Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork 9781350985636, 9781838608118

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Róisín Kennedy is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Irish Art at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on the critical reception of modernist art in Ireland, the role and function of art writing post 1880, and on the position of women as artists and subjects in modernist art. Riann Coulter is Curator/Manager at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery and Studio in County Down. She specialises in Irish and British modern and contemporary art and has over 15 years’ experience curating and co-curating exhibitions for regional and national institutions throughout Ireland.

Censoring Art Silencing the Artwork Edited by Ro´isı´n Kennedy and Riann Coulter

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright Editorial Selection q 2018 Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter Copyright Individual Chapters q 2018 Jonathan Blackwood, Louise Boyd, Riann Coulter, Judith Devlin, Kirstie Imber, Alana Jelinek, Róisín Kennedy, Sean Lynch, Elena Parpa, Devon Smither and Alexey Ulko. The right of Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Visual Culture ISBN: 978 1 78831 383 4 eISBN: 978 1 78672 529 5 ePDF: 978 1 78673 529 4 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Minion Pro by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall

Contents ix xi xv

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork 1 Censorship in Disguise: Elusive Forms of Exclusion and the Examples of Cypriot Artists Socratis Socratous and Erhan Öze Elena Parpa Regulating Rumours Language that Confines Protocols that Bind Conclusion 2 Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran Kirstie Imber

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13 15 19 22 25 31

Engaging with Censorship 34 Authorising Art and Culture in Iran: A Brief Overview 35 Silenced Voices? 38 Conclusion 43 3 Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s Judith Devlin Patronage and Oversight Self-Policing The Dawn of the Terror

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47 48 50 55

Censoring Art The Anti-Formalist Campaign Conclusion 4 Sex, Art and Museums: On the Changing Institutional Censorship of Shunga Louise Boyd What is Shunga? Censorship in Edo Japan Censorship in the UK Changing Attitudes to Shunga in the British Museum Exhibiting Shunga Shunga and Modern Japan Conclusion 5 ‘Naked Ladies’: The Censorship of the Nude in Canadian Modern Art Devon Smither John Lyman’s ‘Travesties, Abortions, Sensual and Hideous Malformations’ John W. Russell and the 1927 Canadian National Exhibition Canada’s Olympia 6 Censorship in the Irish Free State and its Implications for Irish Art Róisín Kennedy Censorship and the Irish Free State Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window Jack B. Yeats’s Jazz Babies ‘Defensive Attitudes’ – the Long-Term Implications of Censorship 7 Post-Soviet and Post-colonial Forms of Art Censorship in Central Asia Alexey Ulko

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59 64 71 71 73 75 77 80 83 84 87

90 92 96 107 107 111 114 118 123

Contents 8 In the Shadow of Alexander the Great: Censorship, Ideology and Contemporary Art in Macedonia Jonathan Blackwood An Ecology of Contemporary Art in Macedonia Case Study: Igor Toševski’s Territory, Plostad Makedonija, 2009 Case Study: Obsessive Possessive Aggression’s Solution, 2012 Conclusion 9 The Contemporary Condition of Eilís O'Connell's The Great Wall of Kinsale Sean Lynch 10 Corporate Censorship Alana Jelinek Not Censorship but Something Else: The Art World Not Censorship but Something Else: The Market Corporate Censorship The Self-Censoring Artist

137 138 145 149 152 157 177 179 180 183 189 197 205

Selected Bibliography Index

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List of Figures Figure 1.1 Socratis Socratous, Seascape With Palm Tree and Warship in the Kyrenia Waterfront, Cyprus, 2008. C-Print, 46.5 £ 70 cm. Athens: The Breeders. Courtesy of The Breeders, Athens. q The artist.

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Figure 1.2 The statement announcing the removal of Erhan Öze’s work, Nicosia, 2011. Courtesy of UNCOVERED Archive. q Özgul Ezgin.

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Figure 2.1 Phillip Toledano, The Absent Portrait, 2013. Original packaging. q Photo courtesy of Phillip Toledano.

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Figure 2.2 Mandana Moghaddam, The Well, 2008. Installation. Gothenburg, Sweden. q Photo courtesy of Mandana Moghaddam.

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Figure 3.1 Solomon Nikritin, The Old and the New, 1935. Oil on canvas, 178.5 £ 216 cm. Savitskii Museum of Visual Arts, Nukus, Karakalpak Republic, Uzbekistan. Courtesy Galeyev-Gallery, Moscow.

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Figure 4.1 Kitagawa Utamaro, from the series Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow), 1788. Colour woodblock print, 25.4 £ 36.9 cm. This is one of the most well-known shunga images: it has been exhibited and reproduced more readily than other shunga because it is less explicit yet of high artistic quality. London: The British Museum. q The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 4.2 Katsushika Hokusai, from the series Ehon tsuhi no hinagata (Picture-book Models of Couples), c.1812. Colour woodblock print, 25.9 £ 38.9 cm. This print, depicting a couple in the throes of passion (note the curled toes and dishevelled hair),

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Censoring Art was owned by Sir Gerald Kelly and given to the British Museum in 1972 by his wife. London: The British Museum. q The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 5.1 John W. Russell, A Modern Fantasy, 1927. Oil on canvas, 243.8 £ 218.4 cm. Estate of Anna M. Russell.

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Figure 5.2 Lilias Torrance Newton, Nude in the Studio, 1933. Oil on canvas, 203.2 £ 91.5 cm. Collection of A.K. Prakash. Estate of Lilias Torrance Newton. q National Gallery of Canada.

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Figure 6.1 Harry Clarke, The Geneva Window, 1929. Stained glass, 181.6 £ 101.6 cm, Wolfsonian Museum, Florida International University. Image courtesy of The Mitchell Wolfson Jr Collection, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida.

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Figure 6.2 Jack B. Yeats, Jazz Babies, 1929, 61 £ 91.5 cm. Private collection. Estate of Jack B. Yeats, DACS London/IVARO Dublin, 2018. Photograph courtesy of Adam’s Fine Art Auctioneers. 115 Figure 7.1 Umida Akhmedova, from Women and Men from Sunrise to Sunset, 2005. Permission of the artist.

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Figure 7.2 Vyacheslav Useinov, Abdication of Swastika, 2013. Permission of the artist.

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Figure 8.1 Igor Toševski, Territory, 2009. Plostad Makedonija, Skopje, Macedonia. Destroyed. Image q the artist.

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Figure 8.2 Obsessive Possessive Aggression, Solution, June 2012. Poster print on billboard. Destroyed. Skopje, Macedonia. Image q the artists.

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Figure 10.1 Peter Kennard, Peace on Earth, 2003. Image for projection. q Peter Kennard.

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Figure 10.2 Pankof Bank (Manon Awst, Sam Causer, Simon Fujiwara), Another Waste of Space, 2005. Image courtesy of Pankof Bank.

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Figure 10.3 Sophie Hope, Performative Interviews, video still, London, 2010. Image courtesy of Sophie Hope.

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List of Contributors Jonathan Blackwood lectures in Critical and Contextual Studies at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. He has written extensively on contemporary art in the former Yugoslav countries, in particular Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia, and is the author of Introduction to Contemporary Art in Bosnia-Herzegovina (duplex100m2, Sarajevo, 2014) and Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia (mala galerija, Skopje, 2016). Also an active curator, he has delivered shows in venues such as Summerhall in Edinburgh, duplex100m2 in Sarajevo, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. He lives and works between Aberdeen, Sarajevo and Skopje. Louise Boyd has a Masters degree in Japanese Art History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a PhD from the University of Glasgow. She is funded by the Japan Foundation as the Assistant Curator for Japan at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, having previously worked at the British Museum, London (in collaboration with Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto), the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, and Dumfries Museum. Her interests include Edoperiod art (c.1603 –1868), especially ukiyo-e and Utamaro, the work of female artists, the history of collecting and collections, and issues relating to gender and sexuality. Riann Coulter is a curator and art historian specialising in modern and contemporary British and Irish art. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin with a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, she has held post-doctoral scholarships from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and the Irish Research Council for Arts and Humanities and has published widely on Irish art. She has curated over 25 exhibitions for institutions including the Crawford Art Gallery, RHA, Ulster Museum, IMMA, Highlanes Gallery, West Cork Arts Centre, Butler Gallery and

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Censoring Art the F.E. McWilliam Gallery, Northern Ireland, where she has been the curator since 2009. Judith Devlin is Professor Emerita in the School of History, University College Dublin. Her interests include the cultural history of modern France and Soviet Russia. Among her publications are The Superstitious Mind: Peasants and the Supernatural in 19th Century France (1987); The Rise of the Russian Democrats: the Causes and Consequences of the Elite Revolution (1995); Slavophiles and Commissars: Enemies of Democracy in Modern Russia (1999), War of Words: Culture and the Mass Media in the Making of the Cold War in Europe (co-edited with Christoph Müller, 2013) and most recently World War I in Central and Eastern Europe (I.B.Tauris, 2018). Kirstie Imber is Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, London, where she is preparing her PhD for publication. Aside from her work on contemporary Iranian art, her current research interests are focused on censorship and freedom of speech in art and cultural history, and the intersection between art and law. Alana Jelinek is an artist with over 25 years’ experience exhibiting and making artworks in a wide range of media. She often works site-specifically using performance, novel-writing, and participatory practices to address questions of colonialism and its legacy, from the point of view of dominant or colonial culture. The title of her PhD is ‘Art as a Democratic Act’, a thesis that was later revised and published as This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (I.B.Tauris, 2013). She continues to contribute to the theory or philosophy of art from a practitioner’s point of view, and to make art. Since 2009 this has been in the context of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Between 2013 and 2018, Jelinek worked on the European Research Council-funded project, Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums. She now works as a Research Fellow with the School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire. Róisín Kennedy is Lecturer in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. She has published widely on modern Irish art and its contexts in edited collections and in Circa, Third Text and

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List of Contributors Journal of Art Historiography. She is co-editor with Marguerite Helmers and Angela Griffith of Harry Clarke and Artistic Visions of the New Irish State (2018). Her book Art and the Nation State: The Reception of Modernist Art in Ireland is due to be published in 2019. Sean Lynch is a Brussels-based artist. In 2015 he represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale. Educated at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, he has recently held solo exhibitions at The Rose Art Museum, Boston, Modern Art Oxford, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver. He has published extensively, and lectured throughout Europe and North America. Elena Parpa is an independent arts writer and curator based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has worked as an arts editor at Phileleftheros newspaper (2000 –13) and as the managing editor of the cultural supplement Ysterografo (2007 – 10). She has curated exhibitions on contemporary art from Cyprus including How to Make a Garden (Visual Artists Association, Nicosia, 2012) and Exercises in Orientation (NiMAC, Nicosia, 2013 and Peltz Gallery, London, 2015). She completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, London in 2018 and is a Scientific Collaborator at the University of Nicosia and at the Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol. In 2017, she curated the opening exhibition of Pafos2017, European Capital of Culture, titled plάnht16 (plánetes). She is the author of Next Spring (2018), edited by Laura Preston. Devon Smither is Assistant Professor of Art History/Museum Studies at the University of Lethbridge, Canada. She is a graduate of the University of Alberta (BA), the University of British Columbia (MA) and the University of Toronto (PhD). Her research and teaching interests include gender and modernity, modern art in Canada and historical Canadian women artists. She is completing a book manuscript based on her PhD thesis on the female nude in Canadian painting and photography from 1913 to 1945. Alexey Ulko, linguist and art critic, was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan and taught at the Samarkand State Institute of Foreign Languages. A graduate of Samarkand University and the University of St Mark and

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Censoring Art St John (Plymouth, UK), he is a freelance consultant on language, culture, and contemporary art. He is the author of Uzbekistan – Culture Smart! The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture (2017). He has contributed numerous articles to various Central Asian and international journals and online publications including Modernism Beyond the West: A History of Emerging Art (2012).

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank Brian Foss, Jane Humphries, Alana Jelinek, John Bowlt, Ildar Galeyev and Catherine Marshall, also copy-editor Elizabeth Mayes and the editors at I.B.Tauris, Anna Coatman, Baillie Card and Lisa Goodrum, for their support and advice. We also wish to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Research for the publication was supported by OBRSS and the College of Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin and by the National University of Ireland.

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Introduction

Róisín Kennedy and Riann Coulter

Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork The effects of art censorship or unjustified restrictions of the right to freedom of artistic expression and creativity are devastating. They generate important cultural, social and economic losses, deprive artists of their means of expression and livelihood, create an unsafe environment for all those engaged in the arts and their audiences, sterilize debates on human, social and political issues, hamper the functioning of democracy and most often also impede debates on the legitimacy of censorship itself.1

According to Matthew Bunn, the traditional liberal conception of censorship ‘sees it as external, coercive and repressive’. Censors are perceived as authoritative social actors, ‘who interfere in the free exchange of ideas to repressive effect’.2 In terms of art history, the repression of modernist art under the Nazis provides an example of this conventional form of censorship. But, as Bunn and recent scholars have argued, censorship is far more pervasive than this model might suggest. The case studies of art censorship explored in this book emerge from new research by art historians, historians and artists whose work seeks to address this wider interpretation of the theme.3 Drawn from global contexts, both historical and contemporary, their findings indicate a complex and dynamic interaction between the artwork and the frameworks of censorship and control that surround its production and reception. Sue Curry Jansen’s study of post-Enlightenment censorship draws attention to the role of socially structured silences that enable insidious

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Censoring Art forms of censorship to thrive.4 Her ideas inform many of the essays in this book, providing ways of identifying invasive yet covert mechanisms of censorship and their impact on the production and reception of art. Jansen’s re-orientation of the operations of censorship is echoed in Pierre Bourdieu’s argument in Language and Symbolic Power (1991) that nonreflective kinds of censorship, notably self-censorship, are more powerful and significant than overt, formal repression.5 Within these new frameworks the very term ‘censorship’ seems inadequate.6 Judith Butler rejects the appellation ‘censorship’ in favour of ‘foreclosure’, which she uses to indicate the ways in which codes of unspoken rules decide what is permissible in speech and language. Of foreclosure’s ambiguous power, Butler writes, ‘when we cannot tell whether or not speech is censorious, whether it is a vehicle for censorship, that is precisely the occasion on which it works its way unwittingly’.7 Foreclosure is a valuable way of understanding the symbiotic relationship between the artwork and the prevailing ideologies that surround it. The artworks discussed in this volume range from those that have been destroyed to those that have been hidden, ignored, transformed or never made. In addition to insidious, silent processes of censorship such as the bureaucracy and self-censorship that curtail the production and exhibition of artworks, traditional prosecution of artists and state-sanctioned destruction of artworks continue apace. The latter suggests that, despite the liberal if cossetted nature of the global art world, art still has the power to provoke reaction and generate meaningful debate beyond the margins of the gallery or art event. As well as negating certain artworks, the mechanisms of censorship can equally highlight, and even produce, art that responds to or reflects the underlying concerns of the censor, many of which may be shared by the artist and the audience. In the reinterpretation of censorship everyone is at some level actively censoring. This process of negotiation in which the artwork both participates in acts of censoring and attempts to undermine it results in oblique and deliberately complex works or, equally, in awkward and compromised ones. The recalibration of a dominant aesthetic or theme is an ‘unintended consequence’ of censorship and one that may even be regarded as beneficial to the artwork.8 Primarily concerned with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the majority of essays in this collection examine art censorship from places that lie beyond the recognised art centres of London, Paris and New York.

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Introduction The multiplicity of locations, from Iran and Uzbekistan to Cyprus, Macedonia, Canada and Ireland, reflects the universal nature of censorship and recognises the increasingly global and cosmopolitan art histories that are challenging the dominant narratives of western art. However, within these diverse contexts, the Eurocentric construction of the artist as the upholder of freedom of expression endures. In recent decades one of the major censorship stories has focused on a non-western case – the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. While he was imprisoned by the Chinese authorities for non-payment of taxes, the western media emphasised the right of the artist to critique the state. This well-publicised case of insidious censorship was ultimately beneficial to the artist’s international reputation and future career.9 But even in the United States, where freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution, artists are subject to censorship and silencing. Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016 has arguably reignited the ‘Culture Wars’ that James Davison Hunter defined in 1991 as the struggle between traditionalist and liberal elites to define America.10 It is perhaps inevitable that Trump’s presidency will produce many more cases of artistic censorship, not least self-censorship, when artists choose not to speak out against the tidal change in American political culture. The essays in this volume are linked by common themes and forms of censorship. In the studies by Elena Parpa, Kirstie Imber and Judith Devlin, art has been formally banned by political forces or cautious art institutions. Louise Boyd, Devon Smither and Róisín Kennedy examine cases from the English-speaking world where art that depicts the body or sexuality has been repressed or ignored. Both Alexey Ulko and Jonathan Blackwood consider censorship in countries that were formerly socialist and where art is now part of the struggle to establish a post-colonial cultural identity. Sean Lynch’s photo essay on the fate of a public artwork in Ireland and Alana Jelinek’s chapter on the contemporary art world in London both suggest how the agendas of social and political groups can change or influence both existing art and that which will be produced. Elena Parpa’s essay on art from Cyprus focuses on how art institutions and sponsors of exhibitions are increasingly reluctant to take risks or embrace controversy. Conscious of the religious and political sensitivities of their audience and patrons, contemporary art institutions can limit rather than blatantly censor the content of the artwork. As a result, the artwork frequently becomes an object of negotiation.

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Censoring Art Socratis Socratous’s Rumours (2009), shown at the Venice Biennale, was inspired by media-generated stories of environmental threats to the Republic of Cyprus from the northern part of the island under Turkish Cypriot administration. It was planned as an elaborate installation that would include palm trees and Indian snake charmers. Inevitably, the exhibition was beset with bureaucratic obstacles and setbacks. The final version consisted of the documentation of this process, offering a metaphor and material traces of the impact of misinterpretation and officious intervention in the production of an artwork. Erhan Öze’s Extraterritorial Electromagnetic Interventions (2011) was part of a research project Uncovered, which aimed to reconcile divisions between the northern part of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus. The work was shown in an abandoned building in the buffer zone that was established on the Turkish partition of the island in 1974. The United Nations, the main sponsors of the research project, demanded that Öze’s work be taken down without offering any explanation for its decision. The organisation scrupulously rejected the term censorship for its actions, claiming that Extraterritorial failed to adhere to the guidelines of the research project. Parpa argues that the artist’s deployment of the word ‘Ercan’, used for the airport operating in the northern part of Cyprus and proscribed by the UN and the international political establishment, was problematic. In her analysis of Interventions, Parpa notes that no concern was voiced by local artists nor other interest groups over the UN’s interference. This silence is an instance of what Judith Butler has described as ‘the implicit operation of power that rules out what will remain unspeakable’.11 The refusal to speak out validates the original act of exclusion. The censoring of art takes on new meanings within the context of contemporary technology and networking. It is impossible to erase an image or an artwork but art that has been banned or vilified by one faction or another takes on a particular cachet. Kirstie Imber’s chapter on contemporary art in Iran addresses this notion, which is evident in several other essays in the book. It may, she argues, be possible to consider the provocation of censorship as a deliberate strategy on the part of artists to gain agency and representation. This can be part of a cynical career building exercise or a more nuanced engagement with national and international political and cultural hegemonies, or perhaps a mixture of both. Imber suggests that the prevailing culture of censorship in post-

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Introduction revolutionary Iran, where art has been subject to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance since 1979, has encouraged the production of work that engages with this climate of censorship. While the West may regard Iran’s censoring of art in black and white terms, Islamic culture in Iran veers from extreme conservatism to liberalism, a constantly changing perspective with which artists react and engage. Mandana Moghaddam’s The Well (2008), a public artwork designed to initiate communication between participants across the globe, was not granted permission to be installed in Tehran. This did not, however, prevent the artist installing the project in several other locations in Europe and Asia. The Well is Moghaddam’s most controversial work because its refusal by her native country indicates its perceived power to the wider art field. Its censoring gives her work credence that it might not otherwise receive. Imber’s chapter demonstrates that censorship can have an active role in constructing the meanings of a work of art. The technological ability to acknowledge and record individual cases of censorship is underlined by one of the first major works of internet art, Antoni Muntadas’s The File Room (1994). A temporary installation which now exists as an open-ended online database, The File Room contains records of past cases of censorship from around the world and aims to reintroduce deleted and suppressed material back into the public realm. Muntadas invites members of the public to add their own examples of artistic and cultural censorship. This archive is testament to the diverse nature of censorship and to the ongoing challenges to free expression that exist, to varying degrees, in every society.12 It also highlights the impact of information and communication technologies on the ‘power of images’ and their eradication of the boundaries that once ensured a relatively stable category of visual art.13 In spite of the growth in transcultural networks, several essays in this book indicate the continuing significance of the nation state in generating both overt and insidious forms of censorship. Art that comes into conflict with prevailing or dominant narratives of the state is subject to censor. But this is rarely a straightforward banning or destruction of an artwork. Judith Devlin’s essay on art in the Soviet Union in the 1930s provides several examples of the ways in which artists and the press intervened to police art production, often with tragic consequences for unsuspecting artists. One unfortunate case is that of Nikolai Mikhailov, whose conventional

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Censoring Art painting, At Kirov’s Coffin (1934 –5), was perceived as deeply subversive due to the accidental visibility of remnants of an earlier still-life on its recycled canvas. In this case the work was destroyed. Far from producing subversive imagery, the chapter suggests that artists working under Stalin were more motivated by economic survival than ideological or aesthetic goals. The prevailing climate of regulation resulted in dozens of artists falling ‘victim to fraudulent allegations of counter-revolutionary activity’, not from the state but from other artists, their competitors in an increasingly bureaucratic environment. Louise Boyd’s essay on shunga, Japanese sexually explicit woodblock prints, is a multifaceted examination of the exhibition of sex art. Although banned in Japan in 1722, this popular art form was widely consumed by men and women of all social classes until western Christian morality that regarded sexual activity as shameful impacted on Japan in the mid nineteenth century. Primarily concerned with the role of the institution, this chapter brings into focus the wider debate about obscenity and art, the ultimate justification for censorship. As Kerstin Mey has demonstrated, obscenity lies in ‘the discursive, rather than content-form dialectics’.14 Obscenity, as Boyd’s case study shows, becomes a problem only when the context in which the work is viewed moves from the private to the public, or between high and low culture. Obscene art is a variable category, one that is defined by changing legal, social and political frameworks that exist beyond the art world but that impact on its operations. Shunga were part of the contents of the Secretum, a restricted collection established at the British Museum in 1864 as a way of unofficially regulating its diverse corpus of sexually explicit material. Accessible only to learned men, shunga were finally exhibited to the general public in 1978, when they provided examples of the aesthetic qualities of the ukiyo-e. In 2014, when the BM staged the landmark exhibition Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, the cultural and social significance of these artworks met with wide critical and public acclaim. Boyd’s essay explores the difficulties presented to museums in the west and in Japan by this contentious material. Selfcensorship by the institution is expected but sensitive monitoring of changing public attitudes towards sex has enabled the BM to use these artworks to raise questions and to provoke debate. In its handling of shunga, institutional censoring both reflects and expands wider societal attitudes and responds to changing concepts of the public.

