Audiences expected transgressive art to be violent rather than pleasant

Evidence

Reporting that the spectator in front of her spent the performance tearing his program into a handful of confetti, Johnston enjoyed the return to the “muck and murk” of the early Happenings as well as “the sensual and scatological pleasures of slimy contact.” The piece, however, ran out of steam. Smith thought that the basic pattern was simple—“messier and messier”—and experienced a sort of letdown. “I had expected (and wanted) it to be a violent, frightening, threatening, transgressive, possibly embarrassing experience. Instead, it was pleasant,” he wrote. Moreover, Schneemann’s primeval aspirations were undermined by her use of cheerful, if not brainless, pop songs. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 604

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: what audiences demand from ‘transgressive’ art — the expectation of violence versus the reality of mess — as a way to date genre expectations.
• XREF: connects to: Disturbing art must also exploit the audience’s attraction to what disturbs — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 408