When does art become child porn? [Article in The Observer]
When does art become child porn?
Tate Modern's decision to remove a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields
from display again highlights the moral and legal issues surrounding
children in artworks. The old masters had no such problems, writes
*Laura Cumming*
By Laura Cumming
The Observer, UK: 1 November 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/01/art-child-porn-old-masters
[ http://tinyurl.com/yhn29hv ]
Not far from the strip joints of Soho is an image of a child having
sex with an adult that can be seen for nothing any day of the week.
The child is a boy of about 10 or 11, completely naked, his backside
raised and partially turned to the viewer. The adult is a young woman,
also naked. She is slipping her tongue into his mouth; he is squeezing
her right nipple between his fingers. Not only is the boy clearly
underage, but this sexual abuse of a minor turns out to be incestuous,
too - the woman is actually his mother.
Anyone can view this scene between the hours of 10 and 6 throughout
the year. There are no cordons or barriers, no advance warnings.
Children are actively encouraged to look. The police have never shown
the slightest interest. Indeed, practically the only people who have
tried to censor Bronzino's _An Allegory with Venus and Cupid_ are the
Victorian moralists who painted over the nipples.
What is going on in this bizarre gridlock of limbs? At the National
Gallery, where the painting hangs, there is general agreement that
nobody agrees. The picture was probably painted for a French king
known for "his lusty appetites", in the euphemism of the gallery
guide; but it may also incorporate a warning against depravity: the
howling figure on the left is commonly held to personify terminal
syphilis.
Now, I submit that when you look at reproductions of the image - away
from the milling crowds, out of its frame, in a different context, all
of which could describe equally well the conditions in which it was
painted - you cannot help but notice that a child is explicitly
fingering an adult. It may be that you are struck by this in the
gallery too, in which case you have probably also observed that your
fellow visitors manage to notice no such thing. We are either blind to
- or very good at ignoring - the sex in old master art.
This is not just any sex, of course: it involves a child, the
strongest cultural taboo of our times. We may think nothing now of the
kinds of image that shocked and outraged our predecessors - Manet's
_Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe_, which so appalled his contemporaries with its
bizarre party of dressed men and naked woman, is a beacon of high art
to us. We wouldn't put a figleaf (as the Victorians did) on Canova's
naked statue of Napoleon. Works of art become more or less
transgressive as societies change.
But in the case of children, the transgressions may appear worse now
than in the past. Fragonard's painting of a young girl masturbating
with the aid of her pet spaniel's tail is a chilling sight in the
Munich Alte Pinakothek. Greuze's _The Broken Pitcher_, with its
pubescent girl holding the eponymous cracked vessel but with one
breast bared, so that the viewer may be edified by the spectacle of a
fallen child, her virginity ruptured, while at the same time enjoying
the forbidden pleasure, is a morally repugnant painting, manipulative
and hypocritical. Yet some art historians are inclined to shrug,
citing it as a sign of the times, an expression of French society at
that period. Louis XV, after all, had a brothel in the Parc aux Cerfs
full of underage girls ready to fulfil the court's appetites.
Greuze is an unusual case in that we actually know the names of some
of his child models. Were he painting now, in Britain, we might well
expect the police to arrive at his studio. We might well expect the
Protection of Children Act of 1978 to be cited - the exploitation of a
minor, the indecent image of a child under the age of 18 - and
certainly a colossal outcry in the press. And the corollary: an
equally outraged defence of Greuze's rights as a painter and of the
image as a work of art.
But here, already, is one of the complications in this extraordinarily
tricky area of law that is not likely to get any simpler as time
passes. Is it the making or the displaying, selling and distribution
of indecent images of children that constitutes the offence? Who is to
say what is or isn't indecent? Should the law treat differently - to
make an admittedly absurd but useful hypothetical - the Bronzino or
the Greuze? Both are intended as allegories. Both are "fictions". But
unlike Greuze, Bronzino's degree of realism is so remote - the flat
patterning, the ceramic chill of the figures - that one cannot imagine
that actual children were ever involved.
