16 Feb 16
By Ceciel Brouwer, 16 February 2016
Ceciel Brouwer is a young academic doing a PhD at the School of Museum Studies in Leicester
In the United States, Australia and Britain a handful of art museums and galleries have come under scrutiny for displaying photographs of children.
Work by photographers such as Nan Goldin, Bill Henson and Sally Mann depicting children expressing a bodily awareness have provoked a reoccurring debate cast in two competing concerns. Voices generally sympathetic to the arts community defend the fundamental right of freedom of artistic expression and emphasise that children are able to give consent. Those calling for institutions to censor art accuse artists of perpetuating the sexualisation of children and ‘playing into the hands’ of paedophiles.
A more critical dialogue on the ethics of exhibiting photographs of young people’s bodies has been hard to find in these debates. The issues are bound up in the display of their image are addressed only during crises of controversy and too often presented as mutually exclusive, while voices of now-adult models remain profoundly absent.
Among the handful of models that have voiced their opinions in media, Sally Mann’s daughter spoke of her experiences as “teaching her the power of art” and inspiring her own career as an artist. Despite the media’s efforts, the now adult models of Bill Henson reflect on their collaboration with the artist as “empowering“. It seems that within circumstances that prioritise the needs and interests of the child, young people can experience an active engagement in art that is inspiring.
Yet not every parent or artist prioritises the best interests of the child when encouraging them to model, making this a particularly difficult ethical territory for museums to negotiate. An inherent power imbalance between parents and/or artists and young people allows some to pursue self-goals over the well-being of the child.
Adolescence is a time in which young people develop their identity, sexuality and thinking in adult-like ways, *while still remaining vulnerable and sensitive to expectations of adults* but also during which they have particular vulnerabilities and remain sensitive to expectations and coercion of adults. A young person might not see the implications of posing in certain ways as problematic until growing into adulthood. *I’d suggest making a new graph here*Consent is fluid and changeable because a person’s feelings may change according to the embodied experiences of adolescence. The meanings a photograph might evoke in other viewers might not become evident until later in life. In addition, photographs are mutable and can be read in very different ways that are temporally and culturally contingent.
In 2010, Vanity Fair published an article that exposed the emotional damage caused by Pop Art pioneer Larry Rivers on his two daughters by filming them naked during their early teens. Rivers made tapes of Emma and her older sister Gwynne on different occasions during the late 70s, “sometimes just with their breasts exposed, sometimes naked, as their father asked them questions about their bodies and budding sexuality“. Although film is inherently different from photography, it shares similarities in this context in that it is expected to show a supposed reality, the true image of a person. One of his daughters later said the film, Growing, contributed to the eating disorder and mental health problems she experienced during her adolescence and adulthood. Despite requests to have the tape destroyed, the archive’s keepers of The Larry Rivers Foundation have decided to keep the film behind closed doors in his daughter’s lifetime, but insist the collection should be kept for the sake of art.
Emma’s account embodies the idea that there is something predatory about the act of taking a photograph, as Susan Sontag asserted in On Photography. Photographs can blur the boundaries between reality and fiction and assert control over their subject, by turning a person into an object that can be possessed. River’s daughter is one of few who has attempted to gain back control over her image and ultimately failed to do so. Although the embargo on the video is partial, it does not grant her control.
Consent is negotiated and defined at the site of construction of the artwork by the relationships between the artist, parents and the autonomy of the child, but cultural institutions play a role by collecting, giving access to, exhibiting and publicising images. A museum grants the image a status inside the realm of art, but also brings work such as Larry River’s from the private into the public sphere. Outside the contemplated context of a gallery or archive, there is little space to negotiate the terms at which a photograph is used. Without any right of ownership of images of themselves, can a young person truly give lifelong informed consent for their image to be used?
No research exists that can enrich this discussion and more significantly bring to light how young people and adults reflect on their experiences. Moreover, a more open and interdisciplinary dialogue between lawyers, children rights advocates, medical ethicists, police, artists and museums is needed to equip institutions with the knowledge to encourage more informed and transparent decision-making and at the same time safeguard themselves against both censorship and self-censorship. A helpful way forward might take the shape of a more dynamic museum ethics discourse that appreciates the complexities of the context in which photographs are made and is rooted in an ethic of care towards the child on display.
