted on obscenity charges in 1990; he was acquitted of all charges.
Contemporary art Taboo aspects of the body continued to feature prominently in transgressive art. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist's urine, became a major focus of public debate after its funding by the National Endowment for the Arts prompted accusations of blasphemy. Serrano himself rejected the idea that the work was blasphemous: "I had no idea Piss Christ would get the attention it did, since I meant neither blasphemy nor offense by it. I've been a Catholic all my life, so I am a follower of Christ."
Artists associated with the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in Britain during the 1990s also attracted attention for their transgressive work. Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) depicted her unmade bed surrounded by personal objects including condoms, alcohol, stained bedsheets, underwear with menstrual blood stains, and other everyday items.
Later, performance artists Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi jumped on the bed to "improve" the work before being removed by security guards; Cai stated that the pair wanted to "push the idea further".
Jake and Dinos Chapman, also associated with the YBAs, regularly created transgressive pieces of work; Fuck Face (1994), one of their most notorious pieces, features a mannequin of a child whose nose and mouth are replaced by a penis and anus. Recalling the delivery of the work to the gallerist Victoria Miro, Dinos Chapman told the Guardian that he had "never been in such a silent place". Miro then placed a tea towel over the sculpture's head when Chapman left the gallery.
Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary garnered similar controversy. The work, depicting a Black Madonna created with elephant dung and images from pornographic magazines, was condemned by a range of public figures including Rudy Giuliani, who subsequently attempted to withdraw the museum's municipal funding.
In literature Literature has also been a form through which artists have expressed transgressive ideas, as well as being the site of legal and political disputes over obscenity and freedom of expression.
Early work There are multiple early literary precedents that challenged prevailing moral, sexual, and religious mores.
The writings of the Marquis de Sade are frequently regarded as an important precursor to later transgressive works. In his libertine novels in particular, characters engage in incest, sodomy, rape,coprophilia, necrophilia, and murder. Sadism – the pleasure of giving pain or humiliation – was subsequently named after Sade.
Though Sade's work is best known for its explicit depictions of sex, violence, and cruelty, it has also been interpreted as a broader challenge to conventional ideas about morality, religion, and humanity's relationship with God. As Michel Foucault argues in A Preface to Transgression, Sade was a pivotal figure in the development of a modern language of sexuality, linking it to the crossing of moral and religious limits. Beginning with Sade, Foucault writes, “the language of sexuality has lifted us into the night where God is absent”.
In the nineteenth century, challenges to prevailing moral conventions also brought writers into conflict with obscenity laws. Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, published in 1857 and covering themes including lesbianism, death, and sex, caused public outcry. Both Baudelaire and his publishers were prosecuted for crimes against public morality; a ban on six of his poems was not overturned until 1949.
20th century literature As in the world of visual arts, literary transgression became increasingly swept up in wider debates about censorship and freedom of speech as the 20th century went on. James Joyce's Ulysses was banned as obscene until 1933, while D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was subject to similar censorship. When Penguin Books published a version of the book in Britain in 1960, it was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, though it was eventually acquitted.
French theorist Georges Bataille was a key figure in 20th century transgressive art, contributing both fiction and theoretical works on the topic. Story of the Eye, a fictional account of increasingly extreme sexual games, is sometimes considered a "Surrealist anti-Bildungsroman": an account of the "dissolution of desire into abjection" which has had clear influence on later writers including Kathy Acker. Bataille subsequently developed his theory of transgression through theoretical work including Eroticism (1957), linking sex work, incest, marriage, murder, and sadism to religious life and other social codes. Other twentieth-century writers associated with transgression include Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, and Dennis Cooper.
Gender, sexuality, and the body