We would never remove these paintings from the National Gallery or the
Louvre. Not only are they prophylactically sealed against affront by
virtue of time and status in these cathedrals of sanctified art, but
they have the figleaves of myth on the one hand - not real people,
only gods indulging in the usual revolting ways - and moral content on
the other. To the pure of mind, everything is pure; filth is in the
eye of the beholder.
And in any case, these are paintings not photographs. They have passed
through someone's imagination; they don't stand in one-to-one relation
to reality. They are what we might call fictions. But that, alas,
apparently no longer stands as a legal argument in the
English-speaking world. Witness two recent cases in America and
Australia.
In Australia a man was convicted of possessing child porn in 2008. The
offensive images showed Bart and Lisa Simpson engaged in lewd acts.
The defence argued - as we all might - that the Simpsons aren't real
children, never mind that they are bright yellow, have only four
fingers and very oddly shaped heads. The judge ruled that "the mere
fact that the figure depicted departed from a realistic representation
in some respects of a human being did not mean that such a figure was
not a 'person'".
In America, last December, Dwight Whorley appealed against his jail
sentence for knowingly receiving pornographic manga cartoons involving
the rape of children. These were defined as "obscene visual
depictions". The judgment - Whorley versus the United States of
America - is extremely finely detailed and involves numerous other
counts, including downloading obscene photographs of children, all of
them indicating the defendant's paedophilia - but what it makes clear
is that the court allows no distinction between "actual" and "virtual"
pornography.
I may be wrong, but it seems to me that Bronzino (or the National
Gallery, to be precise) might be in trouble were a case to be pursued
before such judges in America.
So when I read the many irate comment threads insisting that Britain
is now the most illiberal country on earth because Tate Modern "has
caved into the police" and removed Richard Prince's _Spiritual
America_ - the Brooke Shields image - I strongly doubt the truth of
these claims. In 10 years as art critic for this newspaper, only three
cases involving the police and images of children come to mind (I'm
happy to be corrected here) and not a single one resulted in a
prosecution.
In 2001 a photograph taken by Tierney Gearon was the subject of a
police raid on the Saatchi Gallery. I remember being astonished at
this news. The _News of the World_ called the exhibition in which it
appeared, I Am a Camera, "a revolting exhibition of perversion under
the guise of art" and called for the whole thing to be closed down.
The show was one of the best Saatchi ever held in his old premises in
north London. There were no images of perversion. The supposedly
inflammatory shot showed two naked children at the beach in identical
masks. The scene was comical - one cartoon face shared between two,
and a light skit on Botticelli's _Venus_, too.
The police, tipped off by the public, visited twice. Saatchi did not
remove the image. The police did not threaten to seize the pictures
(no matter what the papers claimed). Nothing happened, except to the
artist herself. The children in the picture were her own: "A lot of
press people came up to them and said: 'How do you like your mum
taking pictures of you naked?' It was very painful to me as a mother
and one of the reasons I moved out of London. But the truth of the
matter is that the police weren't that bothered, because if they were
they'd have said you have to take the pictures down immediately. I
think what they wanted... was a case they could take to court and
finally set down some boundaries."
That show contained another photograph, _Klara and Edda Belly
Dancing_, by Nan Goldin, about which no hue and cry was raised
whatsoever. Until, that is, it was shown again six years later at the
Baltic Arts Centre in Gateshead, when staff themselves contacted
Northumbria police. I don't care for this image. I wouldn't wish my
own young daughters to be photographed this way - one of them naked,
genitals exposed to the lens, prone between the legs of the other -
and I certainly would not wish such a photograph to be publicly
displayed out of respect for their rights.
Nor am I immune to the suggestion made by the eminent lawyer Anthony
Julius that the title deflects attention from the actual image,
attempting to control the spectator's response to what is clearly a
full-frontal depiction of a child's vulva. It is not a good work of
art and it is not to be supposed that Goldin - whose images of
Manhattan's Lower East Side demi-monde are often extremely moving -
has no sense of the need to clothe the child's vulnerability with that
explanatory title.
