How to Draw Silence
Arguing for, about, and over art has been happening for eons. As early as Michelangelo, as bizarre as Andre Breton with Dadaism, and as recently as The Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Sally Mann’s photography was featured in an exhibit called “Diaries of Home,” and featured multiple photographs of Mann’s own children. Five of these photographs were removed from the exhibit after local officials made claims that the photos were “obscene.” These photographs were returned to The Modern after a grand jury chose not to act. When I went to see the exhibit those five had already been removed from the show. But that’s only a portion of the story as there is now a push for legislation regarding the censoring of art in Texas. Who gets to decide if art is obscene? It sounds like a difficult thing to define although there have been attempts to do so. The Texas Penal Code states the following: “‘Obscene’ means material or a performance that: (C) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value.” I’m all for people having opinions about art, whether they like or dislike a piece, but maybe that’s where it should end.
Who decides if art has value? Unfortunately, past attempts at doing so have been disastrous. In the 1930’s there was a massive push to assign morals to artwork. Adolf Hitler decided that hundreds of works of art were inappropriate and without value, leading to Joseph Goebbels creating the first “Degenerate Art” exhibit. On November 6, 2013, a reporter for Witness (BBC Service Radio) Lucy Burns says that “the exhibition handbook explained that the aim of the show was to ‘reveal the philosophical, political, racial and moral goals and intentions behind this movement, and the driving forces of corruption which follow them.’” And in case that wasn’t enough of a suggested response actors were hired to do crowd work, moving around and verbally criticizing the art. Part of what makes painting, drawing and other creative outlets so powerful is they can be interpreted in multiple ways. That power is taken away when you’re told that a sculpture doesn’t matter or that a painting is worthless.
What artists choose to create and what museums choose to display is legally protected under The First Amendment. This means that artists are guaranteed the freedom of speech even in their work, but if this same work is declared as lacking “artistic, political, and scientific value,” it can be visibly removed and potentially banned. Does a painting lack value because it makes a viewer uncomfortable? Is nudity in art obscene? Does that remove its importance? I think the bigger question is should we moralize art, and if so, who do we trust to make that choice? If we want to protect the First Amendment for ourselves and our creators, then there is no place for Rep. David Lowe’s proposed House Bill 3958 which seeks to allow fines of “$500,000 per artwork per day for ‘museums that display certain obscene or harmful material.’” Furthermore, this bill would give courts the opportunity to immediately and indefinitely remove artwork.
I’d urge you to think about how nudity in art has existed before now and will continue to exist. Do we want people in politics deciding what we can or can’t see hanging in a gallery? The story of what happened to Sally Mann’s work in Texas is just one part of a larger work. There are other states that have attempted or will attempt to do something similar in the name of censorship. I bet there’s a painting somewhere that shows exactly how I feel about that. And if not maybe you or I should paint one that does.
