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The organ that will never be art

Thomas Sutcliffe Published: 25 May 2007


Ive been bumping into other mens penises a lot recently.

Not literally, I should say, which might be tricky to explain to my wife, but culturally. By one of those serendipitous pile-ups, there seemed to be penises everywhere, each successive organ adding to the sense that a flock was accumulating, like some weird genital equivalent to that scene in The Birds, when the crows gather behind Tippi Hedren.

I encountered the first one at the Hauser & Wirth Coppermill in Hoxton. Walking round an exhibition of recent work by Martin Creed, I was startled when the lights dimmed and an Odeon-sized screen on one wall began to show a four-minute film of sexual penetration, the penis shaved for maximum sculptural purity and shown, at huge magnification, entering some compliant model from behind.

The following week, Sir Ian McKellens penis popped up in print, after Germaine Greer broke the embargo on reviews of Trevor Nunns King Lear at Stratford to reveal that, as part of his performance, Sir Ian drops his trousers to reveal what Greer described as "his impressive genitalia".

And then, last week, I found myself judiciously inspecting Antony Gormleys organs of generation, on display in a work called Drawn - which doesnt smooth the genitals into the characteristic Ken-doll nub that Gormleys figures often feature, but leaves them dangling, like some Daliesque drooping milk bottle.

And finally, while reading Adam Thorpes new novel Between Each Breath, I was suddenly confronted with the lead characters "knob" - referred to as such by Thorpes protagonist as he describes an idyllic sexual moment with the Estonian girl with whom he has fallen in love.

I didnt feel entirely comfortable having Jacks "knob" thrust in my face like that. Its not a word that you associate with romantic passion, after all - more with playground jokes and deflationary bathos. And yet, once Id finished reading Thorpes book (very good, by the way), I thought I could see what he was getting at with it. Sexual terminology is always a problem in such scenes, our choice of vocabulary being almost as exclusively personal a matter as the deed itself. What may sound earthily blunt to one ear will strike another as coarse, and yet another as twee or infantile. But to assume that Thorpe has hit the wrong note simply because the slang brings you up short is to assume that he wanted the reader to be as carried away as the character he describes. As it happens, the word appears at a detumescent moment in the narrative - a point at which lust, or love, for the first time gives way to a thought of possible consequences - and Thorpe, I think, knows perfectly well that suddenly foregrounding that wayward organ will reliably bring the romance down to earth.

To notice penises at all, or to suggest that they might distract you from more cerebral matters (as Greer did of Sir Ians exposed tackle), is to open yourself up to a charge of childish frivolity or prudishness. Were supposed to be more grown-up than that, to be well beyond nudging, let alone sniggering. And yet, I dont think that assumption does any justice to how stubbornly resistant the penis is to aestheticisation these days. Clearly, there have been cultures that were matter-of-fact about the organ. Its said that the British Museum has a large drawer in one of its storerooms containing the catalogued members that were hacked off classical statues in order to retrofit them to British notions of sculptural propriety.

But though we pride ourselves on our superiority to the Victorians, our culture still isnt easy-going about such matters. It doesnt see the penis as a totem of power or fecundity (unless it is heavily disguised). It doesnt even see it as a mere fact of life. It sees it, more often than not, as a short cut to deflating absurdity. The penis - the tail that wags the dog - brings us down to size. Which is why Sir Ian is taking a risk in revealing himself as a "bare, forked animal" in Nunns Lear. And why Creeds Work No 730 is so discomfiting, even for an audience that prides itself on its sophisticated imperviousness to shock. I take it thats the point. Heres the mechanics of the thing, he says, and youre not going to find it easy to ennoble or prettify it.

Georgia OKeefe might transform the vagina into mystical flowers perfect for a penthouse wall, but the penis is a much stiffer proposition. It is stubbornly resistant to beautification. And far from being a problem, its tendency to make us giggle seems a rather cherishable quality. Turkey-necked, unruly, prone to unpredictable Alice-in-Wonderland transformations of scale - the penis usefully reminds us that pride is always followed by a fall.


2008 03 29 17:47:20













  




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