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Introduction Artworks which are deemed to project values that conflict with the prevailing ethos of the state are obviously more likely to be censored. But who carries out this censoring and what mechanisms are deployed? In terms of a more nuanced understanding of censorship, the intentions of the artist in producing such works of art adds a crucial dimension. Is the work consciously subversive, as Mikhailov’s painting was deemed to be, or is it made with the very different parameters of the art field in mind? Can the representation of the female nude, a subject of central concern in modernist art, be separated entirely from wider societal attitudes? Devon Smither’s exploration of this subject in interwar Canadian art offers some insights into the overlapping priorities of artists whose work addressed this controversial theme. Their practice was heavily influenced by the cosmopolitan modernist art world of Paris but their work was displayed within the contexts of Montreal and Toronto. In this milieu the treatment of the nude took on a whole raft of meanings that extended beyond the parameters of the art world. Focusing on three controversial exhibitions of the nude in Canada between 1913 and 1933, Smither’s analysis indicates that their negative reception was not prompted by aesthetic or even moral concerns but by wider fears of the impact of modernity on Canadian life which centred on the role and position of women, symbolised by the female body. Despite the popularity of the nude genre with many Canadian artists, a number of artworks were censored from exhibitions, while others were the focus of intense public debate and controversy. The nude was consequently marginalised by critics and art historians in favour of the less contentious theme of landscape which, through the male-dominated Group of Seven, came to be seen as the paradigmatic national art of Canada. A similar obsession with the female nude and references to sexuality is found in post-independence Irish art. Róisín Kennedy looks at the Geneva Window, a stained-glass work, made by the Irish artist Harry Clarke for the International Labour Organisation in 1929 and at a painting by one of Ireland’s leading artists, Jack B. Yeats, that was exhibited in Dublin the same year. In that year also the Censorship of Publications Act was introduced into the new Irish state. This fixated on sexuality and references to birth control and fertility in particular. While art was not subjected to such formal regulation, it was produced and exhibited within a prevailing culture of prurience and control. Both artworks draw attention to the female body. Clarke’s, destined for a public space, was quietly rejected

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Censoring Art through long delays and official prevarication. Yeats’s Jazz Babies, exhibited in the relatively unthreatening surroundings of the gallery, was regarded with amusement and puzzlement due to the obfuscating manner in which it was painted. The formal aspects of the work displaced the content of the painting, rendering the work acceptable yet muting its critical aspects. The reception afforded both works highlights the furtive ways in which undesirable art is silenced and equally how artists negotiate controversial subject matter in a climate of pervasive censorship. One might imagine that conservative attitudes towards the representation of gender and sexuality in art can be safely relegated to the past but the major political changes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe since 1990 have reinvigorated this debate. In these emergent nation states, as in Ireland, India, Hungary and elsewhere earlier in the twentieth century, the need to sustain a unified national identity is paramount. This requires the protection of traditional values in the face of what is perceived as liberal cultural tendencies. The same themes, those that seem to undermine the dominant religious or ethnic values of the nation, are censored across these often widely diverse states. The female figure in particular is subject to scrutiny as the nation relies, even today, on ‘the example of the chaste and modest woman to demonstrate its virtuous aims’.15 The resurgence of what was regarded in North American literature of the 1990s and early 2000s as defunct extremism is currently a quintessential characteristic of the contemporary art field in parts of Asia, the Middle East, and the former Soviet bloc.16 Umida Akhemedova’s photographs of contemporary Uzbekistan – Women and Men from Sunset to Sunrise (2005) – appear to be inoffensive depictions of daily life in Central Asia in which traditional gender roles and societal conventions survive. The photographs concentrate on the locality in which the artist was born and brought up. The work opens up questions about the authenticity of Uzbek culture, coming into circulation at precisely the moment when the newly liberated state was embracing its ethnic Islamic origins and pitching this traditionalism against decades of Soviet rule. The photograph that provoked official reaction was that of a young bride crying on her wedding day. As in the Irish state’s censoring of Clarke’s Geneva Window almost a century before, Akhemedova’s work is of primary concern because of its international circulation and its potentially negative representation of Uzbek life to the outside world. Unlike Clarke,

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Introduction whose work was disregarded, Akhemedova was prosecuted for libel and defamation against the Uzbek people. Her photographs are, however, easily accessible on the internet. Alexey Ulko contrasts this seemingly familiar right-wing protection of neo-traditionalism with Vyacheslav Useinov’s provocative installation, Abdication of Swastika (2013). Placing the ancient symbol amidst an array of Uzbekistan folk art, Useinov’s work seeks to rehabilitate its historic meaning prior to its deployment by the Nazis. The swastika is a familiar feature of the décor of homes in Central Asia and carries little political significance in this region. Inevitably, Useinov’s work was condemned by left-wing intellectuals living mainly outside Central Asia, as not only insensitive but also complying with official Uzbekistan artistic doctrine that championed traditional ideas of Islamic culture. The work was awarded the Grand Prix at the Tashkent Biennale in 2013, a seeming confirmation of its complicity. Its vilification indicates the dominance of western liberalism in the contemporary art world, even in appraising art made in non-western contexts. A similar clash between neo-traditionalism and modernity lies at the heart of the censorship of contemporary art in Macedonia, another recently independent state. Since 2006 the conservative government of Nikola Gruevski has sought to align its identity, a country of diverse ethnic populations, to that of the Orthodox Church. Jonathan Blackwood’s essay focuses on the rebuilding of the city centre of Skopje, where modernist socialist-era architecture was replaced by politically inspired neoclassical buildings, from 2010–17. The artworks that have come under scrutiny are public and temporary, their makers rejecting the narrow elite parameters of the gallery space. Igor Toševski’s Territory (2009) Plostad Makedonija outlined in a large yellow painted cross the site of a proposed Orthodox church in the central square of Skopje. The work became the focus of protests against the redevelopment of the city, resulting in the death of one man in June 2011. As a result, the government painted over the artwork. Another work, a billboard sponsored by the artists co-operative KOOPERACIJA, was erected in the city centre in June 2012. It gently mocked the miraculous cleansing of the icons of the Church of St Demetrius in Skopje. Destroyed within a day of its erection, the work, an image of shining haloes and a cleansing product, lived on online. As Blackwood notes, both works were about control of public space. They challenged the encroachment of an

9

Censoring Art authoritarian establishment on the city through humour and subtle intervention. Their direct intrusion into the public domain prompted their removal, and this ability to provoke reaction makes them, Blackwood argues, valuable works of art. Sean Lynch’s photo essay documents the fortunes of one of the largest public sculptures to be erected in Ireland and Great Britain in the 1980s. Eilís O’Connell’s Great Wall of Kinsale was commissioned for a narrow site close to the harbour of the historic, picturesque town in County Cork. O’Connell was given a rare level of artistic freedom in the design of her work. Made of corten steel, fifty metres long, the abstract sculpture consists of three tent-like arches. Its use of industrial materials recalls Richard Serra’s notorious Tilted Arc but its subsequent history is more about conciliation than direct confrontation. Since its installation in 1988, the work has been beset by controversy. In 1989 it was saved from demolition when, in response to local concerns, the Arts Council of Ireland agreed to a number of fundamental modifications, including the repainting of its surface in grey iron oxide and the installation of a water feature to diffuse the severity of the original design. Since then, numerous additions, both aesthetic and practical, have, in the words of the artist, ‘destroyed’ the sculpture.17 Lynch’s photographs of the work are both humorous and shocking. The essay provokes a fundamental questioning of the purpose and role of public sculpture and provides a rich example of how censorship in the form of neglect, interference and bureaucracy can compromise and silence a work of art. Kinsale town council’s treatment of O’Connell’s sculpture can at some level be understood as a re-assertion of local values in the face of elite ideas of the artwork. Censorship is played out here in unexpected ways, exacerbated by local politics; it is fundamentally a rejection of the power of the centre to dictate to the periphery. While the controversy never reached the dizzy heights (or lows) of the Titled Arc debacle, it is a familiar enough story of the encounter between officialdom, the resolve of the artist and the ordinary citizen. This parochial contretemps resonates with all those aware of the widespread modification or neglect of misunderstood public art. The contemporary London art world, where one might presume the artist has greatest intellectual freedom, is, as Alana Jelinek’s chapter reveals, rife with insidious forms of censorship. The prevalence of censorship of the arts in the UK and the need to defend artistic freedom, was underlined during the conference ‘Taking the Offensive – Defending artistic freedom

10

Introduction of expression in the UK’ held in London in January 2013. Organised by the Index on Censorship, this was the first multidisciplinary, national conference on artistic freedom in the UK and underlined how censorship, in its many guises, is a threat to artists in countries that we perceive to be liberal and free.18 Increasing reliance on private and corporate sponsorship for the arts since the 1990s has drastically reduced the range of art spaces and the scope of art being produced in London. While corporate sponsors rarely dictate the content of exhibitions, self-censorship by art institutions and by artists is, according to Jelinek’s findings, pervasive. In what she describes as ‘the corrosive impact of the internalisation of neo-liberal values’, arts organisations and individual artists behave as if they themselves were corporations with brands or careers to protect. The essay highlights Sophie Hope’s Performative Interviews (2010), a project that centres on the ways in which artists and art workers allow themselves to be manipulated by neoliberal ideals.19 Masked individuals are interviewed about their involvement in generating commissions and making art, prompting their admission of how they and the work they produce are compromised by the overarching demands of the free market structures in which they need to compete. As the breadth of essays in this volume show, censorship in all its forms is integral to the production and display of art both historically and in the contemporary moment. Far from alleviating its effects, globalisation provides further challenges and obstacles. There is no escaping censorship or foreclosure or compromise. However, rather than allowing censorship to silence the artwork, exposing its mechanisms enables us to have a greater understanding of the conflicting frameworks in which the artwork functions. The case studies contained here also reveal how the role of censorship in the making of art can be creative as well as destructive. It can, in fact, be a productive force that is capable of reasserting national identity in a postcolonial situation or, ironically, of drawing attention to banned works of art. These essays open discussion and debate which help to counteract the effects of censorship or, at the very least, expose its pervasive influence on art.

Notes 1. Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur, Statement to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, United Nations General Assembly, 14 March 2013, Human Rights Council, 23rd session, Report of the Special Rapporteur in

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Censoring Art

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed, p. 18, http://artsfreedom.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/A-HRC-23-34_en.pdf (accessed 16 January 2017). Matthew Bunn, ‘Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After’, History and Theory 54 (February 2015), p. 29. Many of the essays began as contributions to a session on Censoring: Silencing the Artwork held at the Association of Art Historians annual conference at the Royal College of Art, London in April 2014. Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (Oxford, 1988). Bunn, ‘Reimagining Repression’, p. 27. Frederick Schauer, ‘The Ontology of Censorship’, in R.C. Post (ed.), Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, 1998), pp. 147 – 68. Judith Butler, ‘Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor’, in R.C. Post, Censorship and Silencing, pp. 247 – 59. See Nora Gilbert, Better Left Unsaid. Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship (Stanford, CA, 2013), pp. 1 –11. Rebecca Catching, ‘The New Face of Censorship: State Control of the Visual Arts in Shanghai, 2008 – 2011’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11: 2þ 3 (2012), pp. 231 – 49, doi: 10.1386/jvap.11.2-3.231_1. James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991). See Rich Lowry’s article on Trump and the Culture Wars. www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/29/donald-trump-left-faces-newcultural-warrior-in-battle-it-thought-won (accessed 29 January 2017). Butler, ‘Ruled out’, p. 249, quoted in Parpa’s essay. The File Room was hosted in the servers of Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago from 1994 to 1998, in Media Channel, New York from 1999 to 2001 and the National Coalition Against Censorship in New York from 2001 to 2016 when it was restored by Rhizome.org. Kerstin Mey, Art and Obscenity (London, 2007), p. 23. Ibid., pp. 1 –4. George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality. Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York, 1995), pp. 90 –8. Schauer, ‘The Ontology of Censorship’, p. 150. Eilís O’Connell quoted in Cristín Leach, ‘Eilís O’Connell and the Great Wall of Kinsale’, Sunday Times, 13 February 2015, available at http://cristinleach.com/ eilis-oconnell-great-wall-kinsale/ (accessed 2 January 2017). Founded in 1972 in London by writers and intellectuals responding to censorship of literature in the USSR, Index on Censorship is a campaigning publishing organisation for freedom of expression, which produces a quarterly magazine of the same name. http://sophiehope.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Logbook_03_Performative_ Interviews.pdf (accessed 9 January 2017).

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1 Censorship in Disguise: Elusive Forms of Exclusion and the Examples of Cypriot € 1 Artists Socratis Socratous and Erhan Oze

Elena Parpa

In November 2014, in what would later be described as an ‘unnecessary and repressive measure’, the Republic of Cyprus police raided an exhibition held at the Municipal Market in Nicosia and confiscated a number of works on display.2 The exhibition, titled Correction, was initiated by Accept-LGBT Cyprus and focused on photographs and videos by Greek artist and trans activist, Paola Revenioti.3 A number of the exhibits on view pictured male nudity, and the police, enforcing an obsolete law from the 1960s, withheld them as ‘offensive’ and arrested the president of Accept-LGBT on the grounds of enabling the display of ‘lewd content’.4 The incident provoked an instant reaction by artists, art organisations and activists who were concerned with interrogating the conditions of freedom in art and the rights of the LGBT community to free expression.5 Examining the whole episode, the official response to the police’s censoring act ranged from silence to bewilderment and attempts to make amends,6 as, within weeks, the photographs in question were returned, charges against the Accept-LGBT president dropped, and the police were reprimanded for ‘excessive zeal’.7 13

Censoring Art Although Revenioti’s case adds to the long list of censorship incidents related to LGBT content in art, it also represents a typical example of regulated censorship.8 A controlling subject – in this instance the police – assumed its position of authority to exert control over another subject in order to regulate what is shown in the public sphere. Yet, there is a weak link in this otherwise powerful chain constraining freedom of expression. The shadow it casts is visible, identifiable, and can be challenged.9 ‘Explicit forms of censorship are exposed to a certain vulnerability precisely through being more readily legible’, points out Judith Butler in her critical reflections on contemporary modes of curtailing free speech.10 What seems to have been fortunate, then, in this otherwise aggressive instance of regulating expression, was the explicitness of the censor’s actions, which instigated reactions. A recurring question, however, is whether censorship today is as traceable as this example allows us to assume. Indeed, is the figure of the policeman confiscating artworks an outmoded idea of the censoring agent in visual art? In its popular perception, censorship corresponds to the ‘either/or’ modality.11 That is, a work is either suppressed or not. However, Butler cautions us that censorship can occur outside of the binary, in subtler and less detectable ways.12 Art practitioners and critics have agreed on this and have extended the argument to consider how censorship also operates under many guises that can be camouflaged as moral imperative, political correctness, built-in institutional mechanisms, economic arrangement or even as ‘an inevitable result of the impartial logic of the free market’.13 Recognising the prevalence of what has been described as a ‘domesticated version of the 1970s institutional critiques’, some voices question whether art today can ever challenge the clauses dictating its forms and means of production, circulation and display.14 For these critics, freedom of expression is consistent with what they call ‘artistic sovereignty’,15 which they understand as severely curtailed, thus calling for an urgent reconsideration of the conditions of art’s making.16 Similarly, in censorship discourse it is accepted that regulation of cultural activity does not necessarily occur after the act of expression, but can be manifest during the work’s production, either as self-censorship or as external intervention.17 The issue raised, however, when examining the phenomenon’s operational apparatuses relates to the quandary of equating severe violations of human rights, on the one hand, with less invasive practices, such as the refusal to fund a work, on the other.18 How can we

14

Censorship in Disguise account, then, for those instances of artistic regulation which, although intrusive, do not constitute extreme violations? More importantly, in what ways is artistic expression compromised when operations occur under the radar and in various guises? With these questions in mind, this chapter addresses some of the intricacies relating to censorship and the regulation of expression within visual art today. Its point of departure includes two cases taken from the Cypriot paradigm. The first concerns the multifaceted installation Rumours (2009), by artist Socratis Socratous, presented at the 53rd Venice € Biennale; the second involves Erhan Oze’s Extraterritorial Electromagnetic Interventions (2011), a project that was to be included in an exhibition in Nicosia, but was removed a day before the opening. This chapter investigates the reasons underlying the works’ denunciation and the mechanisms – overt or covert – mobilised for their regulation. It examines them in relation to the dominant rhetoric defining the ethno-political conflict in Cyprus and in relation to the risk-averse policies adopted by institutions in an increasing atmosphere of caution. In so doing, it argues that censorship can operate in disguise, under many pretexts, including that of ‘public safety’, ‘political correctness’ and the need to safeguard society’s ideological hypersensitivities. However, it is important to make clear from the outset that, although both cases are from a Cypriot context, they are not discussed as testimony to a ‘conservative’ society that has allowed censorship to happen in contrast to other societies where censorship does not exist.19 To recognise, rather, the socio-historical specificity of these cases is to reinforce the argument that different types of censorship – extreme or moderate, explicit or implicit – exist and depend, to a large extent, on the context that surrounds them. Censorship is socially and culturally relative. Whether such a realisation may eventually lead to being more responsive to censorship’s guises, and therefore more instrumental in devising effective forms of resistance, remains a matter to be debated. This is discussed at the end of the chapter in relation to the practices developed both by Socratous € in their attempt to counter limitations and negotiate margins. and Oze

Regulating Rumours Before examining each artist’s confrontation with censorious forces, a brief overview of the contemporary history of Cyprus is necessary in order to 15

Censoring Art comprehend the local ethno-political predicament that has functioned as background to both cases. Formerly part of the Ottoman and British Empires, Cyprus gained its independence in 1960, an outcome that its two main ethnic communities – the Greek and Turkish Cypriots – were reluctant to accept. During the previous decade, between 1955 and 1959, the Greek Cypriots had embarked on an armed insurrection against the British, demanding the island’s enosis (union) with Greece. The Turkish Cypriots, fearing their marginalisation in the case of a British departure, claimed their own political aspiration of taksim (partition). The new republic inherited its population’s internal divisions and as early as 1963/64 interethnic enmity escalated into violent clashes. In 1974, following a Greek Cypriot coup which was supported by the Greek junta, Turkey intervened militarily, taking control of the northern part of the island. The Turkish intervention imposed a de facto partition and until 2003, when the Turkish Cypriot leadership partly opened the checkpoints, the island was divided in two by a non-crossable ‘Dead Zone’. Today, the two communities continue to live separately, as peace talks fail to yield a result. The Greek Cypriot controlled Republic of Cyprus (RoC) remains the only internationally recognised state, while the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) is recognised only by Turkey. Socratous’s Rumours, the installation that in 2009 constituted the RoC’s official contribution to the 53rd Venice Biennale, sought to reflect critically on the island’s ethno-political quandary. Bringing together video, text, objects, photographs and elements of performance, the piece elaborated on a seemingly trivial item published in a Greek Cypriot newspaper regarding the importation of palm trees from Egypt to the northern part of the island.20 The newspaper claimed that the trees carried cobras’ eggs in their roots, which had started to hatch, spreading rumours that poisonous snakes would emigrate across the border, to the RoC. Acknowledging the political and symbolic connotations of the story – snakes represent a fear of the ‘other’, and rumours being a usual tactic of propaganda employed by the island’s two main ethnic communities – Socratous sought to re-stage it in the Cyprus Pavilion.21 His display included, among other elements, an installation with palm tree trunks, two video pieces – one documenting the artist’s interview with the Turkish Cypriot businessman who imported the

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Censorship in Disguise

Figure 1.1 Socratis Socratous, Seascape With Palm Tree and Warship in the Kyrenia Waterfront, Cyprus, 2008. C-Print, 46.5 £ 70 cm.

trees to the north – and a series of photographs of the northern part of the island. The photographs, which sought to trace the newspaper story across the landscape, included Seascape with Palm Tree and Warship in the Kyrenia Waterfront, Cyprus (2008) (Figure 1.1). The image revealed a view from the shore with a thick palm tree trunk dominating the foreground and a Turkish warship crossing the sea in the background. The artist and the appointed curator, Sophie Duplaix, chose it to illustrate the invitation to the exhibition’s official inauguration.22 Just a few weeks before the opening, however, two prominent Greek Cypriot newspapers, Phileleftheros and Simerini, featured the photograph on their front pages under negative headlines and disapproving remarks.23 Isolating it from Rumours’ multi-layered artistic content, the newspapers launching the attack subjected the image to the dominant Greek Cypriot political rhetoric concerning the Cyprus conflict. ‘With a Turkish Frigate at the Biennale’ proclaimed Simerini’s title, pointing to a photograph that featured two emblems denoting superiority (a flag and a warship) of the RoC’s

17

Censoring Art ‘archetypal enemy’ (Turkey) in order to participate officially in an international event (the Venice Biennale).24 Similarly, Phileleftheros bickered: ‘Could you ever imagine that for promotional reasons [. . .] we would use the picture of a frigate of the Turkish army [. . .] without even mentioning the invasion and occupation?’25 By making reference to the Turkish military operation, Phileleftheros attacked the photograph on political grounds. It also pointed to the context in which the use of the Turkish frigate would be deemed ‘acceptable’, which brings to mind the way images are usually employed by the RoC in order to condemn the Turkish military operation. Consider, for example, one of the pamphlets edited in 2012 by the Press and Information Office (PIO) of the RoC with the intent of informing foreign audiences of the events of 1974.26 It includes an image of a Turkish frigate next to pictures of ruins along with a narrative which details the extent of the destruction caused. Although Turkey’s intervention and its repercussions are indisputable facts, there has been criticism in relation to the political construction of memory and history in Cyprus. It has been observed that each community has been diachronically involved in the methodical production of one-sided ethnocentric versions of history. This is based on over-generalisations that disregard the suffering of the other and hinder reconciliation between both sides.27 The PIO and its corresponding Turkish Cypriot institution have been in part instrumental in maintaining the antagonism between the two communities, disseminating the official exclusionary views of their respective communities through leaflets, books and other print material.28 As a product of this mechanism, it is valid to assume that the PIO pamphlet in question accommodates the image of the Turkish frigate as dictated by the dominant narrative. Supported by an array of carefully chosen linguistic and iconic messages, the warship pictured is nothing but the carrier of the enemy about to unleash destruction. Approached from this perspective, Socratous had deviated significantly from the prescribed way of representing the Cyprus conflict. Unlike the tactic of ‘anchoring’ meaning into specific conclusions, he let his photograph ‘float’ in the uncharted waters of polysemy. In the weeks that followed the attacks from the press, a fierce debate broke out. The issue provoked the reaction of members of the artistic community, instigated various political analyses, and forced MPs and

18

Censorship in Disguise government officials to take a stand. Those who deemed the matter a grand faux pas were mostly politicians who shared the view that Socratous’s choice of image undermined the Greek Cypriots’ national interests.29 Some even suggested that Socratous had no right to political engagement, insinuating that the local debates concerning Cyprus’s predicament constitute a tightly controlled discourse in which only the elected few, meaning the politicians, can participate.30 In contrast, those who defended the artist believed that the furore was symptomatic of the ‘problematic disorientation of critical thought in Cypriot society’, one that denigrated Socratous’s work to an unpatriotic act, therefore significantly compromising freedom of artistic expression.31 Such observations are poignant, especially in relation to the kind of limitations potentially imposed on public discourse in societies marked by conflict, and intolerant of internal critique and dismissive of the other side’s view. As Socratous’s case exemplifies, the official rhetoric related to the Cyprus conflict can be so dominant that its parlance threatens to eclipse critical voices. Most worrying is the fact that the values it projects may be used as the criteria on which ideas are evaluated and regulated.

Language that Confines Socratis Socratous’s photograph was never censored. Yet the reactions that it aroused threatened the dissemination of the invitation that featured it.32 They also confined the work’s reception within a specific narrative, restricting thus its potential critical impact. As such, Socratous’s example is indicative of the way artistic expression may be compromised by operations that, although non-invasive, prove significantly constricting. In the case of Extraterritorial Electromagnetic Interventions (2011), € the context of however, by Turkish Cypriot architect and artist Erhan Oze, € the Cypriot conflict eventually led to a censoring act. Oze’s research deals with spatial politics in contested geographies.33 Extraterritorial focuses on the way the two communities’ antagonism for dominance of the land extends to the electromagnetic field in a struggle to control the island’s airspace.34 The installation was developed for Uncovered, a research-based art project organised under the auspices of the United Nations Good Offices Mission in Cyprus with the support of the United Nations Development Programme – Action for Cooperation and Trust (UNDP19

Censoring Art ACT).35 Uncovered was initially conceived as an intervention in Nicosia International Airport, which has lain abandoned in the UN-controlled buffer zone since 1974. It later developed under the direction of its two curators, Pavlina Paraskevaidou and Başak Şenova, into a project that sought to question the politics of space on the island, which the UN agreed to support as part of its peace-building measures.36 The exhibition, which included artists from across the Cyprus divide, was held in September 2011 in an abandoned building in the buffer zone. A day before the opening, the UN Joint Committee assigned to the project arrived at the venue and after inspecting the exhibition demanded that € remove his work.37 Despite the artist’s objections, the installation Oze was taken down. No official explanation was offered apart from a terse announcement posted outside the artist’s assigned space, which stated that the content of his work was found to be beyond the framework of the exhibition (Figure 1.2).38 Although the work was removed, the word ‘censorship’ was not used.39 In later reflections, according to the curators, the UN executives avoided the term ‘censorship’, justifying their decision as the routine application of UN regulations.40

Figure 1.2 2011.