Ceciel Brouwer is a young academic doing a PhD at the School of Museum Studies in Leicester. Her research explores how museums negotiate the ethical issues involved in collecting, interpreting and displaying photographs of children that express a bodily awareness. She became interested in ethics, consent and representations of young people when reflecting on the impact of her own experiences as a child participant in medical research and treatment. Her research is funded by the AHRC and Midlands3Cities.
30 Sep 15 | mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
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Battle of Ideas 2015
A weekend of thought-provoking public debate taking place on 17 & 18 October at the Barbican Centre. Join the main debates or satellite events.
5 Oct
Does free expression have its limits?
Join Index on Censorship magazine editor Rachael Jolley for a Battle of Ideas satellite event to debate the limits of free expression. With Dr Wendy Earle, Anshuman Mondal, Kunle Olulode and Tom Slater.
When: Monday 5th October, 7-8:30pm
Where: Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts Trust, 181 Bow Rd, London E3 2SJ
Tickets: £4.89 through Eventbrite
• Full details
17 Oct
Artistic expression: where should we draw the line?
Join Manick Govinda, Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg, Cressida Brown, Nadia Latif, Nikola Matisic with chair Claire Fox at the Battle of Ideas festival.
When: 17 October, 4-5:15pm
Where: Cinema 2, Barbican, London
Tickets: Available from the Battle of Ideas
• Full details |
It’s just over a year ago since a mob of anti-racist activists closed down South African theatre director Brett Bailey’s tableaux vivants work Exhibit B in London. The work had actors depicting the horrors of historical slavery, and colonial racism as museum exhibits, echoing the human zoo exhibits of 19th century, which still took place right up until the 1950s.
The work was powerful, visceral, steeped in humanity and stirred a powerful emotional response in the spectator. Yet, it seemed that this physical artistic expression was a step too far for many on the left and Britain’s black community. Most of them, and the 23,000 who signed the petition calling for the Barbican to shut down the work, hadn’t seen the performance. Instead, they felt triggered by a series of publicity photographs of actors performing actions of enslavement and of human bondage.
An image of a semi-naked black woman, sitting, waiting on a bed with her back to the camera, and the reflection of her face and eyes looking back at the viewer, composed and calm was uncomfortable viewing. The living tableau, entitled A Place in the Sun, colonial exhibit, Paris, 1920s was based on a factual account of a French colonial officer who kept a black woman chained to his bed, exchanging food for sexual services. This took place during the French, Belgian and Portuguese scramble for rubber in the Congo. It is a difficult image, the performance brought home the tenderness and active being of the captive woman and stirred emotions of both anger and sadness, as did all the tableaux which took us right to the present day, depicting deported refugee individuals who were killed by the hands hired immigration border security forces. It is hard to disagree with the Brett Bailey’s sincerity that the work is a hard-hitting indictment against racism.
Yet, for the protesters Exhibit B was “an exhibition by a privileged white man who benefited from the oppression of African people in the country [South Africa] in which he grew up, which objectifies black people for a white audience.”
At the opening night in London, 200 angry protesters, with the assistance of the British police force, successfully censored the work. Exhibit B will probably never be performed in England for the foreseeable future.
In the past, artistic, particularly literary works such as DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, James Joyce’s Ulysses to name a few were banned by state officials and enforced by draconian laws such as the Obscene Publications Act 1959. However, recent censorship of artistic expression is no longer the domain of the state and its officials. It is now curbed by radical activists and also by curators and arts professionals who feel too morally weak to defend and stand by controversial works of art. The police are now called in for their advice on artistic expression and inevitably, in the name of ‘public safety’ works of art are censored from the public.
Only recently we witnessed the censorship of a witty series of satirical photographs by an anonymous artist called Mimsy (sorry Banksy, you’ve been up-staged) depicting the popular children models of Sylvanians (cute furry creatures that akin to those in Beatrix Potter’s tales) innocently enjoying leisurely pursuits such as family picnics, sun-bathing on a beach, having a few pints or just simply watching TV where they are threatened by masked, armed creatures in black uniform called MICE-IS “a fundamentalist terror group [threatening] to annihilate every species that does not submit to their hardline version of sharia law”. However, this wasn’t taken down due to any law being contravened. The work, pulled from an exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London entitled Passion for Freedom (oh the irony) was a result of the gallery managers asking advice from the police as they felt uncomfortable with the “potentially inflammatory content of Mimsy’s work”. The police agreed that the work was inflammatory and couldn’t guarantee the safety of the gallery or visitors, therefore £36,000 would have to be paid to the police force for security cover.
