Noa Tepper

*after consulting with the author, we have decided to add a content warning for: pedophilia, rape, sexual assault and harassment, homophobia, and abuse*

Taboo (noun): a subject, word, or action that is avoided for religious or social reasons (Cambridge Dictionary). The things a particular society brands as “taboo” evolve and change over time, as does art. However, while there are those who would argue that the presence of certain taboo elements—such as pedophilia, incest, rape, etc.—immediately excludes a work from being considered art, others are able to acknowledge the work as controversial or perhaps even offensive while still viewing it within the realm of the arts. This essay seeks to explore the invaluable impact that knowledge of an artist’s personal and historical/societal background can have on how their taboo or controversial work is perceived. In this paper, this position will be advocated for by philosopher Kendall Walton’s historical contextualist approach to art interpretation, and I will use examples from the work of Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar. Further, this essay strives to show that every work of art has immeasurable value, arguing against the erasure and censorship of even the artworld’s most problematic works and authors.

On Kendall Walton

In his 1970 paper “Categories of Art,” American philosopher Kendall Walton attempts to answer the long-contested philosophical question, “what is art?” by proposing a taxonomy for categorizing art—via features he terms standard, contra-standard, and variable. He argues that without such a categorization, one cannot interpret or evaluate a work of art due to the direct relationship between category and its corresponding aesthetic properties. Walton states that “to perceive a work in a certain category is to perceive the ‘Gestalt’ of that category in the work” (Walton 340). The Gestalt is understood by Walton as the features you see and which come directly from the category you assigned the work to, establishing category as a component of great importance.

Also central to Walton’s argument is the importance of context in art interpretation: “facts about the origins of works of art have an essential role in criticism, that aesthetic judgments rest on them in an absolutely fundamental way… the view that works of art should be judged simply by what can be perceived in them is seriously misleading” (Walton 337). Walton emphasizes how vital it is for an audience to consider the context surrounding the creation of a specific work. He states that there is a correct way to perceive a work, and it involves historical facts both about authorial intention and its society of origin. Rebuking a formalist approach to art interpretation—one that wholly disregards the significance of subject matter and narrative content, focusing strictly on technical/stylistic formal features such as color, texture, moving lines/shapes, etc.—Walton reasons that a visual examination of the work alone is simply incapable of revealing its true history. According to Walton, one is not in a position to judge a work aesthetically if its origins are a mystery to them. Art interpretation cannot occur without careful consideration of all the features present since, as Walton says, each feature has a historical point of origin that informs the rest of the work.

Walton’s historical contextualist view can best be seen through his allusion to a theoretical society where paintings have been replaced by guernicas. These guernicas resemble Picasso’s Guernica but altered to feature protruding surfaces in place of the flatness the infamous Picasso was composed on. Solidifying his taxonomy, Walton establishes variable features as those whose presence is irrelevant when considering whether a work fits under a certain category while standard features are those whose absence would disqualify the work from being able to belong. Walton suggests that, in this society, the members would still recognize—or, rather, categorize—Picasso’s Guernica as a guernica but its characteristic flatness would be variable for them while, considering our society and its conventions of paintings, being standard for us (Walton 347). Meanwhile, as this is, after all, a society of guernicas, the depicted figures would be standard for them but variable for us. If a guernica taken from said society of guernicas were to be placed in our world, our resulting aesthetic reaction would be “violent, dynamic, vital, disturbing” with theirs being something along the lines of “cold, stark, lifeless… bland, dull, boring—but in any case not violent, dynamic, and vital” (Walton 347). This concept introduces the consideration of culture relativity: if an individual was familiar with both our culture and theirs, they would be able to see the work under the category “painting” but also under the category “guernica” depending on what features they were, at will, paying attention to. Walton’s use of this hypothetical situation masterfully demonstrates why societal context and category—which, as demonstrated, work hand-in-hand—must both be considered wheninterpreting an artistic work. I posit that this theory of art interpretation may aid audiences in perceiving taboo or controversial art and can therefore safeguard such works from being ignored or erased by the public for their problematic, and potentially offensive, content.

