Culture

Our relationship with disgust is complex. We are repelled by what is disgusting, but we are also fascinated by it. It is an uncomfortable fact, but road accidents draw crowds. So does art which arouses a feeling of disgust.

Disgust is part of daily life. Every day we deal with dirt, including our own waste, yet our lives are increasingly sanitised and sterile. The quest for cleanliness consumes time and money. We shower, apply deodorants, and wash our hands frequently. Leafing through Ideal Home, or any other lifestyle magazine shows that a pristine home is a sign of success in modern society.

Many modern artists attempt to illustrate or confront the disparity between our dirty reality and our pristine perception of it. Some critics argue that 'disgusting' art — which uses graphic sexual images, blood, shit and vomit — is simply an exercise in shock tactics. If something is repulsive, people will look at it, but that does not make it valuable.

However, the modern artists who use disgust argue that by refusing to discuss and acknowledge what disgusts us, we are simply denying what is real.

Embracing reality

Artists such as Hermann Nitsch and Stuart Brisley believe that we should acknowledge the disgusting side of life, as well as the pristine side. Nitsch says that our true animal nature has been suppressed by 2000 years of Christianity, that our spiritual life has been over-emphasised at the expense of the body.

Brisley, who caused outrage at the Institute of Contemporary Art by bringing in garbage from his street each day, and arranging it within one of the galleries, says that our impression of the world as clean and regulated is false and dangerous. We are simply sweeping dirt under the carpet. But hiding it does not make it disappear.

Suppressing art which is seen as disgusting is dangerous, too. Works by Egon Schiele and Picasso were reviled by the Nazis. Artists who were seen as 'degenerate' in Nazi Germany were hounded into exile or killed in concentration camps.

Delight and disgust

Sex, more than any other aspect of our lives, encapsulates the paradox of disgust. Sex is both delightful and disgusting. In order to have sex at all, we must overcome our disgust about bodily secretions — our own and others'. When confronted with this in the cold light of day rather than in the heat of the moment, we often become uncomfortable.

Marlene Dumas paints explicit pictures of men and women displaying their sexual organs. In order to be able to appreciate the beauty of the shapes in Dumas's work, we need to suspend our sense of disgust about the naked body and the genitals, just as we have to suspend our sense of disgust when we have sex.

Artists try to overcome the idea that sex is disgusting: Sarah Lucas, whose work includes 'Two fried eggs and a kebab', a parody of the female form, makes sex funny and real. Lucas believes that sex, like life, is a contamination process. By staying pure, she argues, you gain nothing.

Beauty, age and death

All of us — men and women — buy magazines and watch films which celebrate the beauty of the young, naked body. But show us a picture of an ageing naked person and we are disgusted. This is what photographer Melanie Manchot has done by exhibiting pictures of her 67-year-old mother in the nude. Manchot believes that this disgust has to do with our own fear of ageing and, ultimately, death. The images threaten us, because they represent the truth of what we will all, in time, have to face.