€ The statement announcing the removal of Erhan Oze’s work, Nicosia,

20

Censorship in Disguise The practice of dissociation from the term ‘censorship’ (and its negative connotations) has become standard in the cultural field.41 Justifications can be dishonest as well as disorientating, since suppressive actions are not considered ‘censorship’ as long as the work can be exhibited or distributed € was in the position to circulate parts of his piece elsewhere. Indeed, Oze by uploading the work’s video on YouTube and by disseminating the accompanying booklet he had edited.42 On the receiving end of the organisation’s actions, however, the artist experienced the removal as censorship, which raised, in his view, questions regarding the role the UN (and other institutions) play when they allegedly embrace art as a tool for resolving conflict.43 In Cyprus, the tactic of utilising art for reconciliation has been criticised as producing a symmetrical organisational logic which demands the two communities be represented equally, thus prolonging the terms of the dispute that exist on the ground.44 As a bi-communal project, Uncovered was subjected to rules of equal representation and of maintaining a balancing viewpoint that took into consideration – as one of the two curators phrased it – the two communities’ ‘sensitivities’.45 If this was the exhibition’s framework, how then was Extraterritorial found to be beyond it? € As articulated in the booklet, Oze’s objective was to interrogate the competition between Cyprus’s two main air traffic control centres, the Nicosia Air Control Centre in the south and the Ercan Air Control Centre in the north.46 According to the artist and curators, the UN’s decision to remove the piece was determined by the use of the word ‘Ercan’, also the name of the airport in the north, since neither the airport nor the Ercan ACC are recognised by the international community or by the UN.47 It is important to add that since 1974 both communities are locked in a rivalry regarding phrasing. Turkish Cypriots wishing to demarcate their territory have replaced the Greek names of cities and villages under their control with Turkish place names, and refer to the RoC as the ‘Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus’.48 Accordingly, Greek Cypriots refer to the ‘other side’ as the ‘pseudo-state’, demanding that the TRNC be placed within quotation marks. Officials have also proceeded to the criminalisation of material containing Turkified or altered names of places.49 As for the international entities involved, the UN and the EU, it has been observed that their strategy is to avoid using political idioms that might destabilise the divide and the peaceful non-settlement of the

21

Censoring Art conflict.50 Language thus plays a defining role in how each community seeks to deny the validity and political reality of the other. By referring to € Ercan, without necessary clarifications, Oze’s work appeared to deviate from the prescribed phrasing of the existing geo-political status quo and therefore ‘could not be permitted in an exhibition that was supported by the UN’.51 The rigid political context, then, in which the exhibition had to operate, and the language it necessitates, prescribed the way the artworks were evaluated. Similar to Socratous’s case, it provided the lens through which to receive and interpret what was on display. Instead of facilitating a more critical engagement with the politics of division on the island, the frame (and language) in question led to an instance of suppression. This was interpreted at the time as indicative of the kind of mechanisms that control public discourse and result in long silences in both communities.52 It seems, however, that to turn the UN into a malevolent censor is to € oversimplify Oze’s case – and the process of censorship in general – into a matter of the ‘bad’ subordinating the ‘good’. In her reconsideration of the conventional view that censorship is always externally imposed on powerless subjects, Butler reminds us of the sovereignty of the censored and the possibility of oppositional speech.53 € In Oze’s case, it should be noted that, following the work’s exclusion, no group (official or unofficial) voiced any concern over possible violations of freedom of expression. The oppositional actions taken in the Revenioti Case (or in Socratous’s) were absent in this regulatory censorship, and this absence can be interpreted as a form of an unintentional endorsement of the original act of exclusion. More disturbingly, it can be seen as producing a second instance of regulation, in which we can recognise what Butler has identified as the ‘implicit operations of power that rule out in unspoken ways what will remain unspeakable’ – in this case, the very act of € censorship.54 As such, Oze’s installation was not only shrouded under the cloak of ‘the routine application of regulations’ but its occurrence was denied, perhaps more effectively by the reluctance to render it ‘speakable’.

Protocols that Bind € To fully comprehend Oze’s case requires, as well, the simultaneous consideration of exhibitions as structures vulnerable to censorious acts. 22

Censorship in Disguise Uncovered was funded by UNDP-ACT, a programme that offered substantial financial and administrative support to bi-communal initiatives. Aiming to encourage confidence-building practices, the programme has also proved pivotal in the development of conflict resolution art projects since its inception in 2005.55 The question raised, however, is whether such projects, including Uncovered, have managed to provide conditions that strengthen inter-communal relations or allow the presence of non-conforming voices in their framework to be heard.56 From the curators’ statement, it is evident that the content of each work included was communicated to the appointed UN committee to approve the budget and payments prior to the exhibition opening.57 Within the broader picture of exhibition making as a process, this is suggestive of the modus operandi of exhibitions and the regulatory mechanisms they may be subjected to. As the arts sector has grown financially dependent and appears progressively reluctant to take risks and embrace controversy, exhibitions and artworks are increasingly regulated by museum committees, boards of trustees, corporate patrons and (as in this case) funding bodies. Additionally, there are assumed (religious, moral, political) sensitivities of audience members, minority groups or the general public acting as factors that may lead to institutional self-censorship, blunted criticism or even to content suppression.58 It seems, therefore, that the circumstances underwriting the production and display of art have transformed it into an object of negotiation, in which the artist is merely one among the many involved. As e-flux editors and artists Antone Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood point out in their inquiry into rules that bind artistic freedom: ‘While as an artist you may think you are free to do as you please, in order for your work to be economically sustainable, critically acknowledged, or even simply brought into contact with the art public, it needs to conform to certain network protocols that dictate the forms of art production that circulate.’59 For them, the protocols in question are defined by the professional superstructure of contemporary art that depends on exhibition and curatorial codes, institutional and market forces, cultural diplomacy, municipal and state marketing.60 € Cases such as Oze’s remind us that ‘protocols’ are also bound to the sociohistorical specificity that envelops them. His work, and by extension, the exhibition that was meant to display it, were constricted by a political context and a rhetoric which ultimately provided criteria for evaluating the art.

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Censoring Art € and Socratous stand out as ‘casualties’ of At the same time, however, that Oze a politically charged locality, they are also part of an encompassing discourse regarding the ‘protocols’ or ‘frameworks’ that liberate or limit the production and exhibition of art. Found to tread on the consensual barriers imposed by € was told to remove his work by the geo-political status quo in Cyprus, Oze the body that had the exhibition he was participating in under its ‘auspices’. ‘The sanctioning forces of the art world are the sole enabler of art, but also the artist’s ball and chain’, write Vidokle and Kuan Wood.61 In Socratous’s case, this reciprocal relationship between artist and institution is evident in his experience of displaying the work in the context of the Venice Biennale. The central performance in Rumours focused on a boat that cruised along Venice’s canals with an Egyptian date palm mounted on its deck.62 In the initial conceptualisation of the piece, snake charmers from India would be commissioned to perform in the streets, inhabiting the Cypriot Pavilion and looking after snakes that would be kept in specially designed cages. The performance was to conclude with the planting of the palm tree outside the Greek Pavilion in a symbolic move of solidarity. Socratous’s idea proved difficult to realise. In India, the authorities had imposed a ban against snake charmers, while in Europe the importation of date palms was controlled due to the spread of the red palm weevil that completely destroys the tree. In Italy, they would accept the artist’s request for importation only if the trees’ roots were cut, but the Venetian municipal authorities declined his application to plant the tree in the Giardini because of strict heritage regulations protecting the gardens. To add to the list of deterrents, the Venice Biennale refused, for reasons related to public safety, to grant the artist permission to display in a cage, in the Cyprus Pavilion, the cobras he was licensed to own. Various amendments led to the final version of his installation, which included a full-scale documentation of the bureaucratic processes entailed –requests for permission, correspondence with the authorities, rejection letters, and so on. As he clarified later, his intention was not to protest but to provide a ‘testament of a refusal’ which exposed the kind of mechanisms that both restricted and informed the content of his work.63 From Rumours’ conceptualisation, then, to its final execution, Socratous found himself in constant tension with what is doable in the art world and what is not. He was rebuked for reasons relating to safeguarding the public from harm (Venice Biennale), the public space from unwanted interventions

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Censorship in Disguise (Venice Municipality) or the public dialogue from ‘questionable’ suggestions seen to jeopardise the dominance of the official rhetoric pertaining to Cyprus’s predicament as a divided island. Whether, of course, he was intentionally being provocative is a matter open to discussion, since the idea of inducing a response from the media, authorities and institutions seems to € however, Socratous be at the heart of Rumours. In contradistinction to Oze, was given the chance to negotiate his ideas and discipline their content. Not censored but significantly limited, either by misinterpretations or by binding rules, his experience is telling of those practices that pose a challenge to what we widely consider to be ‘the independent zone of art’. € Interestingly, both Socratous’s and Oze’s cases can now be discussed only in terms of what was rendered inexpressible in them. As Butler insightfully discerns, in this paradox lies censorship’s incompleteness, since the denunciation of any work requires the restaging of the censored material.64 Socratous’s wall publicly demonstrating the restrictions he endured can be seen as a form of re-staging of the material. By uploading his video on € turned the website into his ‘demonstration wall’, a space to YouTube, Oze experiment with artistic freedom, despite recent evidence pointing to the internet’s subjugation through acts of censorship.65 Neither reaction was explicitly confrontational, yet each contributed to the interrogation of possible forms of resistance that artists must conjure when their work suffers censorship or curbs.

Conclusion € encourage us to Examples like those of Socratis Socratous and Erhan Oze consider the socio-historical context of censorship and how it is defined by what produces it. A work of art threatened with restriction uncovers ideological conflicts that are inherent in the society that reprimands the works under question. Targeted works also point to the way dominant rhetorics emerging from politically charged localities can evolve into an evaluation apparatus for artistic expression, potentially setting the censorious/censoring mechanisms of an institution in motion. However, a work of art subjected to regulation, like Socratous’s Rumours in Venice or € Oze’s Extraterritorial Interventions in an exhibition bound by protocols, prompts a reflection of art subject to rules and conventions. To do this is to consider the limits imposed on artistic freedom, overtly and covertly. 25

Censoring Art Does this mean that it is no longer possible to think of art as a free zone in a complex world? As these two cases indicate, a work of art today may not have boundless freedom of expression; nevertheless, it holds the promise of a space where one can still push boundaries and work between the lines, allowing for deeper discussion to emerge.66

Notes 1. This chapter is a re-worked version of a section of my PhD thesis titled ‘The Possibility of an Island: Visions of Landscape in Contemporary Art from Cyprus’ (2018). I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr Gabriel Koureas, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Visual Culture at the School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. 2. Accept-LGBT Cyprus, Cyprus Police Returns Paola Revenioti’s Pictures to Accept-LGBT Cyprus and Withdraws Charges of Publication of Lewd Content (19 January 2015). Available at www.acceptcy.org/en/node/9238 (accessed 20 September 2015). 3. The exhibition was curated by Christos Kyriakides. Accept-LGBT Cyprus is the first organisation in the Republic of Cyprus (RoC) to promote Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender rights. 4. The police justified its actions as having acted on receiving complaints by parents of minors visiting the exhibition. See: 35– 33, Police Raid Queer Photo Exhibition, Prosecutes NGO for ‘Indecent Public Displays’ (22 November 2014). Available at www.35-33.com/police-raid-queer-photo-exhibition-prosecutesngo-for-indecent-public-displays (accessed 20 September 2015). 5. An open letter was circulated through Avaaz, and a group initially formed through social media met to discuss courses of action. See: No To Censorship in Art (22 November 2014). Available at secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/Kypriaki_ Dimokratia_OHI_STIN_LOGOKRISIA_STIN_TEHNI/?dHTzJbb&pv¼ 3 (accessed 20 September 2015). 6. Whether because of the effectiveness of actions defending freedom or the fact that the rules enforced were out of kilter with current conventions remains to be investigated. Having said this, the ombudswoman report drafted in response to the incident now constitutes an important document that defends in legal terms the freedom of artistic expression in the RoC. It proved useful in defending Nurtane Karagil’s drawing The Dawn and the Sunset Issue (2017), which was included in Plánetes, an international arts exhibition I curated in January 2017 in the context of Pafos2017, European Capital of Culture. Members of the local community in Pafos had expressed complaints in relation to the drawing’s content and demanded from Pafos2017 to remove it from display. 7. Accept-LGBT Cyprus, Cyprus Police Returns Paola Revenioti’s Pictures to Accept-LGBT Cyprus.

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Censorship in Disguise 8. High profile incidents include the cancellation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s solo show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC in 1989, and, more recently, the vandalism inflicted on Andres Serrano’s works from The History of Sex (1995), in Lund, Sweden, in 2010 by alleged neo-Nazis. The numerous cases of LGBT art censorship was the subject of ‘Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship’ held at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York in Winter 2015. 9. For a discussion of this, see Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge (New York; Oxford, 1991), pp. 7 –8. 10. Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York; London, 1997), p. 130. 11. For more on this see: Michael Holquist, ‘Corrupt Originals: The Paradox of Censorship’, Modern Language Association 109/1 (1994), p. 16. 12. Judith Butler, ‘Ruled out: Vocabularies of the censor’, in Robert C. Post (ed.), Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Los Angeles, 1998), p. 249. 13. Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva, ‘Introduction: Censorship in camouflage’, in R. Atkins and S. Mintcheva (eds), Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (New York, 2006), p. xv. 14. Irmgard Emmelhainz, ‘Art and the cultural turn: Farewell to committed, autonomous art’, e-flux journal 42 (February 2013). Available at www.e-flux. com/journal/art-and-the-cultural-turn-farewell-to-committed-autonomousart (accessed 1 October 2015). 15. Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuan Wood, ‘Breaking the contract’, e-flux journal 37 (September 2012). Available at www.e-flux.com/journal/breaking-thecontract (accessed 1 October 2015). 16. Hito Steyerl, ‘Politics of art: Contemporary art and the transition to postdemocracy’, e-flux journal 21 (December 2010). Available at www.e-flux.com/ journal/politics-of-art-contemporary-art-and-the-transition-to-post-democracy (accessed 1 October 2015) and Hito Steyerl, ‘The institution of critique’, in A. Alberro and B. Stimson (eds), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA; London, 2009), pp. 486 –92. 17. Helen Freshwater, ‘Towards a redefinition of censorship’, in B. Müller (ed.), Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age (Amsterdam; New York, 2004), p. 241. 18. Ibid., p. 242. 19. Recent censorship incidents that point to its socio-historical diversity include but are not limited to the Barbican’s resolution to cancel Brett Bailey’s exhibition Exhibit B in 2014; the Sharjah Art Foundation’s decision to remove Mustapha Benfodil’s installation from the 10th Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and fire the organisation’s Artistic Director, Jack Persekian; and the Smithsonian’s exclusion of David Wojnarowicz’s Fire in My Belly (1986– 7) from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2010.

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Censoring Art 20. Sophie Duplaix, ‘Interview of Socratis Socratous’, in Socratis Socratous: Rumours (catalogue of exhibition at the Cyprus Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennial, 7 June– 22 November 2009) (Nicosia, 2009), p. 14. 21. Ibid., pp. 14– 22. 22. From interview conducted with Socratis Socratous on 3 April 2013. 23. Phileleftheros, ‘Tourkiki fregata kosmei prosklisi tou Ypourgeiou Paideias’ [Turkish frigate adorns invitation of Ministry of Education] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 22 May 2009, p. 1; Simerini, ‘Me. . . tourkiki fregata stin Biennale’ [With. . . Turkish frigate at the Biennale] (Greek), Simerini, 22 May 2009, p. 1. 24. Simerini, ‘With. . . Turkish frigate at the Biennale’. 25. Michalis Hadjistylianou, ‘Gkafa olkis apo to Ypourgeio Paideias’ [The Ministry of Education’s big blunder] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 22 May 2009, p. 3. 26. I am referring to Cyprus: July 1974 – July 2012 (Nicosia, 2012) published by the Press Information Office of the RoC. 27. Yiannis Papadakis, ‘Disclosure and censorship in divided Cyprus: Toward an anthropology of ethnic autism’, in Y. Papadakis, N. Peristianis and G. Welz (eds), Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict (Bloomington, IN, 2006), pp. 66–83. 28. Ibid., p. 69. 29. For excerpts of politicians’ statements, see Michalis Hadjistylianou, ‘Salos gia ti fregata tou Yp. Paideias’ [Tumult over MoE’s frigate] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 23 May 2009, p. 37. 30. Ibid. 31. Christodoulos Panayiotou, ‘Ti kryvetai piso apo to foinika?;’ [What lies hidden behind the palm tree?] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 30 May 2009, p. 41; Antonis Georgiou, ‘Fimes arage i eleftheria ekfrasis dimiourgon?’ [Is artistic freedom of expression a rumour?] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 30 May 2009, p. 41. 32. According to the artist, the invitation was silently withdrawn from circulation. From interview conducted with Socratous. 33. ‘Extraterritorial electromagnetic interventions’, in B. Şenova and P. Paraskevaidou (eds), Uncovered (catalogue of exhibition held in Nicosia, 23 September – 23 October 2011) (Nicosia, 2011), p. 61. 34. Ibid., p. 61. 35. B. Şenova and P. Paraskevaidou, ‘The UN incident’, in Senova and Paraskevaidou, Uncovered, p. 49. 36. For the full history of the project, see B. Şenova and P. Paraskevaidou, ‘Foreword’, in ibid., p. 9. 37. Şenova and Paraskevaidou, ‘The UN incident’, p. 49. € on 27 August 2015. 38. From interview conducted with Erhan Oze 39. Ibid. 40. Şenova and Paraskevaidou, ‘The UN incident’, p. 49. 41. Atkins and Mintcheva, ‘Censorship in camouflage’, p. xv. € 42. Interview with Oze.

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Censorship in Disguise 43. Ibid. 44. Chrystalleni Loizidou, ‘Explaining (as) the problem: Cypriot historiography or mental indigestion?’, Commemoration, Public Art and Memorial Politics in Cyprus (1901– 2013) (London, unpublished doctoral thesis, 2014). 45. Başak Şenova, ‘Occupying the Occupied: Perceptions of occupation and control in Cyprus’, Ibraaz 003 (2 May 2012). Available at www.ibraaz.org/ essays/32 (accessed 13 July 2015). € 46. Erhan Oze, Extraterritorial Electromagnetic Interventions (Nicosia, 2011), p. 5. 47. Şenova and Paraskevaidou, ‘The UN incident’, p. 49. 48. Yael Navaro-Yashin, The Make-Belief Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Durham, NC; London, 2012). 49. Phileleftheros, ‘Poiniko adikima i alloiosi geografikon onomaton kai toponymion’ [The alteration of geographical data and place names as criminal offence] (Greek), Phileleftheros, 4 July 2015. Available at www.philenews.com/ el-gr/koinonia-eidiseis/160/152323/poiniko-adikima-i-alloiosi-geografikononomaton-i-toponymion (accessed 15 September 2015). 50. Zelia Gregoriou, ‘Reckoning with the divide in Cyprus: The performativity of borders’, HAGAR Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities 7/1 (2006), pp. 16– 7. 51. Şenova and Paraskevaidou, ‘The UN incident’, p. 49. 52. Ibid. 53. Butler, ‘Ruled out’, pp. 247–8. 54. Ibid., p. 249. 55. Evanthia Tselika, ‘Conflict Transformation Art: Practice-Led Research Examining The Role of Socially Engaged Art in Resisting Urban Segregation. The Case of Nicosia Cyprus’ (London, unpublished doctoral thesis, 2015), pp. 102– 3. 56. Ibid., pp. 112– 13. 57. Şenova and Paraskevaidou, ‘The UN incident’, p. 49. 58. Atkins and Mintcheva, ‘Introduction: Censorship in camouflage’, pp. xv– xxiv. 59. Vidokle and Kuan Wood, ‘Breaking the contract’. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. All information regarding Rumours’ initial conceptualisation is from the interview I conducted with Socratous. 63. Duplaix, ‘Interview of Socratis Socratous’, p. 32. 64. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 130. 65. Robert Atkins, ‘High wire(d) act: Balancing the political and the technological’, in Atkins and Mintcheva, Censoring Culture, p. 91. 66. For more on this, see Katerina Gregos, ‘Speech Matters’, in K. Gregos and H.J. Christoffersen (eds), Speech Matters (catalogue of an exhibition at the Danish Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, 7 June –27 November 2011) (Milan, 2011), pp. 7– 29.

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2 Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran

Kirstie Imber

In a recent project, Phillip Toledano, the British-born conceptual artist, sourced a number of commercial product wrappers and packaging from Iran. Specifically, the artist selected the packaging and wrappers for products aimed at women – tights, beauty products, items for new mothers – each of which are commonly found stacked on store shelves across Iran. But these products were different from many other everyday items for sale, because before reaching the shelves they had been censored by the Iranian authorities. The photographs of the women adorning each product had been crudely inked out with a black marker pen, individually, and by hand (Figure 2.1). Toledano then removed the blacked-out figures from each product and photographed and enlarged them to produce a series of large-format prints of inky-black silhouettes, entitled The Absent Portrait (2013). In one of the images, Barely There, the silhouette of a woman is almost visible – her pale feet and plain black stilettos jut out from the large volume of black that is concentrated in the centre of the image and set against a background of crisp, empty white. Originally an image of a woman posed to advertise a pair of tights, in Toledano’s enlarged version

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Censoring Art

Figure 2.1 Phillip Toledano, The Absent Portrait, 2013. Original packaging.

we see how the censor intended the ink to work as a temporary veil; cloaking the areas of bare skin on the woman’s upper arms and legs and the length of her loose hair, in line with Iran’s official custom of hejab, or appropriate and modest dress for women in public spaces. The scribbled lines of inky magic marker have been applied haphazardly and with speed,

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Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran as if the censor was in a hurry to conceal the image and move onto the next. Yet it is the attempt to disguise particular areas of her body that draws the eye into the mass of black – we begin searching for a glimpse of what was once visible. After a few moments of concentrated looking the gaps and crevices between the lines of ink become legible: the edge of a knee; the contour of a face; the ends of some loose hair. There are also areas where the ink has worn or been deliberately scratched away. It is during this act of looking that we become conscious of where this process of censorship has failed; we are reminded that this form of veil will conceal only up to a point, because what lies beneath remains, and cannot be eradicated by this method of censorship alone. In a brief statement about the series of photographs, Toledano suggestively argues that the censor, whose job it is to erase, ‘becomes the person who makes us look’.1 The operations of censorship, as dramatised and brought to the fore in Toledano’s series of photographs, provide the point of departure for this chapter, which explores the issue of cultural censorship in presentday Iran. Despite the limited research available on this subject, a number of cultural practitioners working in Iran continue to face challenges in obtaining official authorisation to exhibit or publish their work, and many also run the risk of having their work censored.2 Rather than provide a survey of cultural censorship in Iran, however, this chapter will interrogate commonplace understandings of censorship in relation to contemporary art produced by artists living and working in the country. The chapter will raise the question as to whether censorship is simply a systematic process put in place by governments and their agencies in order to create and maintain degrees of silence and invisibility, and whether it is possible to conceive of censorship as one of the strategies that can increase an artist’s chances of gaining agency and representation. As Toledano’s images demonstrate, the act of censorship – the attempt to cover up a seemingly inappropriate or offensive image – also leaves a suggestive trace of its operations. It will be argued here, then, that censorship is not always a discrete act that produces the desired effect of eradicating and silencing. Rather, we might begin to conceive of censorship’s ‘traces’ as a productive site for critical inquiry and reflection – a chance to look and listen again.

