Community Conversations

Self Expression and Decency

Prepared by Dr. Deland S. Anderson for the Pratt Museum based on a Community Conversation held 8 June 2005

Nearly thirty people assembled at the Pratt Museum for a conversation on censorship. Based on what was said during the evening, some were curious about the facts behind the title, some were committed to fight for their perceived rights, some were seeking balance of perspectives, some just wanted to come to a talk, regardless of the topic. A series of controversial events in the community involving artwork and/or artists during the past year had heightened people’s awareness on matters of self-expression and public decency. This was especially true for the many artists and art supporters in the area. Not surprisingly, the assembled group consisted almost exclusively of community members with interests in the arts. Conspicuously absent were teachers, parents, and administrators of local area schools. Conspicuous, that is, because each of the events leading up to this conversation had taken place in schools or during school visits to public art venues. What was surprising was the degree of difference expressed by such a seemingly like-minded group. For, though the general consensus was that art should not be censored, not all agreed what constituted censorship or that censorship was even the issue at hand. Numerous diverse perspectives emerged during side discussions of the several events mentioned above. Because those events were sensitive, the facilitator warned people off at the beginning from arguing over the details, and encouraged them to instead reflect on the broader issues. For this same reason, only a cursory description will be given of the events, with no indication of how or whether they might have been connected despite that in some people’s minds they formed a series, trend, or even an orchestrated movement.
Controversy erupted when a local non-profit art gallery brought visiting Tibetan Buddhist monks to a local elementary school where they performed "sacred" song, dance, chant, and prayer. Community members subsequently objected on the basis of the First Amendment separation of Church and State.
Another event involved visiting artists as well. In this case, a local artist was under contract with the same local non-profit art gallery to teach dance in Homer’s middle school. Concern was expressed that the artist was not dressed appropriately for the school, and was asked to change or leave. She left.
The other two events centered around school field trips, one to the aforementioned non-profit art gallery, and the other to the Pratt Museum. In the latter case, representatives from the school asked museum staff to cover in some fashion the nude torso of a small, figurative sculpture of a mermaid-like creature. The museum staff reluctantly acceded by allowing a school teacher to cover the object during the visit. In the former case, a representative from the school inquired of the gallery owner whether the exhibit in the gallery was appropriate for young children. The host cautioned that the exhibit contained nude paintings, but the teacher decided to view the exhibit anyway. Objections were raised by a parent shortly afterward, and a follow-up visit involved a State Trooper.

Those are the basics. Put those into the context of a town with a vibrant and active arts community and a history of conservative Christian opposition to public displays of nudity or symbolism, and the matrix is complete. Some of the perspectives expressed at the conversation are as follows:

It’s not even about art, it’s just somebody dressed up in a uniform trying to intimidate someone.
It’s about shaming the human body, especially the female.
It’s really about the separation of church and state.
It’s about free speech.
It’s about what’s appropriate for children, for school, for the public.
It’s about discrimination against women and minorities.
It’s about pornography.
It’s about aesthetics.
It’s about community standards against physical harm, violence, hatred, and offence.
It’s about those people trying to take over this country.
It’s about conservative Christians taking over the schools.
It’s about respecting other people’s points of view.
It’s about the institutionalizing of values.

What it’s about is hard to tell, because "they" didn’t come to the talk. A series of suggestions emerged to deal with difficult issues that might arise in this community between the arts and the public. They boil down to guidelines for visiting artists in the schools and school visits to outside venues. As for the former, it was suggested that, since the students constituted a captive audience, special attention should be given to the appropriateness of the presentation, including religious content, sexual content, and matters of nudity, including dress code. As for out of school visits, it was suggested that students could simply opt out of the activity. It was further suggested that both schools and galleries/museums work to clearly define institutional standards and make those available to concerned parties. For example, if a museum or gallery has stated principles that it will not alter an exhibit or an art piece, it is clear that visitors will get what they get, and so they must suspend their judgments at the door. Alternatively, if a school gives clear guidelines on age-appropriate content and activities to visiting artists, the artists will have to temper their judgments accordingly before entering the school. Such suggestions go a long way toward saving the connection between art and education, but a root issue remains to be discussed at each instance, and that is the status of nudity in Western society.