Contextualism Decodes Taboo

A work of art that shocks or offends is still a work of art. However, the presence of problematic/taboo content is often enough for certain audiences to justify the erasure of an artist and their creations. I believe Walton’s contextualist theory is an effective advocate for such works; taking into account an artist’s story entirely alters the way an individual, without excusing morally corrupt themes, perceives the work as a Gestalt.

Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar is best known for fathering a myriad of complex melodramas, all of which contain a variety of extremely taboo topics—most notably rape, pedophilia, domestic violence, murder, incest, drugs, prostitution, stalking, nudity, sex, queerness, and religion—that bring discomfort and, in some cases, disgust to audiences worldwide. While his center-framed, high-contrast shots, oozing of rich color saturation that perfectly embodies his kingdom of kitsch art, all receive critical—and philosophical formalist—praise, the true genius behind Almodóvar’s cinema is his provocative characters and the complex themes they personify. These themes, by no sheer chance, come from Almodóvar’s own life. “Everything that isn’t autobiographical,” said Almodóvar, “is plagiarism” (Hirschberg).

Bad Education, the film considered among Almodóvar’s most autobiographical, tells the story of a filmmaker named Enrique. Enrique meets an actor claiming to be his friend and first love, Ignacio, from Enrique’s Catholic boarding school. He comes bearing a manuscript that contains stories of their time at the school and wants Enrique to make it into a film. Through Enrique’s reading of this manuscript, the viewer learns that, while at the seminary, the priest school principal sexually abused Ignacio, who was in love with Enrique. Ignacio allowed the Father to molest him in exchange for Enrique being spared from punishment after he caught the boys in a sexual encounter. The Father expelled Enrique anyway, separating the boys. Ignacio then falls into a life of drugs, blackmail, a sex change, and a string of messy murders.

Priests and church corruption are common taboo themes in Almodóvar’s work, as are transness and homosexuality, as Almodóvar himself was sent to a seminary where it is suspected that he was sexually abused by the priests. This led to years of struggling with his identity before he eventually came out as gay. Despite various allusions and public suspicion, he never explicitly confirmed his own experiences with the abuse, but shared that he knew many of his friends had been victims. Of the priests he said, “This is an awful thing to do to boys of nine or 10, to tell them you are guilty just for being born. To engrave in their minds the idea of sin and punishment…” (Mackenzie). Religious communities, especially those in Almodóvar’s predominantly Catholic home country Spain, find his raw and graphic portrayal of the corruption within the church blasphemous and slanderous. By more contemporary younger audiences, Almodóvar’s depiction of transgender and gay characters as broken and, at best, morally ambiguous could be seen as promoting harmful stereotypes and villainizing the already marginalized queer community. Yet, in 1970, just ten years after Almodóvar was free from the seminary, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco passed an act that gave police officers the power to arrest gay people “because of the threat [they] posed to society… It was not a good time to have a sexual orientation that was different,” said Almodóvar (Mackenzie). In fact, this very reason is how Almodóvar became a crucial figure in La Movida Madrileña, a cultural renaissance based in Madrid that, following the death of Franco, rebelled against the oppressive society he’d built with a very intentional “riot of sex, drugs and gender fluidity” (Billson). Taking into account the years of abuse Almodóvar endured at the hands of the church, only for abuse by police to be legalized as a weapon handcrafted against his very identity, can it truly be argued that Almodóvar doesn’t have a claim to express his trauma through his art? That his work is offensive if it is just his lived experiences, translated on-screen? Or, when taking into account how creating art was also a form of political rebellion for Almodóvar, does not the provocative nature of his particular form of artistic eccentricity make sense once paired with the anarchy his generation desperately hungered for? I believe these conclusions become strikingly apparent the more one considers Walton’s argument.

Pedophilia, a taboo theme introduced in Bad Education, is yet another that arises frequently for Almodóvar, especially alongside incest. This can be seen in the film Volver. A character named Raimunda finds out her teenage daughter Paula stabbed her stepfather to death when he’d attempted to rape her. To protect Paula, Raimunda hides his body in the freezer of a restaurant she briefly runs before she eventually buries him. We later learn that Raimunda’s father had sexually abused and impregnated her with Paula, making Paula both Raimunda’s daughter and, genetically, her sister. Years prior, Raimunda’s own mother started a fire to kill her husband and the woman she learned he was having an affair with. Then, when that woman’s daughter slowly withers from cancer as an adult, Raimunda’s mother cares for her in secret.