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Censoring Art

Engaging with Censorship The academic discourse on censorship has long emphasised the nuances and complexities of the censorship process. For example, in 1988 Annette Kuhn published an influential study of cinema and censorship, drawing in particular on Michel Foucault’s theories of power. Kuhn redefines censorship as a more relational, fluid and productive process – one that is implicated in an ‘apparatus or set of practices whose interrelationships are imbued [. . .] with the “play” of power’.3 Censorship is thus recast as a causational model that escapes reduction to a circumscribed and predefined set of institutions and activities. Writing ten years later, Judith Butler, whose work continues to influence writing on the arts and humanities, also argued that censorship is implicated in the material it seeks to censor, ‘in ways that produce paradoxical consequences’. Indeed, it might be considered a process that contributes to ‘making the object that it also constrains’.4 This theoretical thread is particularly relevant when considering alternative ways to conceptualise and understand silence and invisibility in the context of censorship, and therefore provides the framework for this analysis of contemporary Iranian art. It raises the question: to what extent can censorship be viewed as a productive process that has the ability to simultaneously suppress and grant visibility to the artist, object or work? When it comes to the seemingly silenced voices of artists who work in Iran, this question seems absolutely vital, if we are to avoid reducing their work to something that did exist. Although the following examples interrogate the censorship and eradication of images and art objects in present-day Iran, I would argue that this approach may prove relevant and insightful to censored works of art in other geographical and historical contexts. For example, the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and the battles he has waged with the Chinese state, have been the focus of much media and scholarly attention in recent years. In a recent interview with The New York Times Weiwei suggested that ‘the most elegant way to adjust to censorship is to engage in selfcensorship. It is the perfect method for allying with power and setting the stage for the mutual exchange of benefit’.5 For Weiwei, cultural censorship places limits on knowledge and values. Tellingly, he points out that everyone in China knows that a censorship system exists, but there remains

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Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran little discussion of why. I would argue that more discussion is therefore needed on these issues – particularly the inherent contradictions of the censorship process.

Authorising Art and Culture in Iran: A Brief Overview To date, few art historians focused on contemporary art in Iran have fully addressed the impact of government censorship on the arts.6 Accessible analyses of the impact of government censorship on the arts have been published by scholars working beyond the disciplines of art history and the humanities (nearly all of which are published in English). Before addressing these reports, however, it is necessary to provide a more general overview of the way in which the arts and culture in Iran have been regulated following the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the transition to an Islamic Republic. Since before the Revolution in 1979, art and cultural practices produced in Iran are subject to a vetting system governed by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Vezarat Farhang va Ershad-e Eslami). This organisation forms part of Iran’s complex structure of elected and unelected institutions and councils that make up the country’s political system. The President of Iran, who is directly elected but who does not maintain overall control over all policy and military departments, is responsible for appointing ministers to his cabinet (who are then approved by parliament). It is within this cabinet that the Minister for Culture sits (currently Ali Jannati), heading up the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians are required to apply for permits from the Ministry in order to exhibit, publish or release their work inside the country. Authorisation can take weeks, months or years, or it can be denied altogether. As is often reported by the media (particularly in Europe and North America), practitioners who risk producing work outside of this system often face strict government censorship, or receive far worse forms of punishment. The Ministry has been recently described as ‘an elaborate system of councils that regulate and monitor every sphere of artistic expression’.7 In addition, Wendy DeBano has drawn attention to the

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Censoring Art notion that cultural practitioners are continually under the ‘watchful eyes and ears of the state’, which is evidenced by the ‘stern gazes and ghostly stares’8 of images of national leaders and martyrs which adorn billboards and the sides of buildings across the urban landscape.9 In one of the few published reports examining the Ministry’s permit system, published in 2006 by the UK-based human rights organisation Article 19, it is described how artists are ‘informed of any amendments needed to make the work acceptable [. . .] that is, in line with the tenets espoused by Islam, in order to obtain a stamp of approval’.10 Indeed, within this system of vetting and authorising works of art, the effort to bring culture in line with both Islamic values and with the Islamic Republic’s political values forms one of the Ministry’s most crucial criteria, and therefore should not be underestimated. Problematically, however, members of the Ministry include figures from varying religious positions, which in turn impacts on the ways in which Islamic values are described and set out in political policies. In very general terms, Iran’s political factions are often categorised as either reformist or conservative, and these factions are, unsurprisingly, often locked in battle.11 Although there is certainly diversity within each group, in essence the conservatives tend to follow Ayatollah Khomeini and his teachings (the first Supreme Leader and father of the Revolution), and therefore ‘promote a puritanical understanding of Islamic principles’, which often confines artistic expression to the cause of state propaganda. The reformists, however, tend to hold more liberal views, often favouring an approach to culture that involves democracy and dialogue.12 Thus, depending on who is in office, and who is appointed head of the Ministry, the process, frequency and justification for censoring works of art is subject to continuous change. It is important to stress, however, that in the context of Iran, where the principles of Islam implicitly and explicitly provide the foundations for governmental policies and strategies, it remains impossible to obtain a clear picture of the issue. Talinn Grigor has recently argued that the actual practice of censorship ‘remains vague and in constant flux’.13 Similarly, Iranian theatre director Mahmood Karimi-Hakak claims that, in Iran, ‘one never really knows who issues the order to censor or even why something has been censored’.14 Nevertheless, Article 19’s report argues that censorship is ‘firmly entrenched’ in Iranian culture, as is its corollary, self-censorship. As the

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Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran anonymous authors of this report go on to claim, this is a particularly problematic aspect of censorship in Iran; namely, that self-censorship significantly extends the boundaries of state-imposed censorship.15 A more recent document (2012), written and published by another UK-based research group and action lab, Small Media Foundation, explores the Iranian government’s policies of cultural control in the latter years of the Ahmadinejad era. This period is also known as post ‘Reform’, following the departure of President Khatami from office in August 2005. (Seyyed Khatami remains known for his reformist policies and open engagements with the arts.)16 Rather than focus on the internet and the popular press, the report examines the impact of state censorship on a much wider array of cultural activity, including literature, music, cinema and theatre. In the introduction, the authors argue that: as books are removed from shelves, shops are closed, albums are kept from public distribution, critiques of films digress into libel of an extremely personal nature and crucial characters are culled from plays, Iran’s artists are becoming increasingly frustrated and disillusioned.17

The report carries the warning that the condition of culture in Iran during the latter years of Ahmadinejad’s leadership is moving towards ‘what can only be described as a state of emergency’.18 The reports cited above belong to a recent wave of publications (mainly published in English and made available on the internet) on cultural censorship in Iran and the Middle East, produced by non-governmental organisations, think tanks and charities. Favouring a generalised, statistical account of the issue (indeed, most reports tend to provide a catalogue or list to highlight patterns and trends in the government’s censorship strategy), these reports advance the argument that artists are subject to human rights abuses. The language of these reports portrays censorship as a decisive process that removes, erases or silences. The Small Media Foundation’s report on cultural censorship – which bears a front cover depicting a darkened and faded nineteenth-century Qajar portrait of a young boy with two pieces of white tape placed over his mouth – begins by stating that the Islamic Republic has attempted to silence the voices of writers, poets and publishers perceived to be against the regime.19 While not to call into question the validity and importance of these reports in 37

Censoring Art aiming to cast light on the perennial challenges faced by Iranian artists, they do, however, leave little ground to pursue a sustained investigation into the nuances and complexities of the artist’s (censored) work and practice. Herein there lies a paradox: because, while these organisations work to defend freedom of cultural expression, the very process of documenting acts of censorship in this way operates to restrain or suspend the work from meaning. It becomes a theoretical framing device that functions to consign creativity to the past: as something that did exist. Accepting the notion that censorship operates to deny or remove creative expression without question is to affirm censorship’s associations with absence, silence and invisibility. Indeed, the narratives advanced in this literature are clearly predicated on a series of binaries: works of art are either present or absent; visible or invisible; heard or not heard. To what extent, then, do the operations of censorship – the banning, removal and erasure of works of art – achieve absolute, irreversible results? Are Iranian artists’ voices rendered silent and their works invisible? What meanings emerge once the relationship between censorship, silence and invisibility is interrogated? Without wanting to romanticise censorship, or suggest that censorship produces creativity, is it possible, following Toledano’s suggestion, that the censor becomes the person who makes us look? A brief consideration of contemporaneous examples of cultural censorship proves particularly productive in this regard, and demonstrates instances where the binary logic underlying censorship might be said to break down.

Silenced Voices? In 2008 the Iranian artist Mandana Moghaddam began developing the first of a series of sculptural, site-specific installations as part of a long-term project that explores the dynamics and tensions of dialogue and exchange. Moghaddam’s work takes the form of a traditional water-well that requires the active participation of the city’s audience: passers-by are invited to speak into its structure with the aim of establishing dialogue with an unknown individual across the globe (the wells are technologically linked in the same way as telephones) (Figure 2.2). Entitled The Well, the project was conceived on the basis that, despite the various networks of communication saturating the globalised world, there are always latent complexities inherent in establishing dialogue – whether between 38

Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran

Figure 2.2 Sweden.

Mandana Moghaddam, The Well, 2008. Installation. Gothenburg,

individuals, communities or cultures – particularly within the often repressive ideology of Islamic society. Moghaddam’s ambitious project therefore promised to encourage unmediated dialogue that would cut across inter- and cross-cultural divides and the geographical borders between countries. Initial plans for the project included two connected well structures installed in the public spaces of Tehran and Gothenburg. Yet, just days before The Well was due to be unveiled outside the House of Artists in the centre of Tehran, the national authorities halted the permit process. In an article written for a human rights magazine Gozaar, Moghaddam recalls that: A letter from the House of Artists said they would cooperate, but the work was stopped as soon as it started. They were verbally told that no permit would be issued, because the well was regarded as a ridicule of Imam Zaman, and there was also some concern about the kind of conversations that might be exchanged.20

Moghaddam has described this brief and somewhat vague explanation (which is characteristic of the statements issued indirectly by the Ministry)

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Censoring Art as a form of cultural censorship. Following these developments, the artist was unable to complete the full installation of The Well in the centre of Tehran.21 However, given the overall ambition to establish alternative networks of communication and exchange, Moghaddam continued to build and install the project elsewhere. At the time of writing, structures are now in place in Sweden, India, and South Korea, with the artist planning to install further wells in other major cities across the globe.22 While markedly absent from the art historical discourse on contemporary Iranian art, The Well is a project that remains simultaneously absent (through censorship) and distinctly present (through its various iterations across the globe) and thus might be said to slip between the categories of visible/invisible, heard/not heard. The Iranian authorities’ refusal to grant The Well a permit for its display and use by the public is clearly an important marker for the perceived power of the work, and should therefore prompt further questions as to why the installation was deemed inappropriate for public display in this specific geographical and cultural context. To date, however, these questions have yet to be addressed by art historians.23 And one reason for this may be that, despite its ongoing presence across the globe, The Well is assumed to be a censored, absent work, and the artist’s voice silenced. The censorship of Moghaddam’s project in 2008 can be contrasted with another, more high profile instance of cultural censorship from the world of Iranian cinema that took place two years later. In December 2010, the prolific filmmaker Jafar Panahi was sentenced to six years imprisonment and placed under house arrest for alleged ‘crimes against national security’ and propaganda against the Islamic Republic. According to lawyers, Panahi was ‘accused of making a film without permission and inciting opposition protests’ during the 2009 presidential elections.24 Yet perhaps the toughest sentence handed to the filmmaker was a twenty-year ban on making and directing films, including writing screenplays and giving interviews to both the foreign and national press. However, Panahi has continued to find loopholes in the system to create work, a fact evidenced by the release of the wittily titled This Is Not a Film (In Film Nist) (2011),25 a zero-budget documentary offering a candid portrait of Panahi himself. Shot entirely on an iPhone and DV camera, the film was ‘allegedly’ uploaded to a USB stick and smuggled out of Iran in a birthday cake to Europe, where it received widespread praise by critics at

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Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran the Cannes Film Festival.26 The seventy-five-minute film, which was codirected with collaborator Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, follows Panahi roaming about his house and ruminating, occasionally talking to Mirtahmasb, to his lawyers, and to himself. These scenes of contemplation are contrasted with those showing Panahi carrying out the mundane tasks of everyday life: feeding his daughter’s pet iguana, making business calls, taking out rubbish. Critical responses to This Is Not a Film, while sensitive to Iran’s perplexing political situation, are quick to describe Panahi as an ‘exiled and silenced’ voice.27 Yet Panahi’s powerful document dramatises the suppression of agency while simultaneously speaking with intense fluency about life lived under such restrictions. By playing with the medium of film, he subtly conveys an important political message about the powerful role of art when created under such severe circumstances. This metaphor of the lost or silenced voice is deployed time and time again across the existing documentation, particularly within reports and articles in the mainstream press that focus on the censorship of artists. But how accurate is this metaphor? For it seems to be based on the assumption that acts of censorship are systematic processes put in place by governments and their agencies in order to remove works of art and silence their authors. Censorship is described as functioning in a unidirectional way, based on the binary logic of oppressor and oppressed, powerful and powerless. However, stepping into the ‘silence’ that surrounds these artists’ works can be revealing. In Panahi’s case, following his house arrest, the director has achieved further fame across the globe. His ‘unauthorised’ work has received greater visibility since then, winning awards and gaining new audiences.28 Research into Moghaddam’s comparatively lesser known project has also proved productive, revealing the ongoing unease on the part of the Iranian authorities towards public art projects that cannot be effectively regulated or policed, and that have the potential to encourage acts of free speech and communication.29 Viewed in the context of her wider practice, The Well stands out as the only work deemed controversial. It is in this sense, then, that Moghaddam’s censored work demands further attention, and should not be assumed to remain consigned to the past. In January 2013, Café Prague, the popular meeting place of artists and writers located just a stone’s throw from the university in Tehran, was ordered to close after it refused to comply with official orders to install a

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Censoring Art video surveillance system. Rather than face further harassment by the authorities, the owners closed the café themselves, and created various online platforms for visitors to post their comments, memories and images. Amir Darafsheh, a Tehran-based photographer, decided to create a series of images of the very last day in Café Prague, because the online site had offered him an important exhibition space for his and other artists’ works. To date, Darafsheh remains without a suitable exhibition space to share his images; however, his series continues to circulate on various Iranian online galleries, and are now being used alongside articles about the politically motivated closure. Indeed, the closure of Café Prague and the exhibition space has, in a sense, given fresh visibility to Darafsheh’s work. In a recent study, indeed, Niki Akhavan has examined in detail the significance of the internet in Iran as a site for cultural production.30 Like a lot of artists inside the country, Darafsheh seeks out the interstices in order to generate dialogue about his work. The internet might thus be conceived of as a site within which the meaning of a work of art can continue to unfold in multifarious and unexpected ways – beyond the watchful eyes of the state. For Niyaz Azadikhah, a female visual artist whose provocative images are consistently banned in the country, censorship has also created alternative opportunities for her to share her politically motivated work, which includes being nominated as a finalist for the Magic of Persia prize in 2011. In 2014 the artist exhibited a selection of her work in a small onewoman show in Tel Aviv – an exhibition that should have included another seven Iranian women artists. Although the other contributors initially agreed to participate, the fear of the Iranian authorities forced many to cancel.31 For Azadikhah, who refused to pull out, this was an opportunity to share her work in a cultural context that seldom considers contemporary art from Iran, due to the interminable political tensions and unrest between Iran and Israel. Indeed, as the curator of the exhibition also argued, this was an important opportunity to make cultural production from Iran accessible to the Israelis, and to begin a dialogue that moved beyond popular media portrayals of each country. Azadikhah’s work has thus gained visibility in an unexpected corner of the globe. For Farhad Moshiri, the threat of censorship is something the artist has learned to welcome. After showing works at the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2009, Moshiri received an email requesting him to stop producing art,

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Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran due to the fact that ‘it is an insult to brave Iranians who have shed their blood for more freedom’.32 Moshiri is quoted as saying that, ‘I cherish these letters [. . .] they turn out to be like the diplomas people hang. I keep them close.’33 Indeed, in 2008 Moshiri broke the auction record for a painting by an Iranian artist, with a work that featured the Farsi word for ‘Love’ embroidered in Swarovski crystals and gold sequins, which sold for just over $1 million.34 From an art historical perspective, cultural censorship in Iran provides a unique opportunity for the cultivation of questions and critical reflection about works of art, as this chapter can only begin to highlight, and should form part of the wider discourse on contemporary art and its developments. We might begin by thinking about the implications of labelling censored artists as ‘silenced voices’.

Conclusion Ethnomusicologist Laudan Nooshin has suggested that it is significant that the seemingly ‘muted presences’ of silenced artists have remained unremarked upon, and should therefore call attention to the need to seek alternative modes of enquiry without relying on the outmoded binaries of ‘domination and resistance, victimiser and victimised, voice and silence’.35 I therefore want to conclude this chapter by citing the voices of two Iranian writers who have drawn attention to the nuances of artistic production in Iran. Speaking about the cultural climate in the country, Kianoosh Vahabi, a local architect, has argued that ‘Iran nevertheless remains in many ways unique. While there is relatively little financial backing for the arts, and despite the extensive political and social constraints that exist, it’s still a spectacular socio-political environment for ambitious young artists to take as their starting-point as they seek to forge a dialogue with the rest of the world’.36

Echoing these sentiments, art critic Tirdad Zolghadr argues that: today not only sculpture biennials but also video installations, independent art collectives and other features of your standard urban ‘art scene’ are becoming commonplace. Even art in public

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Censoring Art spaces – performances in shopping districts, exhibitions in lorries and half-built high-rises – has reared its grisly head in Tehran.37

Perhaps most telling is Zolghadr’s remark that, ‘if there’s anything typical of Tehran, it’s the dizzying pace at which cultural fashions swell and transfigure – be it architecture, reformist Islam, Speed Metal or the visual arts’.38 The discipline of art history therefore offers a crucial platform for exploring this remarkable, if problematic, area of cultural production. But it should interrogate those moments of silence; it should pause and pay attention to the gaps and the blind spots. It is precisely this attentiveness to the seemingly silent and invisible within censored works of art that can provide an alternative entry into understanding the meaning and efficacy of socially and politically engaged art produced in Iran. As Talinn Grigor has recently argued, ‘Iranian art is at the moment prolific and brilliant, not despite state censorship as if often argued but because of it.’39

Notes 1. Quote obtained from Phillip Toledano’s website, http://theabsentportrait.com (accessed 1 March 2014). 2. Despite the lack of up-to-date and widely available research on this issue, it has been noted that, while literature, cinema and some forms of music have been subject to high censorship, not all forms of visual art shown in galleries and museums attract the same level of intervention. Interview with Hamid Keshmirshekan, May 2014. 3. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–25 (London; New York, 1988), p. 7. 4. Judith Butler, ‘Ruled out: Vocabularies of the Censor’ in Robert C. Post (ed.), Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation, Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, 1998), p. 247. 5. Ai Weiwei, ‘Ai Weiwei: How Censorship Works’, The New York Times, 6 May 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/06/opinion/sunday/ai-weiwei-howcensorship-works.html (accessed 20 August 2017). 6. In a recent interview, Hamid Keshmirshekan, who has published widely on contemporary Iranian art and who currently edits a popular bi-lingual journal, Art Tomorrow, confirmed that the subject remains too risky for scholars wishing to publish their research in the country. Interview with Hamid Keshmirshekan, London, May 2014. 7. ‘Unveiled: Art and Censorship in Iran’, Article 19 (London, 2006), p. 7.

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Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran 8. Wendy S. DeBano, ‘Enveloping music in gender, nation, and Islam: Women’s music festivals in post-revolutionary Iran’, Iranian Studies XXXVIII/3 (2006), pp. 442 – 3. 9. In fact, the landing page of the Ministry’s official website also displays the portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini, and the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. 10. ‘Unveiled’, p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 11. 12. Ibid. 13. Talinn Grigor, Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (London, 2014), p. 142. 14. Mahmood Karimi-Hakak, ‘Exiled to Freedom: A Memoir of Cultural Censorship in Iran’, The Drama Review XLVI/4 (2003), p. 18. 15. Ibid., p. 8. 16. For a useful account of Khatami’s landslide presidential election and campaign, see Chapter Three: ‘Khatami’s Emergence’ in David Menashri, Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power (London; New York, 2001), pp. 70 – 90. 17. Mostafa Khalaji, Bronwen Robertson and Maryam Aghdami, ‘Cultural Censorship in Iran: Iranian Culture in a State of Emergency’, Small Media Foundation (London, 2011), p. 2. 18. Ibid., p. 1. 19. Ibid., p. 7. 20. Mandana Moghaddam, quoted in Mohammad Abdi, ‘A Well that Connects Sweden and Iran: cultural discourse or government censorship?’ in Gozaar: A Forum on Human Rights and Democracy in Iran, 18 November 2008. http:// www.gozaar.org/english/articles-en/A-Well-that-Connects-Sweden-and-Iran. html (accessed 16 January 2012). 21. It is important to note that many other works by the artist have been shown in Iran without controversy. 22. Interview with Mandana Moghaddam, October 2011. 23. Moghaddam’s project forms the focus of Chapter Two in my unpublished doctoral research. See Kirstie Imber, ‘Unveiling the Voice: the politics and poetics of the voice in contemporary Iranian art’ (PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2016). 24. ‘Iranian film-maker Jafar Panahi gets six-year sentence’, BBC News, 20 December 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12045248 (accessed 11 May 2012). 25. In Film Nist. Dir. Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi, 2011. 26. As described by various articles in the press, such as Guardian http://www. guardian.co.uk/film/2012/mar/29/this-is-not-a-film-review (accessed 11 May 2011) and Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/ films/reviews/this-is-not-a-film-jafar-panahi-and-mojtaba-mirtahmasb-u7605930.html (accessed 11 May 2011).

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Censoring Art 27. E. Nina Rothe, ‘This Is Not A Film: Just Jafar Panahi, his iphone and the Truth’, Huffington Post, 27 February 2012 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/e-ninarothe/this-is-not-a-film-just-j_b_1303679.html (accessed 11 May 2012). 28. Panahi’s third unauthorised film, Taxi (2015), also won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Rachel Donadio, ‘Jafar Panahi, Iranian Filmmaker, Persists Despite a Ban’, New York Times, 24 September 2015. http://www. nytimes.com/2015/09/27/movies/jafar-panahi-iranian-filmmaker-persistsdespite-a-ban.html (accessed 24 October 2015). 29. For an analysis of how Moghaddam’s project promised to transgress certain societal regulations around speech and behaviour in public, see Imber, ‘Unveiling the Voice’, pp. 96 –124. 30. Niki Akhavan, Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Revolution (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2013). 31. See ‘Iran: Six women artists cancel their participation in exhibition in Israel’, ArtsFreedom, 31 March 2014. http://artsfreedom.org/?p¼7119 (accessed 2 May 2014). 32. Negar Azimi, ‘Farhad Moshiri: all that glitters’, The National, 28 May 2010. http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/farhad-moshiri-all-that-glitters#page1 (accessed 2 May 2014). 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Laudan Nooshin, ‘Prelude: Power and the Play of Music’ in Laudan Nooshin (ed.), Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (Aldershot, 2009), p. 31. 36. http://www.frieze.com/article/tehran (accessed 2 May 2014). 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Grigor, Contemporary Iranian Art, p. 145.

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3 Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s

Judith Devlin

Accounts of art under Stalin have frequently been written as a story of excisions, absences and disappearances and Soviet censorship has usually been treated as a sad but simple tale of state repression, with writers and artists figuring mainly as victims of state tyranny.1 During the Cold War especially, but also thereafter, histories of Soviet art, lamenting the demise of the great modernist revolution of the first third of the twentieth century, concentrated on the tragic fate of exceptional individuals such as Pavel Filonov and Kazimir Malevich, whose creativity was crushed by oppressive state policies.2 Their disappearance from public view was seen as emblematic of the fate of Soviet society as a whole under Stalin: subject to a uniquely oppressive and intrusive dictatorship, deprived of all agency and independence of action, Soviet citizens were held to be forced to conform outwardly while dissenting inwardly.3 However, this model of the allconsuming political leviathan has been widely challenged by historians and, in relation to art, requires amendment. The evidence suggests, as this chapter will show, that few Soviet artists demurred when offered the opportunity to paint what the authorities required and that problems arose more by accident than by design.