Censorship by fear of terror, by mob-rule, by “triggering’ traumatic feelings, the growing self-censorship of artistic works and the British state’s lily-livered position in defending free expression come into arbitrary play, leading to a worrying situation where potentially any work of art can be censored.
It’s easy to morally grandstand and point the finger at the horrific killings of cartoonists and bloggers in Bangladesh and Iran and criticise the Chinese authorities for their ‘house imprisonment’of Ai Weiwei, but if we cannot defend all forms of artistic expression from the high arts to popular culture, we are seriously compromising artistic freedom for fear of upsetting various communities of interests, be they Muslims, feminists or anti-racists.
I am currently reading Azar Nafisi’s brilliant latest book, Republic of Imagination (2014) where she writes a chapter on the US writer Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Huckleberry Finn as a major inspiration in her life and moral outlook. The novel is currently triggering some US literary students and professors into a state of apoplectic trauma as the word ‘nigger’ is used 219 times in the novel. The decision to re-publish the novel and replace the word ‘nigger’ with ‘slave’ is a dangerous re-writing of history and art. Nafisi defends artistic expression unreservedly and quotes from one of Twain’s notebooks as follows:
“Expression – expression is the thing – in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature.” (Republic of Imagination, p.88)
Art should be dangerous, unsettling, funny, an emotional journey, beautiful, entertaining and yes, obscene. Artistic expression, in all its manifestations, is a value that must be defended in our Western democracies. We should heed Mark Twain’s wise words.
Manick Govinda is head of artists’ advisory services for ArtsAdmin
Govinda is participating in the 17 Oct Artistic expression: where should we draw the line?Battle of Ideas session with Index on Censorship CEO Jodie Ginsberg, Cressida Brown, Nadia Latif, Nikola Matisic with chair Claire Fox at the Battle of Ideas festival.
Index on Censorship magazine editor Rachael Jolley is speaking at Does artistic expression have its limits? at the Bow Arts Trust on Monday 05 October
29 Sep 15 | Art and the Law Commentary, Artistic Freedom Commentary and Reports, mobile, News and features, United Kingdom
The following was presented at No Boundaries: A Symposium on the Role of Arts and Culture. Video of Julia Farrington and the day’s other speakers is available on the No Boundaries site.
In 1972, Michael Scammell, the first editor of Index on Censorship magazine, wrote in the launch issue: “Freedom of expression is not self-perpetuating but needs to be maintained by the constant vigilance of those who care about it.”
We obviously haven’t been very vigilant here in the UK.
As we heard last week, when the artist Mimsy’s work Isis Threaten Sylvania was removed from the Passion for Freedom exhibition at the Mall Galleries, London, artistic freedom of expression was put up for sale at £36,000.
And disturbing though it is, the news is a gift to those who have been concerned about the direction policing of politically or socially challenging art was taking. Now the situation is crystal clear and marks an alarming new approach to the policing of controversial art.
In last week’s case, the police were concerned about the “potentially inflammatory content” of Mimsy’s work, so they gave the organisers a classic Hobson’s Choice: if they went ahead with their plans to display it, they would have to pay the police £36,000 to cover the cost of security for the six-day show.
The police took the view that a perfectly legal piece of art, which had already been displayed without incident earlier in the year, was inflammatory. And in the balance of things as they stand, this opinion outweighs the right of the artist to express him or herself, the organisation’s right to present provocative political art, the audience to view it and those that protest against it, the right to say how much they hate it.
If this goes unchallenged, it will set a very dangerous precedent for foreclosing any work that the police don’t approve of.
But going against police advice is tough. In Index’s information pack on Public Order – part of a series of booklets looking at laws that impact on what is sayable in the arts, we ask the question: “What happens if police advise you not to continue with presenting a piece of work because they have unspecified concerns about public safety – and yet tell you it is your choice and they can only advise you?”
The answer is that in principle, in law, you are free to proceed.
But it goes on to talk about duties the organisation has to their employees and members of the public present on their premises, which fall under licencing and other obligations.
But the point is no one has taken this to the courts, so it hasn’t been tried and tested.
As it stands — and in the heat of a crisis when these decisions are mostly reached — police advice is a Hobson’s Choice in pretty much every case.
This latest example of policing comes hot foot after revelations in the summer that the police were involved in, though allegedly not directly responsible for, the cancellation of Homegrown.
