As long as a there has been art there have been forms of censorship. Natalie Coleman investigates.
In use since antiquity, from the Roman Empire to the totalitarian states of the 20th century, it is defined as ‘the prohibition or restriction of any type of expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order.’
In 1907 Pablo Picasso delivered Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to an unsuspecting public sending shock waves through the art world. By replacing the unthreatening female nude with what appeared to be a group portrait of crude prostitutes in an angular, primitive style, he challenged the established notions of what was perceived as art.
A decade later in 1915, the anarchic members of the Dada movement, the precursor of Surrealism, began to wreak havoc in Switzerland through a challenging brand of social and political satire and nonsense works. Both were subject to censorship, the former by the established art circles and the latter, by the National Socialists in Germany.
More recently, the 1997 Sensation exhibition, a collection of young British art from the collection of Charles Saatchi, became one of most controversial cases of attempted censorship in recent years.
Beginning at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and travelling firstly to Berlin and then on to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, it was only when it reached the US that the full outcry arose. The collection was based largely on ‘shock art’ content, which included Dead Dad by Ron Mueck, an eerily life-like silicone model lying prostrate on the floor, Self by Marc Quinn – a perspex sculpture of the artist’s head, filled with his own blood and displayed in a fridge, and the Chapman brother’s Tragic Anatomies featuring genetic freaks made up of girl mannequins morphed together with genitalia for features.
When then mayor Rudolph Giuliani, condemned the exhibition as “sick stuff” and threatened to withdraw funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, he met with a hail of criticism.
Giuliani’s supporters saw him as a saviour of moral and social standards, while his attackers accused him of intolerance and likened him to Adolf Hitler.
On opening day, protestors, including a large number from the Catholic League, confronted long lines of visitors – there were a record 9200 people on the opening day – while the day before the New York Civil Liberties Union had led a demonstration in defence of the Museum.
In response, The American Association of Museum chose to draft ethical guidelines on exhibition funding in order to avoid similar issues arising in the future.
What this exhibition and the surrounding controversy did was raise interesting issues related to the role of the media, the involvement of politicians and governments in the arts, legal issues, and matters relating to funding. Should such exhibitions, which seriously challenge socially accepted degrees of morality, be housed at publicly funded institutions?
In any society where freedom of speech is celebrated the answer should theoretically be yes, however in reality for every ten people that support the public exhibition of such art, paid for in part by their tax dollar, many more would argue the need for censorship to protect morality in the face of what they consider to be pornography, mutilation, or blasphemy.
Similar issues are naturally circulating around the current ‘Raw’ exhibition which was born out of the controversy raised by the exclusion of artist Luelan Bodden’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ from the 2004 McCoy exhibition.
The piece in question was excluded from display after a committee, made up of several members of our national cultural organisations, decided the work may be deemed pornographic in nature and thus offensive to certain members of community.
As publicly funded organisations and co-hosts of the event, the National Museum and the National Gallery have a greater degree of responsibility to their public than their privately funded counterparts and this issue will surface again.
Whether to draw a line and where it should be drawn will remain a topic of hot debate long into the future. What the leaders of these organisations are quick to confirm is that they are not promoting censorship across the board.
That Luelan Bodden has found an alternative venue in which to display his piece, along with fellow artists Wray Banker, Al Ebanks and Chris Christian whose work addresses themes of nudity, violence and eroticism, is a testament to the growing awareness of the need to expand our visual vocabulary.
Artists must continue the conquest of new territory and new taboos, to challenge and provoke. Like the countless controversial figures populating the art world, who have been the subject of censorship, much of this these themes may become familiar with the soothing effects of time. Furthermore we are able to see that the controversies of recent years continue in a well-established tradition, of censorship and reaction, where current artists hope to add their names to an illustrious list of forerunners. After all, Picasso’s infamous nude now lies in the centre of collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York having given birth Modernism, one of the most significant movements in the history of art.
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