Volver is a dramatized yet direct reflection of Almodóvar’s view that families are headed by women who endure and men who provide the pain they must overcome. He draws this view from his childhood: “My childhood was entirely surrounded by women. I don’t remember men around me. They were working or they were in the bars or whatever” (The Irish Times). That, coupled with the abuse he suffered all his life at the hands of men in positions of power, fully explains why the hero in his universe is always the strong woman—typically a mother who fights to protect her children as his had done—and the queer person who, despite getting treated poorly by society, never breaks, just as he had not. Perhaps he even blames his father, the one who had sent him to the seminary, for failing to protect him from his abusers and being a father who “didn’t speak…or perhaps only to issue threats to a son whom he did not understand but whom, assuredly, he loved” (Mackenzie). This perverse sort of love is among the most controversial of his cinematic taboos.

Talk to Her tells a story of the very different kinds of love two men have for their women, one woman a bullfighter and the other a dancer, who are both in a coma. One of the men, named Marco, relives the memories they shared before the woman he loves fell into a coma and, after she doesn’t wake up, decides he needs to move on but swears he’ll never forget her. This creates a contrast for the other man, Benigno, who, after watching a young dancer from his apartment, becomes obsessed with her and fakes needing the services of her father, a psychiatrist, to get close to her and leaves her terrified when she catches him stealing from her room while she was showering. After the dancer gets struck by a car and falls into a coma, Benigno is assigned to her care at the hospital and fulfills his nursing duties in uncomfortably intimate ways. Simultaneously, he talks to her as if their dialogue were two-sided and that of a romantic couple. The two men cross paths and Benigno tells Marco that he plans to marry the dancer, which horrifies Marco since she is incapable of expressing her consent. Later, it is learned that the dancer is pregnant and Benigno goes to jail for her rape. His incarceration makes it impossible for him to hear the news that she had a stillborn baby and awoke from her coma. After this, he commits suicide, trying to reunite with the love of his life through a coma of his own.

Understandably, Talk to Her caused a lot of controversy as some thought Almodóvar was justifying stalking and romanticizing rape in the name of love. However, taking into consideration the rest of Almodóvar’s films through the use of Walton’s historical contextualist approach, it’s clear that, in the end, the woman has lived—has won—and her abuser has lost. After being betrayed and broken by men all his life, Almodóvar ensures the heroes of his films are always survivors painted in the image of the strong women who raised him and the queer people who, as he himself had, bravely took the brunt of society’s abuse. If it is offensive, it was meant to be. His villains may often be men, but after giving them their rightfully grotesque “just desserts,” Almodóvar desperately attempts to find any humanizing lens to view their destructive actions through. We might speculate this attempt to humanize destructive men stems from his father, from whom he clearly sustained substantial trauma and yet will likely forever yearn for the connection that never was. Nonetheless, his victims always get their revenge as they watch their abusers suffer from the consequences of what they’d done, finding power or inspiration in their often immoral means for vengeance. Ignacio murdered the abuser-priest and found fame in film, all three generations of women in Raimunda’s bloodline found each other through the extermination of their adulterers and rapists, and Benigno killed himself in vain while his victim was able to start a family and find love.

The more facts you know about Almodóvar’s life and the culture which made him who he is, the more the way you look at his films and controversial characters changes, demonstrating the power of Walton’s historical contextualism when applied to the perception of taboo art. In fact, in theme with the emphasis Walton put on proper categorization and the aesthetic changes that result from it, if these films were housed in the sub-category “autobiographical taboo” instead of their current comedy drama domain, audiences would be better prepared to look for the allusions he makes to his own trauma. These allusions, I believe, distance his films from “shock art” and allow another to view the world directly through his eyes. This queer man who has fought to culturally rehabilitate both himself and his country after dictatorship and years of pain makes movies “for [his] needs. [His] goal has never, never, never, been to make shocking movies” (Encyclopedia.com). The erasure of his art undermines not just the healing it has done for Almodóvar, but also the countless victims worldwide who see past the “shock” his movies administer and instead feel seen by all of Almodóvar’s queers, women, and outcasts who rose to the top despite it all.