And it is only a year since Exhibit B at the Vaults in London and the Israeli hip-hop opera The City in Edinburgh were cancelled on the advice of the police following protests outside both venues.
Way back in 2004 the theatre world was shocked when protest led to the closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play – Behzti following police advice. Gurpreet says that what shocked her most at the time, was how the politicians didn’t take the closure as an opportunity to challenge the police decision, defend her right, and promote the importance of freedom of expression.
Six years later, the Coventry police wanted £10,000 per night to guarantee the safety of the premier production of Gurpreet’s subsequent play Behud at the Belgrade Theatre, which was her creative response to having her play cancelled in Birmingham; and which, because of the playwright’s history of attracting controversy, was treated by the police as a public order issue from day one of the production.
When faced with the police’s bill, Hamish Glen, artistic director of the Belgrade wrote to the police and said it was a fiscal impossibility for the theatre to pay up, and would amount to de facto censorship of Gurpreet’s voice for a second time. They came back asking for £5,000 per night instead which got the same response from Hamish – and finally they waived the fee and the show went ahead without incident.
In investigating this for a case study I wrote, I asked how the police had come up with the figure, and the answer was that it was assessed by the same criteria for special police services at a football match or a music festival. There is no guidance on policing a not-for-profit arts organisation dealing with fundamental rights – it is not on the police radar.
Writing a case study on the policing of the picketing of Exhibit B by Boycott the Human Zoo earlier this year also gave a series of interesting insights
Only one police officer from British Transport Police – The Vaults are under Waterloo Station and therefore under BTP jurisdiction – and two Community Police Officers attended the demonstration of 200 people – so it was obviously not considered a priority, despite the fact that social and print media made it clear that the production was very divisive and both the Boycott and the Barbican had talked to the police.
When, as the protest escalated and extra police arrived, the officer who took charge, talked to Sara Myers, the organiser of the Boycott, asking what was going on – they seemed not to know anything about it. He asked Sara what she wanted. She said she wanted the Barbican to close the show, and she told him that they intended to picket each of the five performances if they did not. The officer’s response was this is much ado about nothing – we haven’t got the resources to police this – we have to be out fighting serious crime.
So The Heckler’s Veto was seen to be working in London and in Edinburgh, just as it had worked in Birmingham ten years previously. When faced with a noisy demonstration, the police showed that they would take the path of least resistance and advise closure of whatever was provoking the protest.
And now a year later, with the removal of Isis Threaten Sylvania, we have seen a shift from the police advising closure following protest, to the police contributing indirectly or directly to the decision to remove work to avoid protest.
This is pre-emptive censorship by the police and represents a major shift in policing and is a clear infringement of civil liberties. It threatens the arts as a space for public debate about the politics of the world we live in.
Though of course because of the paradox of censorship, it actually has the opposite effect, it has amplified the work and many, many more people will be talking about that work because of the police’s move to close it. That doesn’t lessen the sting of the police’s new boldness and the trajectory they seem to be on with this latest act of censorship.
But let’s look at it from the police’s point of view. They are facing massive cuts themselves. George Osbourne’s latest figures indicate at the lowest end – a 25% cut on top of previous rounds. There are fewer police officers on the streets than at any time since the 1970s.
There is no guidance about policing of artistic freedom of expression, compared to pages of guidance on managing protest which stresses on every page the right to protest. When it comes to artistic cases it is left to professional judgement. I have spoken to several senior police officers about this and they will admit that mistakes have been made, but there have never been any consequences for these mistakes, so they remain quite blithe about them. And the bottom line with the police is always public safety.
They also, I believe, feel they have jurisdiction over certain volatile and socially sensitive areas of society where they have duties to prevent crime and to maintain law and order and have community cohesion responsibilities. So when artists venture into this territory with work that may cause offence, their reaction is to simply remove the provocation.
We also now have elected police commissioners who have political agendas – where inevitably policing unpopular, minority voices is going to come low on their agenda – however brilliant they may be, or however important they might be to the fundamental tenets of a liberal democracy.
And this has never been challenged. There has never been any judicial review of the policing of artistic freedom of expression. Judicial Review is the recourse that any arts organisation has when faced with what they consider to be inadequate or unfair policing. Actions by the police are subject to review by the courts for a number of reasons, including for instance if the police failed to consider alternatives to closure, or Article 10 rights generally.
