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Is it Art? In London You Can Ask the Police

Victoria Z. Alexander

Recently we have witnessed one of the most chilling events in recent art history as Directors of the Tate Modern in Britain pulled Richard Prince’s Spiritual America (which includes a nude image of 10 year old Brooke Shields) from the Pop-Life Exhibition. The original image is a photograph taken by Gary Gross which Prince appropriated for his work because he thought it captured some troubling aspects of contemporary society. Do you think it is child pornography? Until the Tate show it hung unproblematically in galleries and museums around the world for almost three decades. After a visit from London’s Metropolitan Police (Obscene Publications Unit) the work was pulled from the Pop-Life show because police told the Tate administration that it might break obscenity laws. Interestingly enough the police had not received a complaint but decided to visit the Tate after reading about the exhibition in a newspaper (Higgins and Dodd, 2009). Police said the image was of concern because it was of a 10-year old and “could be viewed as sexually provocative”. So can a goodly number of vegetables in my refrigerator but no one is rushing to pull down Giuseppe Archimboldo’s paintings. I wonder what the fallout for other artworks and shows may be from this incident.

Art history has many examples of nude children including hundreds of images of the naked baby Jesus. Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child is but one example.

Interestingly Prince’s work recently hung in an exhibition in Brussels without raising a word from the authorities or anyone else. Most there found it to be a rather mundane image which, despite itself, manages to raise interesting questions about the place of children (especially girls) in contemporary mediated society. The work also lent its name to an a retrospective of Prince’s work at the Guggenheim in New York where it hung in 2007 without complaint or sanction. This is the same New York in which former mayor Rudi Giuliani has recently called for a “decency panel” to ban certain works from the walls of New York’s galleries. Giuliani has had no success but in London he would simply have to call the aptly named “men in blue”. Indeed, in London he would now not have to even place the call!

Prince’s work has an interesting biography and it is not particularly surprising that controversy would one day find it. The name of the work is also appropriated from a 1923 photograph of the underside of a gelded horse by Alfred Stieglitz. Shields tried for several years to suppress the picture (her mother sold the photo session to Gross for $450). Some of the images appeared later in Playboy. Growing desperate her lawyers tried to make the case that the image was pornographic. Interestingly, an American court ruled: “…these photographs are not sexually suggestive, provocative, or pornographic, nor do they imply sexual promiscuity. They are pictures of a prepubescent girl posing innocently in her bath” (see Higgins and Dodd, 2010).

Aside from the fact that it is a painting made to look like a photograph I do not think we need ask for long what London’s police would have to say about Gerhard Richter’s Student (1967). Even Picabia’s subtle (unusually so for him) Nude Model would also probably not count as art before the London Police’s arbiters of art/porn. Or would it. I think the only guidelines the police are using is “likely (or not) to offend.

A significant portion of Lisa Yuskavage’s work may also now be verboten in London. And what of Sally Mann’s photographs of her children or some of Nan Goldin’s work involving young adolescents? Will London museums pass them by to avoid future police interventions?

It is bad enough that police feel empowered to visit a gallery in a supposedly free society and offer official opinions about an artwork. What is truly disturbing is the lack of resistance offered by the very acquiescent Tate Modern. The room in which the work hung was sealed off almost immediately as though some contaminant had been found. Within hours the work was off the wall and hidden away rather like child abuse is so often hidden away in our societies.

Child abuse and child pornography are very serious problems around the world today. It is probably of such wide concern because so many children, including many who have never spoken out as adults, were at one time abused by relative or someone in who’s trust they were placed. Don’t most people secretly suspect (not without evidence) that child abuse is rampant at least in the West? I understand why the police have units to scour the internet for child pornography. Even if its existence does not lead a pedophile to act – the very presence of such images almost always is a record of a crime that has already taken place.

Things may really become interesting in London if someone does complain about Bronzino’s Allegory of Venus and Cupid which has hung for decades in London’s National Gallery. What will the London Police do about this work which is widely acclaimed as one of the great masterpieces of the gallery? After all, it shows a boy (about age 10 as it so happens), fondling his mother’s breast while he kisses her. Will it be viewed as child pornography? Is it sexually provocative? Whom might it offend? Whatever one has to say about Richard Prince’s image – it is difficult to see how the police could avoid making the same claims about the Bronzino. We can hope they do not learn of its existence from the newspapers.

A lot of West Europeans worry that Turkey may enter into the European Union. Many of those same people (who have reasonable concerns about freedom of expression in Turkey) do not have the same concerns about England or Switzerland. Yet pretty Switzerland, which would be welcomed into the EU with open arms, has entrapped Roman Polanski as quickly as the Tate bowed to the cleansing of an exhibition by the police. Is either action really going to protect children? London is not far from the kind of place Giuliani dreams New York may yet be. “Notice to visitors – all images in this exhibition have been authorized by the police”.

The abuse of children is an ancient problem an hysterical actions by police and curators in art galleries is not going to make one whiff of difference to anything but our most cherished freedoms. What we learn from this incident is that even in one of the freest societies it is the police who now decide what is art. That is as disturbing to me as is the very offensive presence of child pornography. London’s police most certainly have better things to do with their time. I cannot help but wonder just where in their dispatch they are empowered to offer advice on what might “cause offence”? One wonders about the real motives of the officers involved. Surely they knew that suggesting the work be taken down would lead to precisely the kind of notoriety it has received – being viewed by millions more on the internet in the wake of the kerfuffle than would have ever seen it at the Tate. I suspect the police, who may not care about either freedom or art, were hoping to press a court case. The Tate’s response did at least thwart that. But at what cost to future exhibitions?

Full shame on the Tate Modern for such a spineless response to an attack upon the very freedoms the institution’s existence depends upon to be a legitimate public gallery. The Tate didn’t even have the courage to leave a blank space on the wall where the image had been which might have sported a small sign pointing out that an artwork was removed after a visit from local police. No, instead, the Tate replaced the work with another – Spiritual America IV (an image of the adult Brooke Shields posing in the same position in a small bikini). It may be an interesting attempt on her part to reclaim her image but its presence in the show comes off as merely pathetic in lieu of events.

I have never especially liked Spiritual America. It is a sad image of a girl who looks like Barbie but who’s face is made up like an adult. It reminds me too much of the way the advertising industry treats girls today. It does not make me think of pornography or sex and it probably arouses about the same proportion of the public as does the sight of a field of cows. It is an image for and about our sad period in history but it does perform one of art’s tasks – it makes some people uncomfortable while raising serious questions. That is why it should have remained on the walls of the Pop-Life show. London is mature enough to handle such a discussion – or is it? Chock one up for censorship in England’s authoritarian “nanny culture”.

References

Charlotte Higgins and Vikram Dodd (2010). Tate Modern removes naked Brooke Shields picture after police visit” (September 30): http//:www.guardian.co.uk/artand design/2009/sep/30/brooke-shields-naked-tate-modern/