A Stance Against Erasure

The philosophy of art allows us to examine not only why we enjoy certain works of art but also what art even is and how we can begin to define it—that is, if we should, or can, define art. The artworld is no stranger to controversy and, as this essay hopes to illustrate, the answers for how we should deal with said controversy may very well lie within the philosophy of art.

The debate over separating the art from the artist has set the internet ablaze with the rise of “cancel culture” and other efforts to hold public figures accountable for problematic behavior. While some think separating an artist from their art is enough, I would argue this is a mere excuse used by people who knowingly support creators and their media despite being aware of them committing some immoral act(s). More than that, I believe the relationship between a craftsperson and their craft is far too intimate for it to even be possible to make the two distinctly separate. As can be seen with Almodóvar, the artist often imbues their lived experiences and personal beliefs into their art—whether knowingly or not—and this makes it virtually impossible to sever the ties between them. Without an artist, the art becomes without a point of origin or context and, according to Walton’s contextualism, therefore ceases to have an accessible meaning.

J. K. Rowling, famous for authoring the Harry Potter novels, went from being known only as the creator of the beloved fantasy franchise about wizards and witches, to being “cancelled” by the internet after she revealed her anti-transgender beliefs in 2020 (Gardner). This led many fans to revisit themes she had written into her old work that, for years, had gone unnoticed. From promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes in the form of money-hogging trolls to naming her Asian characters in caricatured manners, all of Rowling’s bigoted opinions were now out in the open. The world she had created, despite its imperfections, meant a lot to multiple generations who, as children, found comfort and escape inside her magical fantasies and their limitless possibilities. It is unsurprising that learning of Rowling’s true nature felt like a contamination of fond childhood memories for millions of fans worldwide and, understandably, led to the debate over how to remove an author from the books they’d written—like one would remove a cancerous mass before it could spread further. While I agree that problematic authors do not deserve to be celebrated, erasing their name from the creation they made possible only strips the work of its history and diminishes any understanding we may have of the work based on its historical point of origin. Instead, as I have done with Almodóvar, I believe audiences should be educated on the work’s background so that they may construct informed opinions about it, regardless of, or perhaps because of, how it may change the tone of the work.

This approach can be modeled through Emil Nolde, a German painter known to be historically influential in the Expressionist movement and who, after long being celebrated in art history, was revealed to be an unrepentant Nazi sympathizer instead of the victim he pretended to be after Hitler’s defeat. Just as had happened with J. K. Rowling, many museums considered taking down all of Nolde’s work to show they did not support his ideologies or his past. One of these museums, the Columbus Museum of Art, decided to keep its Nolde painting on display but with the addition of informative labels around the work to educate visitors on the artist’s dark history.

Art historian Melanie Corn, speaking of two famous artists known to be incredibly abusive to women, shared that she “wouldn’t love hanging out with Jackson Pollock or Pablo Picasso, but [she recognizes] their importance as artists and appreciate[s] the work they produced without excusing their behavior” (Gray). This approach, I believe, ensures the viewer is able to make interpretive judgments with access to the whole history of the work and, thus, history itself will not be rewritten as a means to bury its ugly truths.

Our perception of what it is for something to be “bad,” or taboo, changes with time but total erasure may never be undone; once something is truly wiped from the record, its absence is permanent. How many of our world’s artworks, our ugliest truths, were burned or deleted before we could even learn of their existence? How much knowledge could we have had today if we’d seen all the things whose loss we cannot even know to mourn? In that way, is not Kendall Walton’s historical contextualist theory an answer to more than just philosophy’s question, “what is art?” Does it not instead make us ask, “what is truth?”

Works Cited

“All about His Mother.” The Irish Times, 18 Aug. 2006, https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/all-about-his-mother-1.1040015.

“Almodovar, Pedro 1949(?)–.” Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/almodovar-pedro-1949.

Bilson, Anne. “Pedro Almodóvar’s Films – Ranked!” The Guardian, 12 Aug. 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/aug/12/pedro-almodovar-films-ranked.