Are conservatives so sexually repressed that they need a controversy before
they can safely talk about nipples? Did God actually find Janet Jackson's
nipple morally offensive?
Make way for the banned Art Auction - an auction with controversy built in. This auction is a time to remove the fig leaf and celebrate freedom of speech as if it still existed. Defenders of the First Amendment (that means you) are invited to create art to be auctioned.
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BANNED Art Auction
April 30, 7:30
pm Organizers include Africa Bound, the Student Environmental Action
Coalition, Eastside Neighborhood Arts, Culture and Technology. |
Why banned art?
Well mostly because it's fun, clever, witty, and sexy!
But also because there are too many paintings of blue circles on black
stripes and too many sculptures of white cubes on slightly larger white
cubes.
Because art should not match those tangerine drapes you bought at Target.
Because if you need a conversation piece for when in-laws visit, it might
as well be made of burnt flag ashes.
Because art has the power to piss people off and sometimes it's good to
piss people off.
The brilliance of controversial art is that the conservative right loves
to hate it and lefties love to love it.
If Giuliani never made a ruckus about Chris Ofili's painting, "The Holy Virgin Mary" (the one with the elephant dung, remember?) at the 1999 Brooklyn Museum of Art's 'Sensation' show, the art world may have never learned the power of poo as a viable artistic medium.
Exhibit
A. The Breast
In 2002, the US Department of Justice spent $8,000 on curtains to cover
up an art deco statue of a toga-clad woman entitled the "Spirit of
Justice." Apparently Justice was a bit too spirited for John Ashcroft,
who felt uncomfortable speaking to the press beside her exposed tin breast.
According to the BBC, the Department of Justice had been regularly renting
curtains for $2,000 to hide the offending breast and decided that spending
$8,000 on permanent curtains would be a good investment.
Exhibit B. The President's Monkey
In December, Syracuse University graduate, Chris Savido's painting, "Bush
Monkeys," a portrait using imagery of monkeys and swamp scum to form Bush's likeness, caused a 60-piece
art show at New York City's Chelsea Market to close a month early. A Republican
donor did the only thing he saw fit. He donated the funds to turn the portrait
into a billboard hanging over the entrance to Holland Tunnel. Four hundred
thousand drivers saw the work each week for a month. The irony never ceases.
Exhibit C. Stoning Hope
In late February, three City Council members from Lakewood City, Colorado
pulled an art exhibit entitled "Hope Stones," declaring it, "Anti-American."
The artist, Gayla Lemke, an air force veteran, included text in her work
such as the line, "A real coward is someone who drops a bomb from a
protected space several thousand feet up." The work included other
highly insulting lines such as "Love is a verb, not a noun."
Personal Inspiration
My first official banning was during my senior year in high school. The
literary magazine that friends and I published stumbled into its most successful
year ever, thanks to encouragement from the school's administration. We
didn't know what a blessing the simple phrase 'blowjob' was until the administration
declared our publication unfit for student consumption. Our otherwise dull
magazine became a sought after commodity. Who knew a poem that wasn't even
about sex - it was actually about mismanaged urban renewal - could be so
popular? Our underground marketing proved far more financially fruitful
than the typical lunchroom distribution. Keep in mind that my senior year
in high school coincided with the whole Clinton scandal thing, a time when
being overly sensitive about 'blow-jobs' was a national duty.
Throughout history, those in power have always tried to stifie the artist with the dissenting voice. As artists, we must not compromise our beliefs. In 1934, Diego Rivera refused to remove anti-capitalism imagery from his mural commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Rivera was banned from the site and the mural was first hidden by a massive drape and then axed at midnight by the Rockefeller Center's workmen. Rivera went on to recreate the mural in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, this time with an added portrait of Rockefeller, Jr. Rivera's first mural may have been destroyed but his story of resistance will outlive the fading brushstrokes of any mural of the status quo.
Kimberley McCoy is an Arts and Culture organizer at Eastside Neighbors in Partnership. She studied Art History at Syracuse University, is a radical cheerleader and a lover of chocolate cupcakes.