Western society emerged in the climate of the Ancient Near East. The overarching religious values of the various peoples of this region were expressed in fertility symbols, which because of their nature, involve varying degrees of nudity. Two cultural strains from out of this milieu wove together to form Christian European culture. They were that of the ancient Hebrews (ancestors of modern Jews) and the ancient Greeks (who were succeeded by the Romans and later modern Europeans.) As for the former, depictions of nudity were absolutely forbidden within that cultural context. Religious law expressly and unequivocally prohibited the making of images of anything "above the earth, under the earth, or in the earth." This theology of absolute iconoclasm undermined the worship of fertility gods and goddesses whose power resided in their images. By extension, nudity too was proscribed. Nudity in fact became the symbol of human frailty, shame, and disobedience. Perhaps more importantly for the present conversation, the religious ban on images prevented the birth of the visual arts in Israel (as it would also in the Islamic world). But things were different indeed in the case of Greece. The peoples of the Ancient Near East blended with invading Northern Asians to form the unique, and uniquely visual culture of the Ancient Greeks. Nudity and fertility were so much a part of this emerging culture that the Greek pantheon was conceived of as perpetually being in the buff, or nearly so. In addition to the better known Olympian deities, such as Zeus and Athena, there were countless local spirits, sprites, satyrs, nymphs, etc. They were all sexually active, and explicitly so. This is all by way of saying that, when the visual arts emerged in Greek society, they were habitually if not essentially tied to nude forms, particularly to representations of beautiful young men and women. At some point, most probably during the age of Periclean Athens, the nude became coextensive with beauty.

Enter Christianity. The Christian religion was established as a radical Jewish sect in 1st Century Palestine. As such it embraced and embodied the cultural values of the Jews, including the ban on imagery, and by extension nude images. But, as this regional sect began to spread around the eastern Mediterranean through the conversion of non-Jews, it became enmeshed in a foreign and vital culture. They were up against the nudes. Of course it was broader than this, but the issues of fertility, marriage, progeny, life itself, were perplexing in the context of a religion that conceived of the end of the world as imminent, as did early Christianity. It would take some four centuries for Christians to codify their approach to the vigorous arts of the classical world. Augustine of Hippo accomplished this in a work that was the standard of theology and aesthetics for the next 1,000 years of European history. It was titled, De Doctrina Christiana (On Christian Instruction) and it provided an elaborate allegorical method of interpretation that enabled the adept to interpret any cultural object or event as signifying the grace of Christ. Needless to say, this was easier in some cases than in others, but the overall project succeeded. Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century, and in so doing it inherited the canon of classical learning and arts as well as the dominion of the known world.

The history of images in Christianity is complex. The West did not follow the same path as the East. Icons (paintings of Christian saints with special metaphysical status) continue to define the Orthodox aesthetic today. In other words, the only pictures that are okay are ones of saints, and they aren’t really even pictures, but more like instantiations of once human beings. They are emphatically clothed. In the West, things started this way, but the metaphysical status of icons (and relics) was downgraded to symbolism after much ink and blood was spilled. So pictures, which in this case were genuinely and only images, were allowed so long as they depicted the grace of Christ in a relatively straightforward way. Generally the art of the culture was restricted to pictures of bible stories. Significantly, the only nude depictions were of the original couple, Adam and Eve, caught in the embarrassing moment of self-consciousness and shame. Hence art (and images of nudity) was dedicated to inculcating and promoting Christian doctrine: original sin, the forgiveness of sin, immortality, the glory of God, etc. As the Christian world continued to expand, however, the matrix became labyrinthine. Through a series of invasions into Asia, known collectively as the Crusades, Christians were brought again into contact with large portions of the classical tradition that had been left behind by history and dogma. These newly rediscovered ideas stimulated a cultural revolution. The Renaissance was the modern rebirth of classical ideas, languages, standards. To make a long and complex story short, the nude came back with a vengeance. The Church tried to control this new standard of beauty that threatened to eclipse the reigning aesthetic ideal of the goodness of God. But it was not successful. Compromises are apparent everywhere in Renaissance art and letters. Consider, for example, Michelangelo’s nude David. Here are wed prophetic dignity and classical beauty, spiritual heroism and nudity! Those who have read the bible stories know that David was anything but innocent and pure. But Michelangelo uses the technique of undressing him to convey these very values. This is the aesthetic complement to the Copernican Revolution.

