Something Shocking

A week or so ago I discovered the original video for Bowie's single off his brilliant 1 Outside album of the 1990s Hearts Filthy Lesson. It just goes to show how astonishingly out of touch I can be even with the work of musicians I deeply admire that I had no idea a video existed. In my own defence I suppose I could argue that it's the music that really speaks to me and I've never had much of a visual imagination, so I've never been terribly bothered about looking up this sort of material. But since Bowie has always been deeply interested himself in visual art, and conscious of the importance of the visually theatrical in his work, that defence wouldn't hold up in a courtroom, especially the Supreme Court of Aesthetics.

And here's the thing, in relation to standing in judgement on Art (always, of course, a perilous thing to do.) The video really, really bothers me. It's wonderfully made, visually stunning, entirely simpatico to the music and spirit of the song and, indeed, the whole album. But it's upsetting in its obvious and disturbing implications of the pleasures and pains of sado-masochism. Googling around for a bit of background I discovered it got banned on MTV and, I've got to say that seems pretty reasonable to me. The idea of chancing upon it in some gallery or other and choosing to watch it with some sense of the context from which it springs seems altogether reasonable; but youngish kids watching it as part of some general promotion of music as consumer culture just doesn't seem right.

Now I've always been on the side of disturbance as an artistic strategy, but I've found myself thinking very hard as to how some aspects of the video might reasonably be defended and I'm not sure I have any easy answers. I do have some hard ones though - amongst which is a sense that we need to accept 'outsider art' to achieve an understanding of the totality of ourselves. Must say though, I don't think anyone, no matter how deeply conservative in their tastes, could fail to grasp that Bowie performing the song live is the real deal, and then some.