The following is a response to an article carried by the California Ventura County Times in the Spring of 2008. The article described a controversy developing in a community north of Los Angeles concerning the appropriateness of art displayed in a local government building. It was in reality just another recursive iteration of the old-as-civilization tension between cultural taboo and art that teases or questions it. Local defenders-of-goodness had taken umbrage at the apparent and implied human genitalia visible on a painting and a sculpture displayed in the foyer of the public building, and were anonymously but passionately agitating that the Conejo Valley Arts Council have them removed. One of the pieces happened to be an abstract bronze sculpture created by my wife, Kathrin Raab-Questenberg. Since the division of labor in our home is I write and she sculpts, she asked me to ghost-write a defense (those of you who are married will intuitively understand this means I was bequeathed in the writing with a lovingly attentive assistance). The following appeared as an editorial in the same paper on June 17th, 2008.
Re: your June 14 article, "Nude art up, down, back up on a T.O. public wall: Officials deal with complaint plus the issue of censorship":
I am responding to comments concerning some pieces of art in the new Hillcrest Center of the Arts show, which some viewers found inappropriate.
First, let me say that it's always satisfying to see artistic reflexes in other human beings, reflexes that resonate to the symbols that breathe in good art, but are nevertheless missed by many as they burrow through the minutiae of daily living. Those taking umbrage at the sexual overtones of these art pieces understand at least that meaning hums from the center of art, and they express a willingness to mine that meaning for themselves. They are (laudably) engaging in the sacred artistic dynamic of filtering what they see in art through the complex of their own emotional experience.
But in the process they have become frightened, and I must say that was never my intent. They have pulled meaning from the pieces that burgeon far beyond their original implication, choosing to see in them a malevolent and lurid carnality that is simply not there. The pieces they malign are modeled on nothing more or less than the sublime biological opus of God, on the warm concavities and convexities found everywhere in the stunning repository of his creation. These are the same sexual (but not prurient) forms as those seen on the pistil and stamen of a day lily, or in the achingly stretched petals of a Phrag orchid, or in the fluttering and floridly orange edges of a Caribbean coral. If such forms mirror or telegraph what are (for the unnamed critics) disorientingly lewd themes, it is ultimately due to their own interpretation rather than anything intrinsic to the art itself.
There is a difference between sexuality and pornography, between God's creation and salacious human corruptions, and our critics seems to blur that distinction. I personally cannot explain their reflexive apprehension the pieces are sexually tainted, that they drip with lasciviousness, that even if they are, according to the newspaper article, "blatant genitalia," this automatically makes them sensual and corrupt. Ultimately, art is a Rorschach test, one in which viewers often wittingly (and unwittingly) morph the artist's message to fit their own preconceptions. That they construct from the radials and curves, pockets and hips of these pieces a suspicion of carnality is fascinating in its own right. It is exactly this predisposition of human beings to respond to art in personal and unusual ways that makes art such a magical pursuit.
In the final analysis however, at least as regards both my own and Rich Brimer’s original intent as the artists, the critics are simply wrong. The pieces they complain of, though frankly biological, transmit only the sublime innocence and grace of that biology. They are only echoes of the gorgeous movements of God's hand on the material surface of the world, reiterations of the god-caressed forms that float inside this space we occupy. They are just as lurid as an orchid, just as licentious as the apostrophe of skin that marks the edge of a human smile, just as indecent as the rounded "O" of a baby's mouth.
Of course the controversy in Thousand Oaks is not just about the theoretical substance and intent of the art pieces themselves. The members of the Arts Council are entrusted with representing not just art, but the interests and sensitivities of the community as well. Let me affirm for them that the accusers are wrong in their fear an epidemic of corruption will radiate from these pieces, one that dissipates and disorients our youth. I don't know exactly where their expertise regarding "the youth" lies, and I am sure they mean well, but I have surveyed the many children who tumble through my home on a daily basis (friends of my three young boys), and they have always seen nature and not naughtiness in these pieces. Children contain and funnel a natural awe with both beauty and the broad world, and are innately free of the neuroses that often complicate the intellectual and emotional inner life of adults.
Of course the council could just play it safe; there are plenty of pieces of art the critics would not find offensive. But then, what are we saying to the panorama of God's creation? That only certain things are acceptable? That we will decide what is appropriate and what is not in the broad textures of this Earth? That anything that even remotely resembles something even remotely sexual will be condemned, making things as superficially innocuous as a rose garden (where flowers seek sexual reproduction) or a petting zoo (where animals sometimes do the same) off-limits to our children?
In such a brutally sententious framework some of the most wondrous artistic achievements of our human race would fail the litmus test of propriety. Michelangelo's David would languish unseen in a museum vault, revealed only to those deemed mature enough to view its lurid and excitable contours; Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man would be obscured behind the equivalent of the back counter at a local 7-Eleven, covered in an opaque folio seal so as not to corrupt adolescent eyes.
Here’s the thing: a world dissolved of everything humanly potent is a world dissolved of everything human. In the umbrage these critics take, in the folds of the cultural despotism they represent, we find the beginning of the sterilization of our children's lives, the first imperious step toward being so sure we protect them from everything bad, we end up protecting them from everything.
And that, frankly, is a world I think even our critics would abhor. Now, if they could only see that it is exactly such a world they are so assiduously trying to form.
Posts
