Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens Chiens

“Straight-macho gonzo porn,” as historian Christelle Taraud calls it, makes up the vast majority of content and, with an ever-increasing number of views, helps shape sexual desire and fuel rape culture. Among the most searched categories are “incest,” “rape,” “little girl,” and “Beurettes.” Moreover, one need only watch certain videos on the French Bukkake platform to understand that these are not sex scenes, but scenes of war.
What we are dealing with, then, is destruction disguised as fiction, authorized by the mere presence of a camera. It is “a work of the mind. It’s entertainment,” defends Pascal Op, dismissing his critics as overly moralistic. The issue with this entertainment is therefore not so much the idea of pornography as the principle of its industry and what it conceals.

Chiens seeks to bring to light the extreme violence and the sickening denial of the torture endured by these voiceless victims in order to create turning points. The oxymoronic confrontation between liturgical form and pornography lays violence bare, ridicules the established order, forces recognition of its own law, challenges, reclaims its confiscated conflicts, and breaks free. This is not a whispered confession but one laid bare in the public light. Against a strictly documentary approach or pure testimony: art as a force for action.

This performance is thus an attempt to stage a confrontation between a society that consumes, denies, mocks, downplays, judges, or makes sweeping generalizations, and the reality experienced by these women, who are viewed as “bad victims.” This heterotopia blurs and redefines the boundaries of what is part of the game and what is not, what is acceptable and what is not, what we can laugh at and what demands seriousness. It offers no answers or solutions to the problems it raises. While the resulting form does not exclude violence, this violence is incomparable to that of our collective complacency in the face of these filmed assaults and is never treated, in the performance, as an object of fascination. On the contrary, it places us in an awkward position, one that confronts us with a reality—the porn industry—that is as omnipresent as it is rendered invisible—without ever borrowing its images or the voyeuristic affects that accompany them. It renders strange what has become all too familiar and poses the following question: what is obscene?

And what are we to make of all the sexist and racist biases that literally permeate its practices and reveal power dynamics that bring to the surface a more or less repressed French unconscious? It is not so much a matter of setting up a substitute court as it is of confronting, on an individual level, the horror and passive complicity without turning it into a spectacle—to the point, perhaps, to empty or devitalize the old figure of the “masculine”—which is also that of the actor—and to ask ourselves what becomes of the flesh in an era where #MeToo and French Bukkake coexist.

Lorraine de Sagazan