What People Don’t Get About Controversial Art

(Warning: This article contains imagery that is not suitable for children and may be triggering for victims of sexual assault. I write this in the few days preceding my solo popup exhibition in San Francisco, which will contain a plethora of “difficult work”.)

“I don’t want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically… I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.” — Ingmar Bergman

I loved finding this serendipitous quote a few years back, when my work had recently shifted in a new and unexpected direction. I was trying to figure out what was happening in my studio: it was as if something had taken over my practice, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. The work was intensely disturbing, even to me, yet I was dead certain that I was doing the right thing in continuing to make it. I have always created the work “that needs to be made”, but this time, I could not keep up with whatever was working through me in the studio. I kept telling my husband, “I just want to finish this body of work before I die”, and he would look at me as if I was nuts. I queried my network on Facebook, asking them if they had ever seen work that was “too intense”. I requested studio visits from friends, because I truly felt like I was in the process of jumping off some kind of cliff, and I wanted some feedback to get my bearings. Several unrelated people responded to the work with an identical descriptor: “I feel like I’ve…