the art of pornography according to michael turner
john sinopoli, the varsity (university of toronto)

At the age of 16, he got his first taste of adult cinema. Shortly before that, he taped his neighbours having sex on their back porch with a strap-on dildo and their Great Dane.

He is the unnamed narrator in Vancouver writer Michael Turner's latest novel, The Pornographer's Poem.

The character tries to use pornography to do something artistic, liberating and socially relevant, but ends up falling into a world of greed, delusion and hypocrisy; everything he rebelled against.

The narrative of the story includes film treatments and scripts, diary entries, monologues and conventional narrative. The narrator is forced to relay the events of his life by a trio of mysterious interrogators.

Much of Turner's research "was centered on jailhouse testimonials and courtroom transcripts. I wanted to construct a voice that was under duress, what I'm calling an 'interrogated narrative.' The authorities were most helpful."

Turner explores a variety of pornography, from the paedophilic to the bestial, from "artistic" nudes to "raunchy" hard-core fetishes. The novel manages to depict pornography and the world of pornographic films without censoring the reality of it all, while still avoiding being gratuitously exploitative.

Turner, the author of the cult classic Hard Core Logo (made into a film by Bruce MacDonald), has also written two poetry collections, Kingsway and Company Town. Company Town was nominated for the 1992 Dorothy Livesay B.C. Book Prize for Poetry and was followed by American Whiskey Bar, which reads as a film script and was produced as a live television special on CityTV in the fall of 1998.

Throughout Turner's work it's obvious to see that he doesn't confine himself to the conventions and form of genre, whether it be prose, verse or poetry.

"I don't distinguish between the two, other than to recognize the fact that they are both encoded forms that operate on a set of arbitrary conventions, and that we, as readers, are conditioned to respond within the limits of those conventions. I like to mix the two to effect, play with their boundaries. I also like to add visual materials, aspects of the material culture, whatever it is I'm working in. I consider myself a practitioner of neither prose or poetry."

Determining what is pornography and what is art is an arbitrary decision made by the individual. And who is to say where the line should be drawn between what is considered "art" and that what is deemed "smut"? One could argue that they often intertwine, or that it's easy to distinguish between the two, or that it's impossible to do so.

"The line between art and pornography is based on a social construction of taste. Taste is defined by the rich and upheld by the middle classes. Both art and pornography begin in the same place, but it is the taste-makers that decide what goes in the gallery, what goes in the paper bag, and what goes behind bars," says Turner. Turner says that the term pornography didn't appear (in the West) until mid-19th century.

"Prior to that, images of sexual activity were woven into art and writing (much like they were and are in the rest of the world). Very often these images provided the basis for social and political satire. As literacy rose, the upper-classes felt that these materials should be banned, put into private libraries. They knew the impact these writings and images were having on an increasingly class-conscious working class, on social relations between men and women," he elaborates.

"One of the interesting things I find with pornography today is how it exists as a burlesque of the mainstream. For every Hollywood blockbuster movie, you have its trickster in the world of porn. To wit, every Batman begets a Buttman. And this paralleling is backed up in the capitalist world as well: over half the video retail and rental market is made up of pornographic films. Same goes for the Internet."

According to Turner, we live in a society that is constantly selling sex, yet is still extremely closed-minded and prudish about it.

Turner cites the advertising industry as a perfect example of how sex is sanctioned in our society.

"Because being a model has become a sanctioned aspiration for a young girl, then her appearing as a so-called 'kinder slut' in a Calvin Klein ad is okay," he explains. "It's okay because that's advertising, a domain that models work in. And it's okay that the subtext is 'This child is fuckable' because the subtext is ostensibly hidden from the billboard. But, of course, it isn't because the subtext is within our mind."

Reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Pornographer's Poem detests the phoniness of the people and the world around him. He hates the ways in which people sell themselves in order to achieve or get what they want. Throughout the novel, the protagonist's "Bullshit Detector" evolves as he becomes increasingly aware of just how fake society really is.

"Everybody's a phoney to some extent," says Turner. "The funny thing about business is that people will often do weird things to make an impact. The desire to succeed in business is based, I think, on the sublimation of certain repression. A lot of these repressions are rooted in our youth, and most of them revolve around issues of sex and sexuality."

The "Bullshit Detector" is also a response to the fact that pornography is the reality of things. A lot of people watch porn, but deny it and deny it any credibility as an art form. In general, most people lie about pornography and sex in general, too afraid of the negative ramifications of being interested in things deemed "taboo" and going against the constraints of a repressed society.

On whether he believes that our society is becoming more open to pornography being called "natural" and "art", Turner says, "I would say that there's always a small percentage that say yes. Then there's a slightly larger percentage that would at least debate the topic.

"Unfortunately, though, the majority of people won't speak publicly on it at all - so we'll never know. But we do know that many of them are buying and renting porn."

Turner thinks that the work of certain pro-sex feminists (Williams, Hunt, Kipnis, Faludi) is opening the door to a more open interest in representations of sexual activity.

"I am hopeful," he declares. "The days of Dworkin and MacKinnon, hopefully, are numbered. Again, so much unhappiness stems from sexual repression."

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