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Censoring Art Censorship and sanctions were just one strategy employed by the regime in the 1930s; it also offered inducements and rewards to those willing to accommodate themselves to its demands. Engagement in the art world, under Stalin, involved accepting the rules of the game as outlined by the Party and producing the kind of art the authorities were understood to want. The Party only intermittently tried to define the parameters of acceptability.4 For much of the time, therefore, artists had to guess what was required, an endeavour in which they were assisted both by critics and other artists. Artistic activity therefore involved a large measure of implicit censorship and, in the 1930s, artists themselves were in practice often as important as official censorship agencies in ‘censoring’ art, in the sense of identifying political or stylistic error. Deliberate challenges to the PartyState’s priorities and standards were few in number, as artists began to understand what was required of them and what the ‘deal’ was. Matthew Cullerne Bown even suggests, on the basis of his conversations of artists of that era, that ‘the notion that they might have had moral scruples about [painting Stalin or happy peasants] would have been incomprehensible to nearly all artists’. Instead, he argues, ‘for many artists the artistic programme of the Stalin era did represent a consummation, genuine enough, of their professional ideals’.5 This chapter will argue that artists themselves not only painted what was required but also helped to impose official standards, sometimes in an attempt to ward off the retribution that awaited the errant.

Patronage and Oversight Arguably more important in censorship than formal agencies were the institutions involved in the commissioning of art. In Stalin’s Russia, the Party-State was the only source of patronage and, given the ambient poverty, artists were highly dependent on it. The state dispensed largesse that could make rich men of leading artists and ensure the survival of others. It is estimated that 90 per cent of socialist realist painting was commissioned.6 In the mid-1930s, the visiting American communist Kurt London was told that artists working on approved contracts might expect to receive a monthly wage of 500 to 2,000 roubles, while stars such as Isaak Brodskii were paid 40,000 roubles for one work in 1938 (Voroshilov on a Private Walk) and, like other approved artists, he also made a substantial 48

Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s income from the copying and mass reproduction of his paintings. The three big exhibitions organised by Party leaders in the late 1930s spent about 10 to 12 million roubles on paintings and sculptures (with artists such as Alexander Gerasimov receiving 55,000 roubles for one painting and the out-of-favour David Shterenberg 1,000 roubles). When Stalin Prizes were introduced in 1941, first-prize winners received 100,000 roubles. By comparison, in 1930, a foundry worker earned 50 to 60 roubles a month and in the mid- to late 1930s the average wage of industrial workers in Leningrad was around 220 to 420 roubles.7 Traditionally Russian artists – unlike often aristocratic literary stars such as Tolstoy and Turgenev – came from modest backgrounds: Repin, the great naturalist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was the son of a serf.8 Many members of the influential Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) in the 1920s came from the poor provinces and had neither connections nor private wealth to assist them.9 Throughout the interwar period, many artists continued to suffer hardship from which only state intervention and support could rescue them. Artists needed paints, brushes and canvases, which were frequently in short supply, as well as studio space and buyers interested in and capable of paying for their efforts.10 To work outside the state system was a virtual impossibility, while the rewards for conformism were appreciable. Both the prevailing poverty and tradition thus tended to militate against expressions of independence and to ensure that great scandals were caused not so much by artists’ non-conformism as by unintentional error and circumstance. At the end of the profoundly destabilising First Plan in 1932, the Party pushed to create a popular mass culture to weld a fractured society into a loyal citizenry, mobilising art to produce positive images of the regime. It founded a number of bodies which played an important role in art patronage in the 1930s. Among these was Vsekokhudozhnik (the All-Russian Art Cooperative), founded in September 1929, which commissioned paintings for exhibitions and institutions such as factories, sanatoria and museums.11 Local artists’ collectives (tovarichestva) usually organised the practical work this involved. This system (known as kontraktatsiya) provided a living for many artists and Vsekokhudozhnik’s membership rose from eighty-seven in January 1930 to about 1,500 in the middle of 1931.12 Abolishing the competing cultural groups of the previous period, the Party moved to create unified, hierarchical cultural structures

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Censoring Art through which to dispense favours and sanctions. These creative unions were ostensibly self-governing (under the eye of the Party and its functionaries) and, during the 1930s, would command such unimaginable luxuries as access to special food supplies, apartments, dachas, and sanatoria at the Black Sea. A number of embryos of a projected All-Union Artists’ Union were established in the main cities, the most important of which was MOSSKh, the Moscow branch, founded in June 1932. It was a consciously elite body, which consigned less talented or reliable artists to town committees. MOSSKh was dominated by personalities who had made their name in pro-regime AKhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia) founded in 1922. Many of these individuals not only had personal connections with powerful Party figures, but some – such as Georgii Ryazhskii – also had links with the secret police and controlled membership of the body.13 Despite this, many artists welcomed the foundation of the MOSSKh and the new dispensation, which sanctioned figurative realism as the orthodox style and ended the sharp culture wars of the previous decade. These bodies functioned alongside the powerful commissariats and cultural institutions in mobilising artists to produce the fine art the regime required, giving them contracts and paying them at stipulated rates. As commissions grew in number and the quantity of big exhibitions increased, especially towards the end of the 1930s, artists from MOSSKh and its Leningrad counterpart were involved in reviewing the works produced. The purchasing committees of Vsekokhudozhnik and Izogiz (and later the art journal Iskusstvo) were composed of artists and critics and could require painters to re-work their efforts, or even reject them.14 This arrangement resembles to some extent what Robert Gellately has called, in respect of Nazism and the GDR, self-policing.15 What did this mean in practice?

Self-Policing While Glavlit (the main censorship agency of printed material) patrolled the reproduction of approved paintings in the mass media (unmasking innumerable outrages and errors),16 the regime encouraged artists to police themselves. This practice had emerged several years earlier and followed a pattern established under the tsars for reviewing paintings submitted for the Imperial Academy’s Gold Medal.17 This was in line with AKhRR’s 50

Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s practice for its thematic exhibitions in the 1920s.18 In the increasingly fraught climate of the 1930s, this system enabled artists to influence the distribution of patronage and privilege, to interpret and enforce official norms, consolidate their own position and protect or damn their colleagues. Kurt London, who visited the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s, was afforded a glimpse of how the peer-review system worked at this point. Viewings were held in public, attended not only by the large and often distinguished jury and the authors of the works being judged but also by a large crowd by fellow painters.19 Judgements were often harsh, but not invariably so. The jury sometimes refused to accept work, disappointing the painter’s hope of payment, but it also approved other pictures warmly and this served to identify what kind of art was desired. In one session, whose minutes London read, the innovative Alexander Tyschler’s work was condemned for formalism, but not too fiercely, while the work of another painter with hitherto modernist leanings, one Denissovsky (with his dreary image of the French ambassador presenting his credentials) was praised both by Igor Grabar (whose reputation predated the revolution) and the conventional AKhRRist Viktor Perelman, who greeted it as ‘one of the positive symbols of the fact that formalism is seriously and finally approaching its end in Soviet painting’.20 Neither Grabar, whose work was influenced by Impressionism, nor Perelman had much sympathy for modernism and they needed little prompting to condemn it. Among those works which were received enthusiastically by Vsekokhudozhnik, according to Kostin, was Taras Gaponenko’s To their Mothers for Dinner (1935, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), which showed be-suited (appropriately modern) collective-farm women workers taking a break from the harvest to collect their bonny babies from nurses and give them a feed. Most successful of all were the paintings of the initially unknown Arkady Plastov, who lived in a village in Saratov Province and whose work was applauded and heaped with praise by, among others, Grabar and Ilya Mashkov. One of his early successes was his Kolkhoz Festival (1937, Russian Museum, St Petersburg), which showed happy collective farmers celebrating around groaning tables of food under the benevolent eye of Stalin.21 These works indicated to the many artists who wanted to receive contracts and payments what, in practice, socialist realism meant. The public judging system acted as a school indicating what was and was not

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Censoring Art acceptable. There was no shortage of applicants eager to learn from the jury and one of Kostin’s functions as Secretary of Vsekokhudozhnik’s Artistic Council was to vet and view the work of unknown applicants, who included the young, the amateur and elderly representatives of prerevolutionary groupings. Judgements were not always benevolent, however, and by the mid1930s both style and content were increasingly severely policed, as may be judged from the Vsekokhudozhnik jury’s discussion of a painting of Solomon Nikritin in April 1935. Nikritin worked as an illustrator, decorator of large-scale celebrations and as an easel painter. He had trained with Alexandra Exter in Kiev during the Civil War and later at Vkhutemas and had belonged to a number of avant-garde groups in the 1920s.22 The cultural climate was by now inhospitable to a painter with this kind of background and disposition. Nikritin’s painting, entitled The Old and the New, depicted four figures in an indeterminate, abstracted setting (Figure 3.1). The two central figures, a young sportsman holding a ball and a young woman in overalls, were framed on the left by a statue of Venus and on the right by an old man kneeling in front of a begging bowl (identified retrospectively by Kostin as a legless war invalid and intended by Nikritin as a reference to the ‘old’). Much about this painting might already have been found unacceptable: from its style and symbolic language to its rejection of realism and its reference to destitution (liable to misinterpretation as a reference to an all-too-pervasive aspect of the ‘new’). Modernism had already fallen out of favour and was increasingly excised from exhibitions and museum collections. Nikritin, however, imagined that his picture would pass muster and claimed that it was based on personal observation: the young central figures were personal friends, workers building the metro (in theory, suitably orthodox icons) while, he added with stunning naivety, the old man was painted at the Yaroslav market. As for the settings, these were a composite of new sites of popular festivity – Gorky Park, metro building sites, Moscow railway stations and the Lenin hills. ‘Each figure’, Nikritin insisted, ‘was made from the sketch of a concrete person, caught at the moment of a concrete real situation’. The girl stood on a pile of sand, directing labourers and ‘looking at the city like a beautiful elegant lady’. It was a group portrait of the ‘present moment’, painting not its external features but ‘their inner, social-ethical idea’. Clearly he believed the picture to be ideologically orthodox and

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s

Figure 3.1 Solomon Nikritin, The Old and the New, 1935. Oil on canvas, 178.5 £ 216 cm. Savitskii Museum of Visual Arts, Nukus, Karakalpak Republic, Uzbekistan.

hoped to convince the jury that it had the requisite documentary-realist character.23 The jury refused to accept this.24 Pavel Sokolov-Skalya (an artist who contributed several famous paintings to the Party’s historical mythology) condemned Nikritin’s painting as ‘an eclectic work derived from other sources, namely it is adopted from the eclectic Italian fascists’ [sic ]. A leading figure in the campaign against ‘formalism’ (code for modernism), the critic Osip Beskin felt it was typical of the kind of dubious realism flooding Europe and America. More threateningly, the rising painter Mashkovtsev asked: ‘Could a Party man and a Communist create such a picture and would he do it? I cannot recollect that a single shadow of this tendency would ever have occurred in the case of comrades of the Party.’ Another critic, F. K. Lecht, agreed: ‘Comrades, we have here a sample of the works about which Pravda warned us [. . .] What we see here is a calumny [. . .] It is a class attack inimical to Soviet power.’ The painter Grigoriev (probably Alexander, one of the founders of the AKhRR) 53

Censoring Art recalled that it reminded him of the ‘entirely unintelligible’ art fashionable when he was student. ‘If the artist says that here we have a presentation of our times’, he added, ‘then it seems to me a defamation.’25 The content of the painting provoked just as many criticisms as its style. Surprisingly, the jury did not focus on the potentially most damaging figure, the old beggar or war invalid, but on the young man and the ball he was handling. Nikritin claimed to have copied the attitude from the model who, when visiting him, had turned to look at a globe, inspiring the dynamic figure Nikritin tried to present. The jury thought otherwise and saw the image as culturally subversive. ‘This is a deeply pathological, erotic picture’, Beskin declared. ‘Look at the composition as a whole. Why is your attention arrested by the ball? It is the most vulgar form of expression. Just look at the way in which the metro workman is calling across to Venus [. . .] Here every detail, even the working-dress of the Metro work-girl is erotically treated [. . .] This eros [. . .] wallows in filth [. . .].’26 His prolonged outburst was greeted with applause and indicates that, even before Pravda’s famous denunciation of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in January 1936, a bizarre prudery reigned.27 Nikritin had already expressed surprise at this reading of this picture, protesting that he had ‘not imagined these associations of an erotic character would arise’ and explaining that the ball’s position had been dictated by the demands of composition. None of his visitors had understood the picture in these terms. The powerful Alexander Gerasimov mocked him: ‘We are to believe [. . .] that he had not thought for a moment that anyone would question him about this ball! You see all the comrades who visited him were such angels of innocence, none over five years old [. . .].’ The picture should be removed, while Nikritin was ‘an undesirable type of artist’. With this the other jury members agreed. None of them (and it included such wellknown figures as Alexander Deineka, Fedor Bogorodsky and the critic Nikolai Shchekotov) attempted to defend the artist, although a couple referred to his apparent sincerity. Nikritin did not accept defeat, condemning such comments as ‘irresponsible, outrageous outbursts’. Evidently, several other paintings had been judged that day and Nikritin declared that they stood ‘in no relation whatever to Soviet painting. These works follow the line of least intellectual resistance. (I confess what I think – perhaps I am speaking for the last time). What I am looking for is a great socialist style, versatile, philosophical.’28 Given the timing of these

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s proceedings (in the crackdown following the assassination of the Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov), one might assume, as Nikritin appears to have feared, that the painting and its creator would have disappeared in short order. In fact, Nikritin died in 1953 in his sixtieth year, while his painting now graces the Karakalpak Museum of Arts, in the remote Uzbek town of Nukus, to which it was brought by the artist and collector I.V. Savitsky in the 1970s. What London’s evidence shows is that the conventional censorship agencies were largely superseded, in the field of fine art, by a system of self-government through which personal tastes (the conservative inclinations of prominent artists) and shrewd political instincts ensured that the Party’s requirements were interpreted in practice and enforced. In this way, deviations from official norms, even if loyal or unintentional, were condemned, while unorthodox artists were castigated, isolated and impoverished.

The Dawn of the Terror Self-policing worked not least because the Party had politically attuned and obsequious agents in key positions. In MOSSKh, the chairman of the board, A.A. Volter, had been a Party member since 1908, while Fyodor Bogorodsky had joined it in 1917 and both claimed to have played an active role in the revolution or Civil War. Bogorodsky and Georgii Ryazhskii (also a Party member) were connected to the secret police,29 while Yevgenii Katsman was an obsequious courtier and associate of Voroshilov. Their power and obedience to the Party’s diktat is apparent in one of the most infamous instances of persecution of an erring artist by his peers, a scandal which broke upon the art world in January 1935. It was prompted by the unfortunate coincidence of a political tribute which misfired (thanks to defective Soviet technology and materials) with a political crisis, the assassination of the Leningrad Party leader Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934. Kirov’s murder was a shock which frightened the Party leadership and inaugurated rounds of arrests, proscriptions and the initial trial of two of Stalin’s erstwhile rivals, Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. Not content with arrests, the Party determined that its enemies were no longer open but hidden, masquerading as a loyal Soviet and Party people. It was therefore necessary to unmask them and, on 18 January 1935, the Central Committee issued instructions to this effect, which were 55

Censoring Art to be read and discussed in all Party organisations, including local cells (such as that in MOSSKh). In what the Party’s letter claimed was an unprecedented development, its enemies ‘adopted double-dealing as their main means of relating to the Party, masking their villainous acts beneath vows and declarations of loyalty to the Party and devotion to Soviet power’ and had descended into ‘the mire of counter-revolutionary terrorism’. In essence they formed a ‘White Guard organisation’.30 Party officials were commanded to hunt down these hidden foes, a mission complicated by the fact that few of Zinoviev’s followers had not already been identified and detained. No-one could afford to be less than assiduous in this task, after the assassination of a Party leader or to declare that no enemies could be found, so those with politically incorrect backgrounds or unpopular or marginal figures were cast in this invidious role instead.31 This was the context in which the board of MOSSKh was hastily convened on 23 January 1935 (a mere five days after the issuing of the Party’s instructions) to discuss a painting by one Nikolai Mikhailov, a hitherto conventional painter of revolutionary scenes, who had exhibited with AKhRR shows since 1926. Some of the board expressed surprise to be called in and to have their attention drawn to Mikhailov’s painting, At Kirov’s Coffin, which they had already reviewed and approved for display at an exhibition the union was planning in honour of the late leader. In fact, the work – which depicted the grieving Stalin, Voroshilov and Kaganovich standing before Kirov’s coffin at the mourning ceremony – had produced such a positive impression that it had been decided to photograph it for the union’s journal Iskusstvo. This decision was the cause of Mikhailov’s downfall. Soviet photographers, like painters, often worked with defective equipment and materials and when the photograph was checked before publication, it was found to have a coded, subversive meaning. Between Stalin and Voroshilov, with a bony hand reaching out for their necks to drag them off to the grave, a skeleton could be discerned – Death himself. The painting was thus a call to assassinate Stalin and the other leaders and this counter-revolutionary terrorist subtext was underlined by the grey tonality which now appeared to replace the hitherto predominant red of the original picture. Although MOSSKh’s meeting appeared to be a spontaneous exercise in self-government and self-policing, it was actually more akin to a show trial, a scenario of ritual inculpation,

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s self-criticism and anathematisation scripted by the Party. That this was an indictment inspired by the Party’s letter is evident from the terms in which Mikhailov was condemned. ‘Clearly counter-revolutionary forces have infiltrated our ranks’ and one of them was Mikhailov, the chairman Volter announced on opening the meeting. Parroting the Party’s terminology and key themes, he asserted that the union had been inattentive to admit someone with Mikhailov’s past and disposition. During the Civil War, he had spent prolonged time in territory occupied by the Whites, a clearly suspicious circumstance. His previous paintings (Strike, The Shooting of Communards, Unemployment in the West, all of which had been exhibited at major official shows in the past), rather than illustrating the heroic martyrdom of the revolutionary movement, were now reinterpreted as depicting revolution’s bloody defeats and the triumph of the White Guard oppressor. Furthermore, Mikhailov also displayed mystical and symbolist tendencies. The fact that the skull and skeleton in the picture were only revealed in the photograph showed what a cunning mechanism was at work.32 Ryazhskii declared that most people would agree that between Stalin, Voroshilov and Kaganovich a ‘disguised skeleton’ was clearly visible. The painting was ‘in essence counter-revolutionary, there can be no doubt about it, it can only agitate for further terrorist acts against our leaders’. Bogorodsky, too, asserted that enemies had now hidden themselves in places where they were harder to find, such as the union. Its members had been too liberal. ‘This story with Mikhailov was our gunshot at Kirov.’33 All these individuals, whose links with the political authorities were wellknown, simply repeated the Party’s language and acted on its instruction to root out possible suspects. Katsman enlarged on Mikhailov’s dubious past, attacking the painter’s attempts to justify himself. The unfortunate artist’s tearful response to questions about his painting and youth were dismissed by everyone and his guilt was taken as read. Nothing he said would have changed the outcome, for he was a convenient scapegoat. Indeed, there was little desire on the part of the authorities to look further, for Mikhailov was not alone in having spent part of the Civil War years under the Whites. Few Soviet citizens had lived entirely exemplary lives, given the turbulent and unpredictable times the country had gone through. What seems to have been decisive in Mikhailov’s case was the officious intervention of a nervous editor, who, scanning the photograph of his painting, first discerned the otherwise invisible figure of Death.34

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Censoring Art At any time, error with the leaders’ images – inadvertent or not – caused trouble but in this context (when the erstwhile leaders, Kamenev and Zinoviev, had been condemned for alleged complicity in Kirov’s murder just under ten days earlier) it was potentially fatal and not just for Mikhailov. The consequences were apparent to everyone who attended. Those who had previously endorsed Mikhailov’s work now felt obliged to recant and deplore their lack of vigilance. Ryazhskii noted that when the sketch for the painting had initially been viewed by the union’s jury, ‘everyone, at least those sitting here, saw it and remarked on it as a positive thing [. . .] and essentially considered the work as the best [effort], in relation to composition etc., and we should all recognise this. All the members of the board of MOSSKh and the artists were unable to notice this happening in time.’ It was thus no longer enough to consider an artist’s work solely in relation to the quality of execution because it was evident that ‘if counter-revolution exists in art, it would not be obvious, in our conditions it can only be hidden’.35 This was a scarcely veiled warning and, after this intervention, artists – even Perelman, who had declared his initial interest in and sympathy for the victim – hastened to repent their short-sightedness and admit their errors. Taking his prompts from his more powerful colleagues, the Communist Konnov accused Mikhailov of counter-revolution; Evegenii Lvov (another Party member) demanded his exclusion from the union as an anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary; Alexander Grigoriev (who later died in the camps) demanded a hard and severe crackdown, as a lesson for Mikhailov and all MOSSKh’s members. Older artists whose reputations were made before the revolution also capitulated (doubtless feeling vulnerable): these included Konstantin Yuon and Aristarkh Lentulov, who admitted that the painting had moving qualities but nonetheless called for more severe measures against its creator. If no-one demurred, some were more measured in their comments: Ilya Mashkov attempted to prevaricate, saying how much he disliked both the painting and the entire process. Others confessed their errors, their failure to see what was before them: Sergei Gerasimov and Grigorii Shegal admitted the picture had made an impression on them. Gerasimov regretted his impressionability, Shegal his big mistake and inability to feel the work’s un-Soviet realism. Alexander Gerasimov, who clearly felt better protected, went over to the attack, using the Party’s signals to demand a clean-out of the board (doubtless for his own ends)

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s and asserting that Mikhailov was not the only guilty person; the whole atmosphere had been conducive to this incident. He, too, observed that when asked to review the painting before the meeting, he still could not see the offending image until it was pointed out to him.36 Mikhailov was expelled from the union. Leading artists confirmed the sinister subtext of his picture to the Central Committee; the matter was referred by Stalin to the Politburo and Mikhailov was arrested. The unwitting counter-revolutionary disappeared and the painting was destroyed. One of the artist’s friends later plausibly suggested that he had recycled a still-life with a skull for the painting because he had no other canvas to hand.37 Artists on MOSSKh’s board had collaborated in the destruction of Mikhailov, criticising his work on what they can hardly have failed to know were spurious grounds. However, they had been intimidated by their more political peers, who clearly acted for the Party in the proceedings. They had been left in no doubt about the Party’s ultimate oversight and the necessity of policing themselves more effectively, with a series of leading apparatchiki and functionaries reminding them of the primacy of politics in all their activities.38

The Anti-Formalist Campaign The affair marked the opening of a new period in relations between the Party and the art world. Two developments signalled this new climate: the anti-formalist campaign and the establishment of the Committee for Artistic Affairs (the KDI). The Committee began work in January 1936 and exercised more direct bureaucratic, political control over the arts than hitherto. The campaign against modernism culminated in a series of editorials in Pravda in the beginning of 1936. Already under a de facto ban and no longer exhibited since 1933, modernist artists were given to understand that the question of style was now a matter of politics rather than aesthetics. The talented Leningrad painter and illustrator of children’s books, Vladimir Lebedev, was the hapless victim of the Party’s anathema. Condemned initially by Politburo member A. A. Andreev at a conference in January, Lebedev’s amusing illustrations for a much praised book of songs and tales for children were attacked for ‘befouling everything’, for being addressed to ‘a small circle of aesthetes’ rather than children and for ‘formalism’, whose ‘bourgeois nature was betrayed by its passion for all 59