For Julius, it is an act of bad faith. "It's aesthetically immoral - a
violation of an artist's professional morals. Just as there's a set of
principles guarding business life, there is a distinct set of morals
guarding an artist's life." But he does not call for it to be censored
and, indeed, once again, there was no charge.
Lawyer Kerrie Bell examined the work for the Crown Prosecution
Service. "There is actually no legal definition of what is or isn't
indecent. Case law has decided that it's for a jury to decide, based
on 'current recognised standards of propriety'. I had to look at the
photo and decide whether a jury would determine it indecent and I
decided not."
Who can define "current recognised standards of propriety"? The CPS
can only guess at what a jury might think. But consider that in the
intervening years between the Saatchi and Baltic shows our awareness
of unimaginably atrocious paedophile crime has grown exponentially and
you may understand why the Baltic's own staff felt the need to contact
the police for advice.
When an inspector from the Obscene Publications Unit visited Tate
Modern's _Pop Life_ on 30 September, the prompt was a seizure of
outrage in the press. But art lawyer Mark Stephens, of Finers Stephens
Innocent, doesn't think it takes much to rouse the Met these days.
"This smacks of overzealous policemen with little cultural
understanding tramping about the Tate in their hobnail boots," he
says.
Yet even within the art world, Richard Prince's rephotographing of
Garry Gross's infamous photograph of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields
slathered in oil and wearing nothing but mascara - the erotic shot
made for a _Playboy_ publication, the copyright unsuccessfully sued
for by the adult Shields in an attempt to suppress it - remains moot.
Queasy, exploitative, pornographic: these are all words I have heard
in recent weeks, and not of Gross's original photograph, either.
For it is by no means clear how the appropriation - the
rephotographing and framing of the shot - differs in its content, as
opposed to its context (the "quotation marks" of low lighting, crimson
walls and gold frame). Indeed, rephotographing sounds very little
different than the category of proliferation in the Child Protection
Act.
Tate Modern has said that the police were by no means heavy-handed.
The decision to remove the photograph was taken by the museum -
publicly funded, publicly accountable - itself. Yet both sides have
been vilified, even though, as far as I can see, the photograph might
well be regarded as indecent according to the culture of our times.
Culture, after all, encompasses more than art.
I don't ask for this work to be banned - I am in favour of censure,
not censorship. But I would like to know, once and for all, what is or
isn't unlawful. Tate Modern has, I think, been judicious in
withdrawing the image and replacing it with another - _Spiritual
America IV_, in which Shields reprises the original pose 30 years
later, this time clothed in a bikini, as if reclaiming her rights. But
still, a full-scale prosecution would have been useful to discover how
a jury would have decided the case.
Quite apart from anything else, since we define them both as art, it
would have established some of the aesthetic, if not moral,
distinctions between Bronzino and Prince. And we would discover,
democratically, our current views of propriety.
Laura Cumming presents Painting Lolita, which will be broadcast on 1
November 2009 at 9.50pm on Radio 3
=========================================
Note how the author uncritically buys into the whole 'paedo-panic':
"But consider that in the intervening years between the Saatchi and
Baltic shows our awareness of unimaginably atrocious paedophile crime
has grown exponentially..."
Here are links to some of the art works discussed:
Bronzino's "An Allegory with Venus and Cupid":
http://www.wga.hu/art/b/bronzino/4/venus_cu.jpg
Manet's "Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe":
http://cgfa.acropolisinc.com/manet/p-manet20.htm
Greuze's "The Broken Pitcher":
http://www.wga.hu/art/g/greuze/broken_j.jpg
Fragonard's "Girl Making a Dog Dance on Her Bed"
http://www.abcgallery.com/F/fragonard/fragonard25.html
--
Cub Reporter
date: Sun, 01 Nov 2009 10:23:17 +0000
author: Cub Reporter
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