We can and should expect more of the police. Tamsin Allen – senior partner at Bindmans states in an article she wrote for the case study of Behud: “The police have an obligation to fulfil their core duties – those are now enhanced by their duties under the Human Rights Act not to act incompatibly with the European Convention on Human Rights. The convention imposes both a qualified obligation not to interfere with the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and protest and a positive obligation to take appropriate steps to protect those rights. This may change if the Human Rights Act is abolished.”
And we are talking here about legal expression. We do not see artists going to court in the UK – the last major case in this country was Lady Chatterly in the 60s; the Oz Trial, the publishers of the poem The Love That Dares to Speak its Name in the 70s; and the lesser known case of the Human Earrings in 1989, being amongst the very few other cases.
It is also worth pointing out what is obvious – that nearly all the artworks that have been foreclosed by the police over the past few years deal with race and or religion and, Exhibit B notwithstanding, the majority of contemporary cases of contested art are by artists from black and ethnic minorities. This only emphasises the fact that freedom of expression is a biased affair in the UK and I believe will remain so while our society and our culture are not equal.
Acknowledging that, I would add to what Michael Scammell said – the space for freedom of expression has to be more than just maintained – it has to be enlarged and extended.
And as an urgent part of that, we have to challenge this culture of policing, this policing of culture.
The climate is not set fair for promoting the importance of artistic freedom of expression – the political climate is set against human rights. Policing as we have seen with absolute clarity this week in the case of Mimsy’s work, is subject to the prevailing laissez faire of the market place.
In late 2013, I asked Keir Starmer, former director of public prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service, if he felt there was a need for police guidance in the area of art and offence and he said emphatically yes. He said he thought it was going to be an increasingly major policing issue over the coming years. He was right.
We have to open up discussion at the highest level with police and the prosecution service, if we are to safeguard the space for freedom of expression in the arts, especially where it relates to political art. The climate might not be conducive, but it has not been tried before, systematically – it is uncharted – let’s go there.
13 Sep 15 | Events, mobile
Does free expression have its limits? is one of this year’s Battle of Ideas satellite events, produced in collaboration with east London arts charity, Bow Arts.
For many, the removal of the Lord Chamberlain’s right to censor the London stage in 1968 was hailed as a key liberalising moment of the Sixties. Yet in contemporary Britain there exists an uneasy attitude to how we approach offensive art. A year ago, the Barbican was forced by activists to close down an exhibition that was deemed offensive to black minority communities. More recently, the audience booed an ‘offensive’ rape scene in a performance at the Royal Opera House, and, in response, the company modified the scene. In August, popular US rapper Tyler the Creator was refused a visa to enter the UK on the grounds his work ‘encourages violence and the intolerance of homosexuality’ despite making numerous visits in recent years with comparatively little outrage.
For many in the arts world, the limits of free expression can be difficult to understand. Very few instances of overt censorship exist, yet from the closure of controversial 2004 play Behzti onwards, there has been a growing trend of venues and publishers being willing to pre-emptively withdraw or edit work either on health and safety grounds or for fear of causing offence. Exhibit B protestors, like the booing audience at the ROH, argued that they were legitimately expressing their opposition to work they find insulting. Following the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris this year, many proclaimed ‘Je Suis Charlie’ in solidarity with offensive speech; yet there was less outcry when controversial comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was arrested for expressing sympathy for the murderers and found his work censored by the French state for routines accused of anti-Semitism and racism.
Is artistic freedom under threat from ‘mob rule’ of community activists and noisy Twitter campaigns by the over-sensitive minority? How should artists respond to claims that their work is offensive? Are ‘trigger warnings’ that alert people to something they might want to avoid a solution? Or do they add to a climate of disapprobation where some ideas are seen as ‘out of bounds’? Are the arts themselves a ‘safe space’ to discuss topics and themes we would not tolerate in our day-to-day lives, or does that defence undermine free expression for all? Isn’t it the role of the artist to go beyond the boundaries, to challenge our perceptions and, on occasion, to cause offence?
When: Monday 5th October, 7-8:30pm
Where: Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts Trust, 181 Bow Rd, London E3 2SJ (map)
Tickets: £4.89 through Eventbrite
Speakers include:
- Dr Wendy Earle — Impact Development Officer, Birkbeck, University of London; convenor, Institute of Ideas Arts and Society Forum
- Rachael Jolley — Editor, Index on Censorship magazine
- Anshuman Mondal — Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, Brunel University London
- Kunle Olulode — Director, Voice4Change England and creative director Rebop Productions
- Tom Slater — Deputy editor, Spiked