Censoring Art kinds of deformity and distortion’ and by ‘its inner emptiness, morbidity and decay’.39 If there were any ambiguity about what socialist realism meant in practice, it was clear that it did not accommodate any hint of modernism. It required no great political acumen to understand that being labelled a decadent bourgeois was tantamount to being declared a class enemy. As the Terror took off almost simultaneously, this was potentially a death sentence. Neither Lebedev nor his colleagues had any idea that they were offending the Party, nor were they seeking to challenge it. Nonetheless, Lebedev was lucky to survive: initially dismissed from his job, he lived to work on propaganda posters during the war and was awarded the title of Honoured Artist of the RSFSR in 1945. Others were less fortunate. The idiosyncratic Pavel Filonov, for example, was consigned to destitution in the 1930s and died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, as he was deemed by the authorities not worth saving. During the Terror, dozens of artists fell victim to fraudulent allegations of counterrevolutionary activity, often by jealous rivals.40 Despite this climate of fear, juries sometimes attempted to offer some measure of protection to artists, even at the height of the Terror, as a session of Vsekokhudozhnik’s Sculpture Council in August 1938 indicates. Vsekokhudozhnik had commissioned several sculptors to take part in a competition for a sculpture of Stalin and issued contracts to them. By the time of the meeting, 1.5 million roubles had already been spent on works that either could not be finished or could not be shown (presumably because they were found perilously inadequate) and the jury had to advise which contracts should be extended and which pieces should go forward. A number of efforts were waved through but the scale model bust of Stalin submitted by Nina Niss-Goldman, assisted by the monumental artist Lev Bruni, provoked a protracted and heated discussion. Niss-Goldman had trained in Paris before the revolution, before teaching in Vkhutemas and rallying to Lenin’s plan of monumental propaganda. Her natural idiom appears to have been avant-garde but by now it was out of the question to present work of this kind. Although some members of the jury found her work worthy of praise, it was also criticised on the grounds of style and one officious Stalinist (a sculptor named Valuev) was particularly hostile to her. A number of judges objected that the bust did not resemble Stalin but the sculptor Vladimir Andreev pointed out that it was very difficult to work only from photographs. (This was inevitable, as Stalin was known to have

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s sat only once for a sculptor, in 1926.)41 Some members of the jury wanted her work to be rejected and her contract abrogated. Others agreed that it did not meet the competition’s requirements but suggested giving her a special contract, as she had laboured on the sculpture for two years, while a third group favoured letting her work through. The artist herself, who was present, reacted angrily, refusing to recognise the authority of her critics, observing that the panel was filled with bureaucrats instead of real artists. In fact, there were at least five sculptors on the jury, including the famous Ivan Shadr, as well as other professionals well known in the art world. Although apparently divided in their political and artistic instincts, several of her colleagues were sympathetic to her and attempted, it seems successfully, to defend her. The sharp dichotomies evoked by the term ‘censorship’ in Stalin’s Russia here seem inappropriate. In reality, artists were frequently engaged in a series of negotiations and compromises as they attempted to work within the system, while conflict sometimes erupted, not so much between artists and the political authorities but among artists themselves, as they tried to defend their interests and interpret or establish orthodoxy. Self-policing had been introduced by the Party to make the cultural machine work more efficiently, and while it could be used to settle private scores, in the later 1930s artists used it essentially to obviate the Party’s intervention and the dangers these brought in their wake. Iskusstvo’s March 1937 competition for a portrait of Stalin for the twentieth anniversary of the revolution in November 1937 indicates how this worked. Both the subject and approach were narrowly defined; significant inducements were offered, with prize money of (initially) 20,000 roubles for the winner and more significant sums for the reproduction of the winning images.42 Fifteen well-known artists were invited to participate and twelve submitted work. They included some of the most famous artists of the day, including Alexander Gerasimov and Isaak Brodskii, as well as Voroshilov’s friend Katsman and the Cézannist, Ilya Mashkov. The artists were given a list of themes and poses specifying how and with whom Stalin might be depicted (for example, working in his office or with his arm raised, speaking on the evening of the opening of the metro). Competitors were given photographs, shown film footage of Stalin speaking and received an advance of up to 5,000 roubles.43 They presented their work within the stipulated three months and Gerasimov submitted two

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Censoring Art paintings. The competition was judged by a jury composed mainly of artists and cultural commissars, which met in early July to decide the outcome. The paintings hung in the Tretyakov Gallery for five days (but were not on view to the public) while the judges deliberated. In the end, they decided no work was worthy of the first prize, but awarded Gerasimov second prize (and 10,000 roubles) and Pavel Mal’kov third prize. Gerasimov’s first work showed Stalin at a table in his Spartan office with his desk covered with books and papers – an image of the vozhd’s ceaseless work for his people that managed, according to the record of the jury’s assessment, to avoid the ‘dryness’ of the official portrait and it was bought by the Tretyakov Gallery, whose director was a member of the jury. The jury also liked Mal’kov’s full-length portrait of Stalin in his office, studying a map of the Five-Year Plan with deep attention. V. N. Meshkov’s charcoal and sanguine drawing of Stalin at his desk was also praised for showing the leader’s bright intelligence but some details of his august physiognomy were deemed to have been rendered in too precise, almost naturalistic detail, while his hands looked weak and boneless and the dark background created a gloomy (and axiomatically undesirable) effect.44 Brodskii, too, came in for criticism, despite his power and prominence: his work was ‘conscientious’ but condemned for its ‘cold formality in overall effect and in its details’. Portraits by Lukomskii, Olga Yanovskaya and Katsman were judged unsuccessful as they did not manage to get a likeness, while Mashkov, despite his reputation (won before the revolution) gave the jury an ‘unpleasant and strange surprise’: it was judged the helpless work of an autodidact, ‘a dead and tasteless lyubok’.45 This leaves one curious to know what became of it and what Mashkov had attempted when confronted with this challenge. The judges felt that his attitude to the competition was ‘careless’. Their views, as outlined in this memorandum, suggest that they understood their role as helping to establish and confirm acceptable aesthetic norms, as well as anticipating and preventing any problems before they became political issues. The threat of arrest and worse, always close at hand in this period, doubtless encouraged this attitude, while the regime was reliant on the artistic establishment to make its policies effective. Collaborators could console themselves with the thought that they could protect their colleagues from the consequences of dangerous mistakes. If the Party’s interventions set the framework within which artists worked, from January 1936 the Committee for Artistic Affairs (KDI)

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s defined and policed the boundaries of what was acceptable far more intrusively than the Artistic Councils and juries of MOSSKh and Vsekokhudozhnik. This may be illustrated by work on a proposed exhibition in Ukraine. The KDI’s branch in Kiev, reviewing the art scene in Ukraine in 1938 and 1939, bemoaned the survival of little independent groups and formalist influences. To counteract this, an exhibition on ‘Lenin and Stalin in Ukraine’ was planned to mark Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in December 1939. Due to its political significance, the show had an enormous budget and its jury was chaired by powerful political figures.46 The KDI’s office in Kiev applied the contractual system and exercised (unsurprisingly, given the context) very close and strict supervision of contributors. By mid1939, they reported that 274 themes had already been provisionally approved and assigned to painters, while 148 contracts had been signed, 277,000 roubles given in advances and 395,000 roubles spent on these preparations.47 Despite this vast expenditure, many of the preliminary sketches were rejected (thirty-two out of forty offerings from Kharkov, thirteen of thirty-two from Odessa). Despite their consultations with major historical museums, Odessa artists were scolded for not being sufficiently serious in their approach to their work and their sketches were deplored for being hasty, done to pass muster with the commissioning jury and receive the desired advance.48 The main difficulty was to know precisely what was or was not acceptable, as official policies were apt to change unpredictably.49 The Kiev office of KDI helped artists find inspiration in illustrating the set themes, showing them films and plays and bringing in historical consultants from the key museums. Some painters, upon viewing Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky, had expressed interest in depicting the struggle against German ‘interventionists’ (this was shortly before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, when such themes would disappear, in favour of illustrating Soviet–German friendship). But what most worried the official labouring over the problem of directing the painters’ endeavours was how to present the ‘epoch of new life’ and Stalin’s genial leadership. Moscow (being more aware of the changing political climate – the winding down of the Terror and the growing fear of war) responded to Kiev’s outlined thematic programme by criticising the excessive emphasis on enemies and treachery and the inadequate illustration of Russia’s military prowess. As for how to treat the ‘vozhd’, they duly advised that ‘themes from the revolutionary activities of Comrade Stalin in the Caucasus are essential’ (a lesson everyone

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Censoring Art had learned from the spectacular success of Beria’s exhibition on this theme).50 As this exchange indicates, by the end of the 1930s art was enmeshed in an increasingly bureaucratic system, which consigned it to the role of illustrating set, essentially political themes. Little emerges of artists’ discontent with the system but the pressures under which they worked are apparent. Yet while they did not have the means to work independently, they did not show any overwhelming reluctance to collaborate with the regime.

Conclusion The censorship of art in Stalin’s Russia took more complex forms than is sometimes realised. While institutionalised censorship developed and became more centralised in the 1930s, it was accompanied by patronage practices that were all the more effective, given the upheavals and acute want caused by Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’ in the 1930s. While the threat of violence played a role in censorship, most dramatically during the Terror, rivalries among artists themselves intensified the repressive effects of state policy. Mostly, however, the Party adopted a twin-track approach, with inducements often more important than coercion in encouraging the production of official art. The active collaboration of artists with Party policies was obviously essential to their success and this appears to have been offered not infrequently eagerly.51 Enthusiastically or not, artists produced the paintings the regime required and collaborated in the elaboration of official standards and style. It was this process of collaboration in giving practical meaning to the Party’s often vague prescriptions that was the most typical form of art censorship for most of the 1930s and even after the establishment of the Committee for Artistic Affairs and during the Terror, artists continued to work on juries and councils, sometimes attenuating the worst effects of the prevailing climate of accusation and fear. Critics also assisted in this process, both participating in the Artistic Councils and writing reviews in the art journals, but the role of artists themselves was essential.52 Problems arose when the Party changed tack, launched new campaigns or faced new challenges, thus making new demands of artists. This required adaptability and finely tuned political instincts on their part and put those with good contacts (and few scruples) at an advantage over the less well-informed or naive. The latter were inevitably more vulnerable to the vagaries of the political climate and sincere ideological commitment to 64

Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s the regime conferred no immunity to its periodic ferocity. The scandals we know about were prompted not by conscious revolts against or challenges to official norms but, on the contrary, by attempts to execute the Party’s orders that misfired. Not until after the Thaw would a new, self-consciously nonconformist art appear and interest a small discerning circle of admirers.

Notes 1. For classic accounts of Party control and censorship of the arts, see Harold Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR 1946 – 59 (Cambridge, MA, 1962); Ronald Hingley, Russian Writers and Soviet Society 1917 – 1978 (New York, 1979); Marianna Tax Choldin and Maurice Friedberg (eds), The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars and Censors in the USSR (Boston, MA, 1989); A.I. Morozov, Konets utopii: iz istorii isskustva v SSSR v 1930ykh godakh (Moscow, 1995). Documentary anthologies, based on the incomplete archival evidence, and illustrating the controlling ambitions of the censorship system, include: A. Blyum, Za kulisami ‘Ministerstva Pravdy’: tainaya istoriya sovetskoi tsenzury 1917 – 1929 (St Peterburg, 1994); T.M. Goryaeva (ed.), Istoriya sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury: dokumenty i kommentarii (Moscow, 1997); Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power: a History in Documents 1917 – 1953 (New Haven and London, 2007), which also illustrates the cultural elites’ engagement with the system. For cinema: N. Laurent, L’Oeil du Kremlin: Cinéma et Censure en URSS sous Staline (Toulouse, 2000). 2. Igor Golomstok, Totalitarnoe iskusstvo (Moscow, 1994), pp. 10 –11; D. Elliott, ‘The End of the Avant-Garde’ in Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators (Hayward Gallery catalogue, London, 1996), pp. 195 –8, detailing the tragic fate of leading avant-garde artists. The interpretation which emphasises the rupture between the modernist 1920s and socialist realist 1930s has been challenged by C. Lodder, who argues that the realism of the 1930s was implicit in constructivism’s aesthetic: Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London, 1983), pp. 5, 204. See also Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (Princeton, NJ, 1992) pp. 14– 74. For a recent reassessment of Malevich’s return to figurative art, see Evgenia Petrova, ‘From Suprematism to Supranaturalism: Malevich’s late work’ in A. Bochardt-Hume (ed.), Malevich (London, 2014), pp. 200–3. 3. See for an example Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy. A History of Socialism in Russia (Toronto, 1994). For a counter-argument, Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 4. These may be enumerated briefly: 1920, when Lenin attacked both futurism and the Proletkul’t; 1925, when it issued a decree refusing to endorse any one cultural grouping; 1932, when Stalin met selected artists in his dacha, and the Party abolished the competing cultural organisations and ended the four-year reign of

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5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

the strident proletarians; 1934, when Andrei Zhdanov delivered himself of his ambiguous definition of socialist realism as the desired style. Finally, the 1936 campaign against ‘formalism’ (or what remained of modernism) was to introduce a new, radically excisional policy. See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (Oxford, 1991) for an overview; John Bowlt (ed.), Art of the AvantGarde: Theory and Criticism (London, 1988), pp. 288–97 for the Party’s decrees and pronouncements; ‘The Artist-Daubers’ in Elliott, Art and Power, pp. 255–6; Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art (New York, 1977), pp. 172–5. Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin, pp. 222, 224. Ibid., p. 95. Kurt London, The Seven Soviet Arts (London, 1937), pp. 49– 51, 53; for Brodskii, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literary i iskusstva [RGALI]; f.2020: op.1: d.51: l.29; for the exhibitions, Kerzhentsev memo to Molotov, 17 December 1937, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii [RGASPI]: f.82:op.2: d.952: l.71; Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin, p. 136; on Stalin Prizes, ‘Postanovlenie’, Iskusstvo Kino, 4 (1941), p. 3. For workers’ pay, Elena Oksokina, Our Daily Bread: Socialist Distribution and the Art of Survival in Stalin’s Russia 1927 – 1941 (New York and London, 2001), p. 46; Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge, 1997), p. 24. Regional Party secretaries, very big fish, earned about 2,000 roubles a month in 1938: Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times (Oxford, 1999), p. 102. See Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, p. 11 and Elizabeth Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Realism (New York, 1990). Gerasimov’s parents were both born serfs: see M. Cullerne Bown, ‘Alexander Gerasimov’ in Matthew Cullerne Bown and Brandon Taylor (eds), Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State 1917 – 1992 (Manchester,1993), p. 121; Fedor Modorov was born to an icon painter in the village of Mstera and worked in that capacity himself in the early 20th century; Vasilii Svarog was born to peasants from Novgorod province; Sokolov-Skalya came from a family of railway workers: Ekaterina Degot (ed.), L’Idéalisme Soviétique: Peinture et Cinéma 1925 – 1939 (Liège, 2006), pp. 140, 142. A review of the state of the art world in Georgia in 1932 discovered that artistic life had ground to a halt for three years due to a complete absence of basic materials. Shortages and the poor quality of such paints and canvases as were produced, and the dilapidation of galleries and the shortage of studio space remained a problem throughout the 1930s, despite attempts to address them, at least in Moscow: Section II of Archive of Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia: sak’art’velos šss ark’ivi (ll): f.14:op.7: d.140: ll.10-11; memo from head of KDI to Molotov, 19 April 1939: RGALI: f.962: op.3: d.368: ll.19-21; d.378: l.22; Susan Reid, ‘Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: the Industry of Socialism Exhibition’, The Russian Review LX/2 (2002), pp. 162– 3. Its membership expanded from eighty-seven in January 1930 to 1,500 by mid1931, reflecting its importance in ensuring some means of livelihood to its

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12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

members: V. Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pervoi: Vospominaniya, chast’.2’, Panorama Iskusstv 9 (1986), pp. 48– 53. Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven, 1998), p. 111; Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin, pp. 40–1. MOSSKh had between 600 and 700 members in the 1930s, while about 2,500 artists in Moscow did not belong to it, according to Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, p. 135. The KDI estimated in June 1938 that there were about 10,000 members of official art associations, with MOSSKh having over 4,000 members, the Leningrad branch 1,150 and Kiev 350: RGALI: f.962: op.3: d.368: l.99. Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin, p. 41. See also J. Plamper, The Stalin Cult (New Haven and London, 2012), pp. 208– 9 for a postwar artistic council’s review of a portrait of Stalin. Studying denunciation and informing, he argued that the population interacted with the regime in an attempt to manipulate it into serving their interests: R. Gellately, ‘Denunciations in 20th Century Germany: Aspects of Self-Policing in the Third Reich and the GDR’, Journal of Modern History 68/4 (1996), pp. 931–67. See J. Devlin, ‘The Iconography of Power: Stalin and his Images’ in A. McElligott, L. Chambers and C. Breathnach, C. Lawless (eds), Power in History (Dublin and Portland Oregon, 2011), pp. 236– 43. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, pp. 6, 34. Students had to paint on an assigned theme, which was specified in sometimes absurd detail, produce within twentyfour hours a sketch, from which, if it were approved, they could not deviate at all in the finished painting. As early as March 1924, Isaak Brodskii had undergone a not dissimilar process, when his Second Session of the Third Comintern Congress, an official commission for a vast collective portrait of delegates, was reviewed by fellow artists who decided it was acceptable and that he should be paid 312,000 roubles for it: RGALI: f.2020: op.3: d.6: l.1. It received a list of subjects from its institutional patrons, demanded preliminary sketches from contributors which were then reviewed with the patrons and only after their approval did artists proceed to work on the final painting. They were given advances on their fees, which were paid in full only when the painting had been completed and accepted at a final review: Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, p. 152. According to Kostin, Vsekokhudozhnik’s jury could include up to two dozen artists, including such distinguished figures as I.E. Grabar, Petr Konchalovsky, Konstantin Yuon, Ilya Mashkov and Sergei Gerasimov, most of whom were respected artists with pre-revolutionary reputations: Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pervoi:’, p. 136. Kurt London, The Seven Soviet Arts (London, 1937), pp. 231–2; Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pervoi:’, p. 136. Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pervoi:’, pp. 136– 8.

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Censoring Art 22. http://www.savitskycollection.org/Nikritin.html (accessed 15 September 2015); John E. Bowlt, ‘Solomon Nikritin, The Old and the New’ in Christina Lodder, M. Kokkori and M. Mileeva (eds), Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Reality in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond (Leiden and Boston, 2013), pp. 153–68 for a discussion of Nikritin and this work, discovered after this article was written. 23. London, Seven Soviet Arts, pp. 223 –4. 24. Kostin, who was present, recalled that some jury members praised the painting’s mastery and novelty but that the work was turned down ‘in a friendly way’: Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pervoi:’, p. 136. This is at odds with the minutes which London perused and claimed to have reproduced at length. 25. London, Seven Soviet Arts, pp. 226 –8. 26. Ibid., p. 227. 27. Stalin was outraged by Shostakovich’s opera, and its staging, when he saw it in the Bol’shoi and prompted its denunciation in the Party’s leading newspaper, Pravda, as an example of all the deficiencies of decadent modern art. A voluminous literature has been devoted to this episode: see Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: a Life Remembered (London, 1994); Francis Maes, A History of Russian Music (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2002); Solomon Volkov (ed.), Testimony: the Memoirs of Shostakovich (London, 1979), for the composer’s alleged recollection of the event. 28. London, Seven Soviet Arts, pp. 226, 229. 29. Cullerne Bown, ‘Alexander Gerasimov’ in Cullerne Bown and Taylor, Art of the Soviets, p. 127. 30. J. Arch Getty and Oleg Naumov, The Road to the Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks 1932 – 39 (New Haven and London, 1999), pp. 147– 50. 31. Ibid., pp. 150– 1. 32. Galina Zagyanskaya (ed.), ‘Stenogramma ekstrennogo zasedaniya pravleniya MOSSKha’, Kontinent 3 (1992), pp. 191 – 3. 33. Ibid., pp. 199, 203. 34. Mil’da Bush, an anti-formalist critic and ‘political editor’ declared she was ‘horrified’ when she saw the photo and envisaged the scandal that would ensue if it were published. Her denunciation of Mikhailov did not prevent her from becoming a victim of the Terror herself: Zagyanskaya, ‘Stenogramma’, p. 209. 35. Ibid., p. 199. 36. Ibid., pp. 198, 201– 3, 204 –7, 210. 37. Ibid., pp. 191 –217; RGASPI: f.82: op.2: d.990: l.11 for Volin’s comments on the affair to Molotov; K. Clark and E. Dobrenko (eds), Soviet Culture and Power: a History in Documents 1917 – 1953, pp. 277 –8 for Kul’tprop (Stetsky) memorandum to the Politburo, 23 January 1935. 38. Chief among these was P. F. Yudin, who delivered himself of a diatribe on hidden enemies, their plots and attempts to encode counter-revolutionary messages in

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Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

pictures, the press, etc., a theme taken up by the head of Glavlit, Glavrepertkom and a person from Pravda: Zagyanskaya, ‘Stenogramma’, pp. 208, 211–14. ‘The Artist-Daubers’ in Elliott, Art and Power, pp. 255–6. See Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin, pp. 132– 5, especially for the tenor of the May 1937 meeting of MOSSKh. V. A. Bessonov (ed.), ‘“Menya vstrechal chelovek srednoogo vozrosti.” Iz vospominanii skul’ptura M.D. Ryndziunskoi’, Muzei revoliutsii vyp.23, k.2 (Moscow, 1992), pp. 112, 118n.7. These were subsequently published in large editions, ensuring that the artists were well-rewarded. Osip Beskin, the editor of Iskusstvo, wrote to Stalin’s private secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, on 5 November 1937 asking for permission to issue a mass edition of the winning portraits of Stalin by Gerasimov and Mal’kov. Poskrebyshev responded that there were no objections but that they needed to retouch Stalin’s face. They were ordered in a print-run of 100,000, and permission was given for an additional large colour edition of 50,000 copies of Gerasimov’s work: RGALI: f.652: op.8: d.157: ll.1, 33, 36-7. RGALI: f.2020: op.2: d.6: ll.3-4 ob: Letter from Isogiz to Brodskii of 27 March 1937; RGALI: f.652: op.8: d.112: l.1. That V. N. Meshkov had been invited to participate is surprising, as he was allegedly angered when his portraits of Party leaders, exhibited at the sixth AKhRR show in 1926, were not purchased, declaring: ‘I didn’t do this trash for myself. You should pay me for the time, canvas and paint spent on this shit.’ See Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, p. 75. RGALI: f.652: op.8: d.112: ll.1-2. RGALI: f.962: op.6: d.503: l.41. RGALI: f.962: op.6: d.503: ll.39-41, 73. RGALI: f.962: op.6: d.503: ll.23-33. They were, inter alia, short of canvas. This was illustrated by an exhibition of Ukrainian art in honour of the 20th anniversary of the revolution. Almost every professional artist submitted work for it and it had attracted large audiences as it toured around the Ukraine. However, when the exhibition opened in Odessa, it was criticised for the absence of historical paintings (a newly endorsed theme) and portraits of Party leaders and inadequate reflection of the beauties of the (starving) Soviet countryside and its collective farms. When the show transferred to Moscow’s Gorky Park in summer 1938, all the works which had been shown in Kiev were reviewed and over 45 per cent were turned down, causing bad feeling towards the successful artists and the jury: RGALI: f.962: op.6: d.503: ll.23-33. RGALI: f.962: op.6: d.503: ll.66-73. See Kostin, ‘Kto shagaet pervoi’, pp. 133– 6 for the eagerness to get official commissions in the first half of the 1930s. The ancillary role of critics would require another paper.

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4 Sex, Art and Museums: On the Changing Institutional Censorship of Shunga1

Louise Boyd

Not all censorship is official or overt. In addition to legal censorship, institutional and social censorship of art was prevalent in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This chapter will consider the roles that official and unofficial censorship have played in the treatment of shunga in Japan and the UK, focusing in particular on how institutional censorship of shunga has changed in the British Museum, from being hidden away in the nineteenth century to being exhibited in the twenty-first century. To begin, a brief account of what shunga is will be given. Next, censorship in Edo Japan will be discussed, before moving on to censorship in the UK as seen in the example of the British Museum’s Secretum. Some instances of how the British Museum has subsequently dealt with shunga will be examined, including the 2013 Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition. Lastly, the issue of censorship of shunga in modern Japan will be raised.