The rest, as they say, is history. Once the nude was let out of the box, it could never be put back in by the Church, or by the State for that matter. Of course attempts are always being made, and in some parts of the world such attempts have been remarkably successful. Yet were one to survey global culture today, the hegemony of the nude would not appear to be in peril. Since the Renaissance, the beauty of humans has become the higher meaning of Western culture, and as that culture continues to spread throughout the world, so too that ideal extends its reach.

Western artists in the 20th century purposively attempted to replace organized religion with their art. The Futurists, the Constuctivists, the Surrealists, the Expressionists, Abstract Expressionists, and Symbolists all worked in transparent ways to supplement or supplant the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. Not coincidentally, this cultural avant-garde organized itself at the same time that conservative Christians in the United States were assembling under their chosen banner of fundamentalism. Sensing the threat of the forces and values of Modernity to Christianity, these believers relocated to a new world, to the 6,000 year old, three-storied, biblically bounded cosmos of 2000 years ago. Armed with the language of Heaven and Hell, the reality of 20th century Western culture was easier for them to understand or perhaps simply to cope with. (Interestingly, many avant-garde artists would concur.) The up shot is that both movements may be seen as parts of the rise of Modernism, only with differing valances. The avant-garde is a bearer of modernism; fundamentalism is a reaction against it. This leads to a complex dynamic, especially in America. There is a strong distrust between conservative Christians and avant-garde artists because they are battling over spiritual values at a time in history when meaning itself is suspect.

A word on pornography is in order, as much of the conversation hovered around this theme. And, though there were none in the conservative Christian community who openly participated in the conversation, it is safe to say that whether a nude image is pornographic is of concern to both sides. Numerous factors were mentioned in attempts to define pornography. Some remarked that what distinguishes pornography is that it is a violent assault on the image of a person, and one that all too often includes physical and emotional exploitation. After all, child slaves are used by pornographers. But then there seems to be a sliding scale on what is acceptable, given different cultures. Someone mentioned, for example, that Cezanne had painted an image of the reclining goddess Aphrodite and was widely scorned because he let out that the subject was a prostitute. But, this person continued, no one would object to it in today’s art world. Others wondered whether graphic sexual images could "tip" certain people "over" and make them deviant. Some responded that they had seen numerous constructive and rewarding encounters between young people and images of graphic sex. Then someone brought up the connection between pornography and photography. With modern techniques people film sex acts, complete with sound and music score. This is a very powerful medium, nothing like what is available elsewhere in the visual arts of Western culture. But someone brought up ancient erotica. Whether Chinese or Greek, this erotica indicates that pornography predates the camera, so it’s not just a matter of medium. Indeed, someone remarked that such erotica, because it does not involve exploitation of others, is fine, even therapeutic. And so it went. And so it will continue to be in American culture.

In closing, consider this continuum: All nudes are pornographic. No nudes are pornographic. Some nudes are pornographic. No matter what you choose, your choice will be controversial. One thing is for sure. On any given day, in any small town in America, you can find someone who believes that all nude images are pornographic. And this leads to the heart of this conversation on censorship. Should you shut that person down? Or should you tolerate the perspective?