What is Shunga? Shunga are sexually explicit woodblock prints, paintings and illustrated books made in Japan during the Edo period (c.1603 – 1868). Shunga were 71

Censoring Art predominantly created in the most popular style of the time: ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world). Almost all of the leading ukiyo-e artists, including Hishikawa Moronobu (1618 –94), Suzuki Harunobu (1725 – 70), Kitagawa Utamaro (1753 – 1806) (Figure 4.1), Katsushika Hokusai (1760 –1849) (Figure 4.2) and Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797 –1861) produced shunga as well as the pictures of beautiful women, warriors, actors and landscapes that they are known for. However, shunga was not a movement, as artists were working across different cities, styles, media and centuries. Rather, shunga is a collective term used to refer to premodern Japanese art that depicts sexual scenes. It is beneficial to think of shunga as a genre, like landscape or portraiture, rather than as a homogeneous category. The term shunga is often translated into English as ‘erotic’ or ‘pornographic’ art, but these loaded terms have negative connotations. In order to avoid such associations, the more neutral term ‘sex art’, as proposed by Tim Clark, curator at the British Museum, is preferred.2

Figure 4.1 Kitagawa Utamaro, from the series Utamakura (Poem of the Pillow), 1788. Colour woodblock print, 25.4 £ 36.9 cm. This is one of the most well-known shunga images: it has been exhibited and reproduced more readily than other shunga because it is less explicit yet of high artistic quality.

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Sex, Art and Museums Shunga portrays all kinds of people in a range of sexual situations, including husbands and wives, adulterers, young lovers, townspeople, ladies-in-waiting and even foreigners. Visual and textual sources support the current scholarly consensus that shunga were viewed by both men and women of all classes of society for a variety of purposes including art, humour, protection, education, seduction, and arousal.3 Despite being officially banned in 1722, shunga was an open secret that was widely produced, circulated and tolerated throughout the Edo period until the 1850s onwards when, mainly due to European and American influences, depictions of sex became a sensitive subject and gradually disappeared from Japanese art. Since then, due to a combination of legal, social and institutional censorship, shunga has largely been omitted from art history, excluded from exhibitions and censored in publications.

Censorship in Edo Japan Shunga did not face the same moral judgements and strict censorship that sex art did, and to an extent still does, in certain countries, including post-Edo Japan. This was mainly due to politics and religion. Prior to 1600, Japan suffered civil disruption as rival clans fought for power. In 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu became the shogun (military leader) of a newly unified and peaceful Japan. To protect this recently established social order, mostly from the threat of Christianity, in the 1630s Japan entered a period of isolation that would last until 1853, when Japan was forced to end its closed-door policy and interact with the rest of the world. Throughout that period, the Tokugawa clan remained in power and kept most aspects of people’s lives under strict control. Due to its relative isolation, Edo-period Japan was largely unaffected by the moral attitudes and censorship which were prevalent in contemporary cultures. Notably, due to the predominance of Christianity, in Europe and North America sex and the naked body are associated with sin, shame, guilt and embarrassment. Shint
o (the way of the gods) is the animistic belief system indigenous to Japan and features sex at the heart of its creation myth. Buddhism, which co-exists alongside Shint
o beliefs, advises against sexual misconduct, but treats sex between two people who love each other as moral, whether they are married or not. In contrast to Christianity, in Shint
o and Buddhism sex is not sinful, but treated as a part of life and an 73

Censoring Art aspect of human experience. Consequently, it was an acceptable and popular subject in art during the Edo period. Although shunga was made nominally illegal along with other luxury goods in 1722 as part of the Kyo
h
o reforms, the production and dissemination of shunga was largely tolerated by the government. There was little differentiation between the creation and distribution of shunga and other genres of art: it was drawn by the same artists, cut by the same carvers, commissioned by the same publishers, and sold by the same sellers to the same audience. The extent to which censorship laws were enforced varied over time and similar edicts were reissued in 1790 and 1841. These resulted in temporary dips in production,4 but shunga continued to be made and sold, albeit in a more discreet manner in deference to the edicts. One example of the government’s tolerance is noted by Andrew Gerstle, who points out that kashihonya (itinerant lending libraries) were not prosecuted for circulating shunga.5 As long as it did not affect the stability of family or societal relationships, the government was generally tolerant of sex, and the prohibitions in publishing did not single out shunga for moral judgement. Artists and publishers were more likely to be prosecuted for political or social commentary than for sexually explicit works, because, as Rosina Buckland notes, these were a greater threat to social order.6 Art was censored in Edo Japan to enforce political control: the government, in an attempt to avoid criticism, which they claimed would be damaging to society, banned artists from depicting political figures and current events. In 1804, Utamaro was arrested not for his extensive shunga output but for his unheroic depiction of the sixteenth-century shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi.7 It was not until the 1850s, when Victorian morals and Christian notions of shame and sin were introduced, that attitudes towards depictions of sex and the human body changed in Japan. Due to cultural and social pressure exerted by shocked foreigners, shunga was suppressed during the Meiji period (1868 – 1912) and since then has remained problematic in Japan. An awareness of the gaze and judgement of others, of cultural outsiders, prompted this cultural self-censorship because Japan wanted to be seen as a civilised and modern nation, as equals. Interestingly, it was social censorship that was effective in suppressing shunga in Japan, rather than the previous official censorship, which was not fully enforced due to the social and moral acceptability of shunga.

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Censorship in the UK Definitions and categories can have an impact on how institutions and the public respond to objects;8 yet, to date, there is no national policy nor standardised guidelines for the acquisition, cataloguing, handling or display of sexually explicit items for museums and other cultural institutions.9 The imprecision of legal definitions relating to obscenity and pornography can be problematic for institutions, especially if shunga is referred to by these terms. It could be argued that the lack of clarity relating to ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic’ artworks puts the burden on institutions to self-censor for fear of falling foul of the law or engendering a public outcry, both of which only become apparent after such works have been acquired or displayed. In this way, institutional censorship can be seen as a preventative measure rather than an indication of the level of acceptability or engagement with sexually explicit items at a given time, as is often assumed. By institutional censorship, I do not mean decisions made as part of the regular curatorial selection process based on issues such as quality, condition, provenance or cost, nor those which are made to ensure complicity with legal requirements. Rather, institutional censorship is the decision to exclude sex art solely because of the sexual content. This decision may be made due to social pressure, personal preference or religious influence but, regardless of the reason, there seems to have been an unspoken agreement by cultural institutions, in the UK, Japan and other countries, that they would not openly engage with such items. An invisible line of acceptability was drawn and institutions assumed responsibility for maintaining that line. Although access to sexual material has become more commonplace in recent decades, particularly on the internet, sex continues to be a sensitive subject and many cultural institutions remain cautious about what they collect and exhibit. One aspect of institutional censorship is an unspoken decision to uphold the implicit taboo of sex art by not exhibiting it; yet this exclusion of sex from cultural institutions ignores, and even denies, an important aspect of human experience. One form of institutional censorship in nineteenth-century Europe was the creation of ‘secret museums’. These were separate rooms or locked cabinets within museums or libraries with restricted access, which contained items, usually uncatalogued, that were deemed ‘obscene’.

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Censoring Art In 1795, the first secret museum was formed in Naples to house the sexually explicit and phallic artefacts uncovered in Pompeii. The Secret Cabinet required a special permit and ‘only those people of mature years and sound morals would be admitted’,10 which in effect excluded women, the lower classes and unmarried men. That people wanting to view newly uncovered antiquities had to undergo personal judgement reinforced the stigma of negativity and ‘wrongness’ created around explicit items. In the 1830s, the Bibliothèque nationale de France separated works which were ‘contrary to good morals’ from the main collection and placed them in a locked section referred to as L’enfer, or Hell.11 Despite these examples, as Stuart Frost, head of Interpretation at the British Museum, points out, ‘Formal Secret Museums were never common since only large institutions needed them. Elsewhere the smaller quantities of difficult or troublesome artefacts could be kept in the Keeper’s office or left languishing in stores.’12 There is little documentation of this type of unofficial institutional censorship; it was prevalent but intangible. Problems arising from informal secret museums include decontextualisation of objects, loss of provenance and other accompanying information, and the risk of theft or damage, especially to uncatalogued items. Nowadays, explicit items like shunga are usually deemed ‘erotic’ or ‘pornographic’, but in the nineteenth century would have been labelled ‘obscene’. Legal censorship of such items began with the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. It had previously been unofficially regulated by class, as art would only have been available to those who could afford, or had access to, paintings, costly prints and other visual materials. As Lynn Hunt observes, regulation, and therefore definition, only became necessary once art could be mass-produced as cheap prints, thus making it accessible to the lower classes.13 Although prior to nineteenth century obscenity laws the concept of pornography did not exist, that is not to say that art could not and was not used for the same purposes as modern-day pornography, namely arousal or masturbation. However, the act left the term ‘obscene’ undefined. In the 1868 case of Regina v. Hicklin, Chief Justice Cockburn described obscenity as a ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’. From then on, his ‘definition’ was used for prosecutions. The Obscene Publications Act was not necessarily intended to apply to institutions, or art, as it was primarily aimed at books and the written word. Nevertheless, the act may be

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Sex, Art and Museums applicable and it is reasonable to assume that sexually explicit, phallic or erotic art could be considered an ‘immoral influence’. It could be argued that the vagueness of the obscenity law, and Cockburn’s subsequent attempted definition, shifted the responsibility to institutions, which in the nineteenth century judged that women, children and the uneducated had to be protected from the ‘obscene’. This gendered and class-based censorship was patronising but consistent with social attitudes towards, and the treatment of, women, minors and the lower classes at the time.

Changing Attitudes to Shunga in the British Museum It was in an informal manner during the period 1830 to 1850s that some antiquities in the British Museum began to be segregated, irrespective of cultural context, due to their ‘obscene nature’. For example, in 1830 the British Museum acquired fragments of Marcantonio Raimondi’s I Modi (The Positions), a series of engravings, after drawings by Giulio Romano, showing sexual positions. Even though they had already been subject to physical censorship (the genitals were cropped out), the prints were kept in a separate folio in the Keeper’s office as they were considered ‘too vulgar by the Museum for cataloguing with the general collection’.14 Acts of physical censorship could be carried out by collectors, dealers, staff in institutions or even visitors to museums, whose sensibilities had been offended. In addition to the risk of being chopped up and locked away, two- and threedimensional erotic items could be subject to fig leaves, loincloths, draped material, or blocks of colour being added to obscure genitals. Works were censored in these ways or hidden away because it was thought that viewing them might ‘provoke an imbalance in the relationships between men and women and hence a breakdown in the social order’.15 Furthermore, men of lower classes were not trusted be able to ‘respond appropriately’ to explicit items. Therefore, institutions restricted access to those who were deemed suitable – educated men who could respond in a detached, scholarly manner – men such as George Witt, who was a doctor and collector. In 1865 Witt donated his collection of phallic antiquities, which he titled Symbols of the Early Worship of Mankind, drawn from cultures around the globe to the British Museum. It included Japanese netsuke (carved toggles), 77

Censoring Art votive wooden phalluses, and shunga prints in scrapbooks. Given the mores of the time, it is surprising that the Trustees accepted Witt’s collection, as the records show, without objection. David Gaimster credits this to the ‘archaeological merit’ of the objects,16 while Lawrence Smith praises the Trustees’ forward thinking.17 The Secretum was officially formed that same year, partially in response to Witt’s donation, but also likely in response to the Obscene Publications Act 1857. The Secretum combined the 434 objects in Witt’s collection with approximately 700 items that had previously been unofficially segregated and locked away in the Keeper’s office. In 1938 some items from the Secretum were transferred to their relevant cultural departments, including Japanese items from the Witt collection to Oriental Antiquities. However, the Secretum, and notions of social and institutional censorship, remained largely intact and in 1948 anyone wishing to view items in the Secretum was required to submit a formal application to the Museum Director. But 1953 was the last year that items were deposited in the Secretum. Subsequently, new sex art acquisitions went directly to the appropriate department. Nevertheless, within the Oriental Antiquities department, shunga, then defined as works which depicted genitalia, were kept together in separate drawers from other Japanese prints.18 The Obscene Publications Act was updated in 1959 to officially incorporate the ‘deprave and corrupt’ test from the Hicklin case and to cover items which could not only be read but seen or heard. Section 4 or the ‘public good defence’ was added, under which works that might be considered obscene could be exempted in the interests of science, literature, art or learning. It could be argued that section 4 gave museums more flexibility and removed some of the impetus for institutional censorship; in the 1960s most items remaining in the Secretum were dispersed to the relevant departments, returned to their proper contexts. Another factor for this must be the significant changes in attitudes to sex in the 1960s, seen, for example, in the partial decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Since Japanese art began to become available in significant quantities in the 1860s, when Japan was coerced into relations with Europe and America, it has been possible for institutions to collect shunga. Yet, shunga collecting could be problematic for a number of reasons, notably the religious and social disapprobation of ‘obscenity’. Whether institutions should reflect, or challenge, the social and cultural norms is an important

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Sex, Art and Museums point to consider. Institutions, since they serve the public, faced even more difficulties than private collectors, but despite this some museums and libraries did acquire shunga. However, for the best part of a century, institutional acquisition of shunga and other erotic works was largely due to collections being donated or bequeathed from private collectors. In 1972, artworks from the Kelly bequest (Figure 4.2) were the first shunga in the British Museum to be officially accessioned and numbered.19 The existing shunga in the collection was catalogued in 1974. Although there is no specific reference in the British Museum’s collection policies that would prevent the acquisition of shunga, there are many stages in the process at which unofficial censorship may, intentionally or unintentionally, occur; for instance when the approval of curators, trustees, the Director or funders is required. Former curator Lawrence Smith regards the deliberate acquisition of a shunga handscroll in 1980 as a turning point.20 Indeed, that acquisition, which due to its price

Figure 4.2 Katsushika Hokusai, from the series Ehon tsuhi no hinagata (Picturebook Models of Couples), c.1812. Colour woodblock print, 25.9 £ 38.9 cm. This print, depicting a couple in the throes of passion (note the curled toes and dishevelled hair), was owned by Sir Gerald Kelly and given to the British Museum in 1972 by his wife.

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Censoring Art had to be approved by the Trustees and Director, indicates the shift from passive to active collecting of shunga which occurred in the British Museum. Since then shunga continued to be sporadically purchased, with acquisitions of shunga increasing to an average of one a year between 2003 and the 2013 exhibition.

Exhibiting Shunga The first time that shunga was exhibited at the British Museum was in 1978, as part of the exhibition A Dream of Fair Women: Japanese Paintings and Prints of the Ukiyoe School (8 June –24 September). The exhibition, curated by Smith, included three shunga prints. These were the three least explicit scenes from Utamakura (Figure 4.1) but they were also chosen for their aesthetic qualities and Utamaro’s skill. This method of gradually reintroducing shunga as a part of ukiyo-e is an effective way to normalise shunga, rather than make it the focus of attention and which may offend. Clark took a similarly measured approach and integrated shunga in the series of chronological ukiyo-e exhibitions he curated between 1998 and 2002. Ukiyo-e I – Ukiyo-e V highlighted the British Museum’s Japanese print collection, which cannot be permanently displayed due to lightsensitive pigments. Over the exhibition series, on average, shunga accounted for almost 10 per cent of the works on display. On such occasions, a disclaimer informing visitors that sexually explicit works were on display was put up at the entrance(s) to the room(s). This progressive approach allowed visitors to decide for themselves, rather than the institution dictating what should be censored. Continuing this development, a significant number of shunga were included in the high-profile 1995 Utamaro retrospective exhibition, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro. Rather than being singled out as something potentially shocking, shunga was shown the way it was considered in the Edo period – as a part of Utamaro’s oeuvre. Since 2000, shunga has been displayed semi-regularly in the British Museum. Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art at the British Museum (3 October 2013 –5 January 2014) was the first shunga exhibition in the UK.21 It was a landmark exhibition in terms of scale, quality and its aims. Shunga was placed within its proper contexts allowing people to engage and interact with it more meaningfully. The exhibition, along with the 55080

Sex, Art and Museums page scholarly catalogue, was the culmination of a five-year cross-cultural collaborative Leverhulme-funded project on shunga between the British Museum and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), in the UK, and Ritsumeikan University and Nichibunken (the International Research Centre for Japanese Studies) in Japan. The British Museum opted not to have an age restriction on exhibition entry. Instead, they continued their relaxation of institutional censorship and allowed visitors to make an informed choice. A disclaimer, displayed prominently at ticket desks, outside the exhibition room, and on the British Museum website, explained that the exhibition contained sexually explicit work and advised that under-16s should be accompanied by a parent or guardian. To understand the issues institutions face in relation to sexually explicit art, and if anything differed greatly from other exhibitions, I interviewed the exhibition’s curators, and staff in other departments, about their roles in the Shunga exhibition. Rather than being limited by institutional censorship, the previous invisible but implicit restrictive line, the decisions over what was included and how it was presented were based on considerations similar to any exhibition. These were a mix of regular curatorial decisions and practical issues, such as quality and condition of the work, availability of loans, and working within spatial and budget constraints. There was some discussion as to whether images depicting rape should be included, not as an attempt to censor them out but rather to avoid giving viewers a misleading impression of their prominence as a subject in shunga. One such print by Utamaro was shown in the exhibition, as scenes of sexual coercion did exist; however, they were infrequent and the vast majority of shunga depicted consensual sex with a focus on mutual pleasure (as in Figure 4.2), elements which visitors frequently noticed and commented on. The only works that were deliberately omitted were for legal reasons rather than institutional ones. In shunga, children are not involved in sexual acts. There are, however, scenes in which children are present; often a toddler walking in on his parents or older sibling. These works rely on the innocence of the child to create humour. Additionally, they add a touch of reality to a genre that is filled with fantasy. However, under the 2009 Coroners and Justice Act, section 62(6), it is an offence to be in possession of a prohibited image of a child, including images where a child is present when adults are involved in a sexual act. Therefore, shunga including children were excluded from the exhibition to comply with this act.

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Censoring Art With regard to the issue of social censorship, there was a distinct lack of public outcry, despite some tabloids’ attempts to sensationalise the exhibition.22 The majority of the 205 visitors who answered the exhibition exit questionnaire gave overwhelmingly positive feedback.23 Over the decades, forward-thinking individuals at the British Museum have been challenging the boundaries and breaking away from institutional censorship. It is possible this has positively affected the tolerance level of social censorship, or, conversely, visitor feedback suggests that society’s tolerance for sexually explicit art has increased and it is only now that institutions are catching up to this fact. Many respondents felt that an exhibition like Shunga was overdue. Visitors frequently commented how pleased they were that an institution like the British Museum was acknowledging sex and sexuality, as these topics are an important, and relatable, aspect of human experience. For example, one visitor to Shunga complained about the lack of ‘homosexual representation’ in the exhibition, because he wanted to see his own sexuality depicted. However, there were more than a dozen male –male images throughout the exhibition, most of which he had not noticed because they were integrated rather than segregated into a separate category. This reflects the more inclusive way that male – male shunga were treated in the Edo period: shunga were usually produced as a set of twelve prints or twelve scenes in a scroll painting and it was not uncommon to include one or two scenes of male –male couples. It is hoped that integrated displays and institutional engagement, along with the acquisition and display of objects depicting same-sex couples such as the Warren Cup,24 are signs that institutional and social censorship of LGBT-related artefacts are becoming outdated. Through exhibitions, institutions provide space for the consideration, and even legitimisation, of difficult or sensitive topics. Yet, how an institution defines an item affects how a visitor understands or interprets it. Under the institutional theory of art, the status of ‘art’ is conferred upon an object by the art world, which consists of curators, museums, and galleries. Institutions like the British Museum, which is held in high esteem not just in the UK but worldwide, have authority; therefore their categorisation, or ‘judgement’ in effect, carries a greater weight. This became apparent when gathering feedback from Shunga exhibition visitors. Unlike the longstanding debate in philosophy,25 visitors did not see ‘art’ and ‘porn’ as two mutually exclusive categories, within one of which shunga must be

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Sex, Art and Museums placed, but as flexible and overlapping concepts. Most people interviewed did not question whether or not shunga was art, partly because it was displayed and titled as such by the British Museum. On the other hand, the accompanying interpretation provided visitors with the information necessary to decide for themselves. The Shunga exhibition is a key example of how the British Museum has made significant changes to its unofficial censorship of sex art over the centuries, which in turn can help to change visitors’ attitudes.

Shunga and Modern Japan Article 175 of the Japanese Penal Code, originally written in 1907, codifies Japan’s obscenity law but, like the UK Obscene Publications Act, does not define the term ‘obscene’. There was a relaxation in the enforcement of the laws relating to depicting nudity, specifically pubic hair, in the 1990s. Shunga no longer had to be masked or painted over and, since they could be shown uncensored, there has been a steady increase in shunga publications. However, when the 1995 British Museum Utamaro exhibition was subsequently shown at the Chiba City Museum, the shunga were removed from both the exhibition and the bilingual catalogue.26 Censoring an important aspect of an artist’s oeuvre out of a retrospective exhibition can give an inaccurate and misleading impression of the artist and their output. Interviews with curators in Japan confirm there are no official institutional guidelines on shunga but that institutions are expected to selfcensor for fear of upsetting the public. In Japan there continues to be significant social pressure to conform, which is encapsulated in the common idiom that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Thanks, in part, to a positive response from visitors and the UK media, there has been a growing interest in the British Museum’s exhibition in the Japanese media. Shunga remains a problematic subject in Japan, as the numerous thwarted efforts to stage a shunga exhibition in Japan in recent years attest. A curator at a renowned Japanese institution commented that Japanese society is not yet ready for a shunga exhibition, indicating that social and institutional censorship are still strong in Japan. It is hoped that this situation will change in the wake of the British Museum exhibition, as it may stimulate discussion and acclimatise Japanese people to shunga. Small 83

Censoring Art steps in that direction have already been made. A selection of shunga was shown, albeit in a curtained-off area, at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in the 2003 exhibition Happiness.27 A selection of shunga was displayed in 2009 at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, although this received complaints. Finally, after much effort and debate, Shunga ran at the Eisei Bunko Museum, Tokyo, 19 September –23 December 2015. Positive responses to the Eisei Bunko show led to a similar exhibition, Shungaten, at Hosomi Museum, Kyoto, 6 February – 10 April 2016. The reactions to these exhibitions from the public, the media and cultural institutions, and how these affect the social and institutional censorship of sex art in Japan, will be the subject of a future article.

Conclusion The British Museum has actively challenged conventional institutional and social censorship through its changing attitude to shunga, and other sex art, over the years, as seen in the dissolution of the Secretum, in the shift from passive to active acquisition, and the increasing and integrated display of sex-related artefacts such as shunga and the Warren Cup. There are differing opinions on whether museums should take a proactive or reactive role when dealing with sensitive topics, but I posit that an important aspect of institutional exhibitions is their ability to go beyond merely reflecting or confirming current views, and to help inform and raise questions about those views. This has been the case with the British Museum as the positive responses to its Shunga exhibition have helped to change perceptions of shunga. It has even contributed to changes in the institutional censorship of shunga in Japan. If fully realised, this change would bring the censorship of shunga full circle: it became censored in Japan due to an awareness of the gaze and judgement of others; but now the acceptability of shunga in the opinion of others seems to be helping it become acceptable again in Japan.

Notes 1. This paper draws heavily from Louise Boyd, ‘Art, sex, and institutions: defining, collecting, and displaying Shunga’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016, available at http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7546/) and is indebted to British Museum staff, particularly Tim Clark, Stuart Frost, and

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2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Lawrence Smith. Thanks are also due to Toshio Watanabe who gave feedback on an earlier version of this given as a conference paper. Timothy Clark, ‘Sexhibition: reflections on shunga in London, looking forward to shunga in Tokyo’, 文化資源学 (Bunka Shigengaku) 13 (2015), p. 127. See Timon Screech, Sex and the Floating World: Erotic Images in Japan, 1700 – 1820 (London, 1999; revised edition 2009), Paul Berry, ‘Rethinking “shunga”: the interpretation of sexual imagery of the Edo Period’, Archives of Asian Art 54 (2004), pp. 7 – 22, and Allen Hockley, ‘Shunga: function, context, methodology’, Monumenta Nipponica 55/2 (2000), pp. 257– 69 for discussions on functions. For more on audiences see Hayakawa Monta, ‘Who were the audiences for shunga?’, in Timothy Clark, C. Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami and Akiko Yano (eds), Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (London, 2013) pp. 34 –47. See graph in Clark et al., Shunga, p. 259. C. Andrew Gerstle, Great Pleasures for Women and Their Treasure Boxes & Love Letters and a River of Erect Precepts for Women (Hollywood, 2009), p. 2. Rosina Buckland, Shunga: Erotic Art in Japan (London, 2010) p. 30. See Julie Nelson Davis, ‘The trouble with Hideyoshi: censoring ukiyo-e and the Ehon Taik
oki incident of 1804’, Japan Forum 19/3 (2007), pp. 281– 315. For an exploration of these issues, see Boyd, ‘Art, sex, and institutions’, pp. 273 – 86. There are guidelines for dealing with other sensitive issues, including human remains, ivory and stolen art, in particular works taken during the Nazi era. David Gaimster, ‘Sex & sensibility at the British Museum’, History Today 50/9 (2000), unpaginated. Marie-Franc oise Quignard and Raymond-Josué Seckel (eds), L’enfer de la Bibliothèque, Eros au Secret (Paris, 2007). Stuart Frost, ‘Secret museums: hidden histories of sex and sexuality’, Museums & social issues: a journal of reflective discourse 3/1 (2008), p. 31. Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500 – 1800 (New York, 1993), pp. 11–13. Gaimster, ‘Sex & sensibility’, unpaginated. Ibid. Ibid. Lawrence Smith, ‘Interview on shunga collecting and display in the British Museum’ (unpublished personal communication, 2014). Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. There had been prior shunga exhibitions outside the UK, notably in Helsinki (see Hayakawa Monta, Kielletyt Kuvat: Vanhaa Eroottista Taidetta Japanista¼Förbjudna Bilder: Gammal Erotisk Konst Från Japan ¼ Forbidden Images: Erotic Art from Japan’s Edo Period (Helsinki, 2002) and Shirakura Yoshihiko & Hayakawa Monta, Shunga: Himetaru warai no sekai: Herushinki

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22.

23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

shiritsu bijutsukan ukiyoe shungaten (Tokyo, 2003)), Rotterdam (see Chris Uhlenbeck (ed.), Japanese Erotic Fantasies: Sexual Imagery of the Edo Period (Amsterdam, 2005)) and Hawai’i (see Shawn Eichman and Stephen Salel, Shunga: Stages of Desire (New York, 2014)). Harry Mount, ‘Is this the naughtiest art show Britain’s ever seen? . . . and the most shocking thing of all is that it’s at the British Museum’, Daily Mail, 2 September 2013, and Martin Phillips, ‘Shunga bunga: Rude Japanese art shown in UK’, Sun, 3 September 2013. For a detailed analysis of the visitor feedback see Boyd, ‘Art, sex, and institutions’, pp. 234–69. The Warren Cup, a first-century silver vessel which depicts scenes of sexual intercourse between older men and youths, was acquired by the British Museum for £1.8 million in 1999. The Cup was featured in various temporary exhibitions, which drew positive feedback (see Morris Hargreaves McIntyre, ‘Pleasure you can measure: visitor responses to the Warren Cup exhibition’ (London, 2006)), and is now on permanent display. For an insightful summary and developments of this debate, see Hans Maes, ‘Drawing the line: art versus pornography’, Philosophy Compass 6/6 (2011), pp. 385– 97 and Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds), Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays (Oxford, 2012). See also Boyd, ‘Art, sex, and institutions’, pp. 27– 47. Asano Shūg
o and Timothy Clark, The Passionate Art of Kitagawa Utamaro (London, 1995). The shunga works were included uncensored in the catalogue: see David Elliott and Pier Luigi Tazzi, Happiness: a Survival Guide for Art þ Life ¼ Hapinesu: āto ni miru k
ofuku e no kagi (Tokyo and Kyoto, 2003).

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5 ‘Naked Ladies’: The Censorship of the Nude in Canadian Modern Art

Devon Smither

This Dominion, in short, has never yet been much in love with the nude. That is why each year in Canada more good figure paintings remain in artist’s studios than ever see the light of day in art galleries or in dealers’ exhibitions.1

At nearly two metres tall, the naked woman in Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in the Studio (1933, private collection) dominates the canvas. The painting depicts a model posing with confidence in modern green sandals, her hair in a fashionable wavy bob, and superimposed onto the representation of a portrait on an easel of the Russian composer and musician Andrey Illyashenko, a painting that Newton exhibited with the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1932. Nude is one of the most compelling works painted in Canada in the 1930s. The model’s nakedness and anonymity rendered as cool smooth flesh is not unlike the scores of naked women from art history: models whose robes are discarded as they pose in the artist’s studio.2 The realism of the painting intensifies the appeal for us to engage with the nude ‘portrait’ while also thwarting easy classification of the work in terms of genre. The tension and ambiguity at work in Newton’s painting led to its removal from a 87

Censoring Art 1933 Canadian Group of Painters exhibition at the Art Gallery of Toronto (AGT). While drawing from the figure was, and remains, a requirement of almost all formal art training, Canada also has a history of contradicting itself. From the nineteenth century onward, Canadian artists produced a significant number of paintings, drawings, prints and photographs that deal with the naked human body. There are Kathleen Munn’s cubist nudes, John W. Russell’s academic studio nudes, and Prudence Heward’s reclining nude in landscape in Girl Under a Tree (1931, Art Gallery of Hamilton). There are Pegi Nicol MacLeod’s surrealist-inspired nude selfportraits, Bertram Brooker’s realist nudes like Figures in Landscape3 (1931, collection unknown) and Seated Figure (1935, Art Gallery of Hamilton); and Edwin Holgate’s nudes set in landscape. The use of modern artistic techniques to explore the genre of the nude female form produced equivocal artworks that in some instances led to admiration and praise while in others to criticism and controversy. Many other nudes painted in Canada were celebrated and purchased by art institutions, signalling the complexity of artistic discourse in Canada at this time. For example, while nudes by Prudence Heward4 and Edwin Holgate were praised, those by their colleagues, including John Lyman, Lilias Torrance Newton and Bertram Brooker, were subject to vitriolic criticism and censorship. In this chapter I focus on specific moments of censorship which illuminate the nude as a site of social and cultural anxiety to argue that the nude was a nexus point for the often diverse ways that artists and the public responded to the development of modern art in early twentieth-century Canada. The nude was also connected to larger discourses about being modern, the changing role of the New Woman in urban Canada and women’s suffrage, as well as unease about new forms of popular culture (especially coming from the United States). Beginning in the 1920s, new and licentious forms of popular culture began spreading into Canada ‘in the forms of dime novels, jazz, movies, burlesque dancing, and beauty contests that threatened to trap youth in a debauched world’.5 Concerns about the best way to perpetuate sexual and gender norms, as well as ways to prevent the Americanisation of Canadian culture, carried over into debates about the nude genre in Canada.6 Alarmists complained that homes and schools were no longer the moral training ground for youth; in relation to art, these

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‘Naked Ladies’ tensions and anxieties were articulated in the positions and attitudes taken towards the painted nude body. By the late nineteenth century, paintings of the nude human figure – though often still tied to historical or mythological meaning – had become an established feature at the yearly exhibitions of Canadian art. During those years, Canada’s museums were not entirely hostile to the acquisition of nude paintings. Curator Michèle Grandbois has discovered that out of 150 exhibitions held between 1918 and 1939, there was at least one nude in each show, a number that contradicts the established perception that the nude was rarely viewed by the Canadian public.7 Despite its presence in early exhibitions, the nude was a site of controversy and over time its place within the history of art in Canada has been neglected.8 The nude’s important role in the careers of artists and in the first art exhibitions held in Canada has been obscured by the historic focus within Canadian art history on the landscape paintings of the Group of Seven, arguably Canada’s best known artists.9 The Group was influenced by Tom Thomson, a self-taught artist who was (and remains) one of the most influential and popular Canadian painters of the early of the twentieth century. While Thomson died before the Group formed officially in 1920, paintings like The West Wind (1917, Art Gallery of Ontario) and Jack Pine (1916 –17, National Gallery of Canada) influenced the Group of Seven as they developed a national art movement connected to the northern wilderness of Ontario. Their iconic paintings of the barren, rocky shorelines of Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park, often depicting a lone tree bent against the icy chill of a strong gale, offered images of untamed nature without human inhabitants. At a time when collectors and gallery patrons favoured dark European landscape paintings by the Dutch and Barbizon schools, the Group’s use of Post-Impressionist techniques and bright bold colours meant that early critics were slow to accept their work.10 The Group eventually found favour in Canada in the mid-1920s and remained Canada’s most recognisable artists for over 50 years.11 There has been much critical reassessment in recent decades of the Group’s position as Canada’s national school of art.12 As Anne Clendinning has noted, the Group’s authority should be seen not as a national one but connected instead to ‘a central Canadian regionalism that was Anglophone, white, and male’.13 I echo the criticisms of scholars like Lynda Jessup and Ross D. Cole who have argued that masculinity was

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Censoring Art central to the discursive alignment of the Group of Seven’s work with a national art and has meant that predominantly urban themes concerning the figure and the nude have been censored and repressed.14 Moreover, the coding of a national school of landscape painting with a virile heterosexual masculinity foreclosed the acceptance of work produced by women artists as well as those genres viewed as feminine. Viewers found affirmation of a national identity in paintings like Tom Thomson’s Jack Pine and F.H. Varley’s Stormy Weather, Georgian Bay (1921, National Gallery of Canada). The nude could not break the hold of the Group on the Canadian imagination, and the complex reception of the nude signals the genre’s ultimate failure as a modality of modernist expression.

John Lyman’s ‘Travesties, Abortions, Sensual and Hideous Malformations’ Beginning in the nineteenth century, most Canadian artists aspired to study art abroad in Europe. Montreal artist John Lyman was no exception. He began training in Paris in 1908 and one year later began studying at the Académie Henri Matisse. Lyman’s paintings from the early twentieth century demonstrate the effects of his time in Paris and the influence of Matisse and Post-Impressionism.15 In 1913, Lyman exhibited four paintings at the Art Association of Montreal (AAM) Spring Exhibition, and one month later he held a solo show that included a number of nudes that were deemed shocking and grotesque. Modernist interpretations of the nude had already caused a stir in Paris with Manet, in London at the Grafton Galleries exhibitions in 1910 and 1912 and in 1913 at the Armory Show in New York (mere months before the AAM exhibition). The 1910 exhibition Manet and the PostImpressionists in London opened to a hailstorm of violent criticism. One visitor described many of the pictures on view as ‘abortions’,16 while critic Robert Ross asserted that van Gogh ‘visualised the ravings of an adult maniac’, and Matisse used discordant colours – a charge also directed at Lyman’s works in 1913.17 The 1913 Armory Show included the largest display of nudes ever shown in North America and critics singled out Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending the Staircase, No. 2 (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude: Memory of Biskra (1907,

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‘Naked Ladies’ Baltimore Museum of Art) in their criticism.18 The nude was everywhere at the Armory Show and became the focus of many writers’ attempts to make sense of the new European art movements. Early debates about the nude in modern art, both in Canada and in the United States, were not centred on the propriety of the woman represented but were reactions to the visual strategies utilised in the re-deployment of this most academic of exercises. The AAM group exhibition and Lyman’s solo show reveal that critics were responding to, and participating in, the international debates about modern art which had recently emerged in London and New York. In responding to Lyman’s artworks, Canadian critics attempted to engage in the artistic debates about modernism. A critic from The Montreal Witness began his article by describing the ‘many gasps of astonishment, some indignation, and a good deal of derisive comment’ caused by the Post-Impressionist works at the opening of the AAM exhibition.19 The writer goes on to say, ‘screamingly discordant colours and execrable drawing are the methods [the artists] have employed to jar the public eye’.20 The contravention of mimetic colour, bold lines and flattened space were too much for Montreal English-language journalists, who were much more polemical in their reactions than their French counterparts. In a review of Lyman’s solo show, one writer found fault with his work in particular, pointing to its lifeless tones and his disregard for form. The critic for the Gazette wrote: ‘The drawings in pencil and ink are for the most part hasty sketches of nude women and if the artists’ renditions are true, no aesthetic person will regret that civilized communities insist that clothes be worn.’21 The words of Montreal Daily Star critic Samuel Morgan-Powell were by far the most malicious. According to Morgan-Powell, Improvisation, a scene of nude figures, ‘is literally disgusting. Not a single line in the whole is pleasing. The figures are figures of deformed creatures: in it there is an insistence upon malformation that sickens.’22 MorganPowell describes the figure in Lyman’s painting Carmencita Maria Teresa as ‘clad in a skimpy bathing suit’ and declares it is ‘A disgusting, sensual, leering, hideous figure, devoid of grace, devoid of humanity, devoid of anything save offensiveness.’23 He goes on to say that Lyman’s nudes are: crudities in outline of nude studies in every possible form of distortion. Some are frankly bestial; others are simply ugly; others revolting; others grotesque [. . .] not a single one of these nude

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Censoring Art studies does any one of these things. They reveal nothing but what is revolting. Some of them are certainly not fit for young girls to see. They can do no possible good. They are not works of art. They are travesties, abortions, sensual and hideous malformations.24

While Anglophone art critics followed the lead of European and American critiques of Post-Impressionism, Francophone critics did not take issue with the modernist tendencies on view. The response of the Englishlanguage press was imbricated in the emerging desire for something more distinctly Canadian in the visual arts, an objective not shared by the Francophone reviewers who were more willing to accept artistic impulses that valued forms of expression that were universal and modern with no nationalist or regionalist aims.25 In the 1910s in Montreal, Anglo critics did not take issue with Lyman’s choice of the unclothed female form as subject, but rather with his use of colour and line to produce ‘deformed’ bodies. Facing such intense negative criticism, Lyman felt compelled to leave Montreal for Paris and would not return for fourteen years.26 His exile was a form of self-censorship, demonstrating the ways in which power and knowledge converged to produce a modern art discourse in Canada that initially rejected European avant-garde art.27 I would argue that Lyman’s departure has contributed to his marginalisation in Canadian art history.28

John W. Russell and the 1927 Canadian National Exhibition Just as the Group of Seven reached ascendancy near the end of the 1920s, controversy erupted over the exhibition in 1927 of an academic nude painting by John Wentworth Russell at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) in Toronto.29 During its ten day run, the CNE Art Gallery broke all previous attendance records as 158,888 people filed through the gallery, drawn by the controversy over the exhibition of three paintings of nudes including Paolo and Francesca by George Drinkwater and Rosalie Emslie’s Comfort, but it was John Wentworth Russell’s large-scale nude A Modern Fantasy (1927, Estate of Anna Russell) (Figure 5.1) that stirred the most debate. The painting had recently been hung in a place of honour at the Paris Salon as ‘one of the outstanding successes at the spring salon of the Société des Artistes Franc ais’.30 When the painting was put on display in

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Figure 5.1 218.4 cm.

John W. Russell, A Modern Fantasy, 1927. Oil on canvas, 243.8 £

the 1927 CNE Art Gallery, however, it raised the ire of the general public, critics and local artists, culminating in over 100 letters to the editor in various newspapers in Ontario. Russell’s aesthetic and compositional choices produced an ambiguous and problematic painting that prompted connections between the visual details in the painting and the status of modern women, consumerism and sexuality. His painting of a reclining nude woman was sensuous and very large scale. The woman’s naked, hairless body is turned toward the viewer, a pudendal cleft is clearly visible, bringing her body down from its idealised position. She is lounging on satiny fabric, against large pillows and surrounded by rich draperies. The upper-class status of the model is signalled by her lavish surroundings. There is an ambiguity here about whether to register her as fleshy body or object for spectatorial consumption. Shifts in moral standards and gender norms simultaneously evoked anxiety and pleasure in modern Canada. Great change ensued after World

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Censoring Art War I. Women’s lives shifted dramatically in rapidly expanding urban industrialising centres, as well as those in the rural countryside, when they gained the right to vote.31 The emancipation of women led to a relaxation in moral standards and the CNE debate was tied to these deeper cultural shifts and the emergence of the New Woman. The physical body – especially women’s bodies – and the intensification of modern visual culture were central to this period of reconstruction. Film, vaudeville theatre, jazz concerts, new illustrated periodicals, flapper fashions and advertising offered new avenues for the display and circulation of the body. The nude was a ‘catalyst for discussion about being modern and the negotiation of cultural change in the 1920s’32 and women’s bodies bore the brunt of much of the moralising discourse. As Jane Nicholas writes, ‘One of the markers of modernity was visuality and women’s ubiquitous presence as objects to be looked at’, and for women this meant ‘an intensification of self-display [. . .] translated into quests for mobility, freedom, and an independent sexual identity propelled in part by an increasingly sophisticated advertising industry’.33 From billiard halls to the movies, fashion, dance and jazz, critics ‘worried that young Canadians were being sucked into the intensely materialistic, commercialized, immoral/amoral vortex of modernity’.34 Against this backdrop, spectators connected the woman’s body in Modern Fantasy to that of the New Woman on the streets of Toronto, working in factories and offices and participating in urban life in modern Canada. One writer claimed, ‘What do we see in our offices, on our street cars, on the streets, at bathing beaches and summer resorts, to say nothing of fashion parades and beauty shows – mothers and daughters alike all flapping their sex before the eyes of man and flaming youth?’35 Another critic stated that viewers could not blame the ‘people of Main street’ for the controversy, for they ‘were raised on dime novels for literature, jazz for music, moving pictures for drama, fashion shows for beauty, and Sunnyside for pleasure’.36 A key concern beginning in the 1920s was that modern popular culture from Europe and especially the United States was warping the minds of Canadian youth, particularly young women. The painting was also deemed to have violated morality in its depiction of such a realistic nude. The Toronto Star declared that ‘[t]here is almost certain to be criticism of them from the standpoint of morals and good taste’, describing Russell’s painting in particular as ‘a large canvas,’

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‘Naked Ladies’ depicting ‘a brunette lady lying at full length on a couch with a large pillow under her head. She is entirely nude and the painting is not lacking in realism’.37 Other writers claimed, ‘it is so grossly material that it is not art at all [. . .] its gross materialism and sensuality so overwhelms the average spectator that he would never see the spiritual quality, even if it could be expressed through that medium’.38 Those offended by the phenomenological effect of this sensual and ‘grossly material’ painting read the reclining woman not as an idealised model but as a real woman. Spectators concocted a narrative about the woman and Russell’s self-fashioning as a Paris bohemian. Karen Stanworth has pointed out that the salacious relationship between artist and model was key to bohemian Paris and it was this relationship that troubled Torontonians (some even read the model as the artist’s mistress).39 Some sixty years after Manet’s Olympia (1863, Musée d’Orsay) had caused a stir at the Paris Salon, Russell’s A Modern Fantasy was praised by Salon critics inured to the nude genre and its complex associations with modern life, but in Toronto such interpretations were new. The relationship of the model to the commodities on display also contributed to spectators’ discomfort with the artwork. The woman’s gaze and hand are directed toward a composed still-life on a large ornate wooden table on top of which three porcelain vases with flowers, a ceramic figurine set of two dancers, and a group of jazz musicians in blackface are displayed. Upper-class and middle-class domestic interiors were beginning to fill with ‘furniture and bric-à-brac in intensively decorative styles, test[ament] to a conviction that status was grounded in the display of possessions.’40 If the woman in Modern Fantasy was clothed, she could easily be modelling the ceramic figurines and vases on display as part of the luxury consumer objects available in downtown Toronto. However, her nudity belies her status as model and instead recalls the problematic sexuality of Manet’s Olympia. It is certainly likely that viewers would have associated the elements of the painting with images of models advertising commodities. As Elspeth Brown writes, ‘by using their bodies to produce commercialized affect in relationship to specific goods: glamour, elegance, cool’, female models performed ‘a new form of sexuality, one specific to the emerging mass culture industries of the early twentieth century’.41 A strange mix of prostitute, artist model and upper-class woman are on offer in Russell’s image. The still-life composition of vases and ceramic figurines signify the

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Censoring Art woman’s upper-class social status.42 On the other hand, the figurines of the blackface43 jazz musicians denote American popular culture and its cheap entertainments and clash with the other signifiers of wealth in the composition. The discord of the contradictory and ambiguous visual information undergirds the public’s visceral reaction to Russell’s painting. Russell was vocally outspoken about his total disgust for Toronto’s ‘provincialism’. He denounced what he saw as Canadian painting, viewing the Group of Seven as mere amateurs. He referred to them as the ‘jazz band of Canadian art’ and felt Canadian art and culture had much to learn from that in Europe. Like Lyman, he left Toronto in 1927 without a buyer for his work and would not return until the early 1930s.

Canada’s Olympi a Critic and curator Donald Buchanan responded to the censorship of Lilias Torrance Newton’s Nude in the Studio (Figure 5.2) in 1933 by declaring, ‘Prudery thus has its complement in prurience. The two together hinder a mature and complete art in which the human form shall hold equal stature with rivers and forests.’44 The exhibition committee had initially accepted Newton’s submission but the AGT board pulled the canvas from exhibition at the last minute because of the model’s troubling nakedness according to Buchanan. He noted, ‘to sit in a city studio and do a Russian model [. . .] is heresy. The Montreal painter, Lilias Torrance Newton, it will be remembered, committed this sin last year. The board of the Toronto Art Gallery refused to hang her painting [. . .] They called the model a naked lady, not a nude, you see, for she wore green slippers.’45 Newton executed a complex and equivocal painting; however, critics at the time gave short shrift to the work’s visual complexities and focused instead on the woman’s nakedness and the propriety of the nude. The realism of the model’s features – those carefully manicured eyebrows, painted lips and polished nails – suggests a real woman who, if Newton had chosen to represent her clothed rather than naked, could very well be someone of social significance, a distinguished figure in her fashionable green shoes and bobbed haircut. The model stands with unbridled self-awareness in Newton’s own studio; her confidence in her own body is captured in the strength of her pose and the display of her naked form. Until Courbet and Manet’s intervention into the nude genre 96

Figure 5.2 Lilias Torrance Newton, Nude in the Studio, 1933. Oil on canvas, 203.2 £ 91.5 cm.

Censoring Art in the mid-nineteenth century, viewing the nude had been concerned with the idealisation of the female form in an effort to contain and regulate the female sexual body.46 The nude has historically been the representation of Woman as Ideal and has thus occluded the role of the woman used as model in the process of representation. In Newton’s painting, the historically absent referent, the female model, is presented to the viewer in a manner that belies her status as abstracted nude body for the ‘possession’ of the male gaze. The signifiers of modernity and the naturalism of the model shatter the fantasy of an idealised Other who might staunch the flow of desire, and instead reconfirms the instability of the subject; she incites and entices the embodied beholder to view her as a real body. Newton’s Nude in the Studio is Canada’s Olympia. Nude is exemplary of the ways in which photography’s naturalism had come to influence painting. The invention of photography also begat pornography as we know it. Photographic nudes were immediate rather than idealised, disrupting the aura of the painted nude.47 This unmediated relationship presupposed between the model and the maker of the image is also called up by Newton’s use of realistic detail. The divide between art and pornography is one based on the separation of sight and touch. The high art nude leaves room for the imagination, for fantasy, while pornography is too close, foreclosing the limit between viewer and image. The naturalism in Newton’s painting troubles the distinction between high art nude and pornography. Lynda Nead argues the ‘hermetically sealed’ female form distinguishes art from obscenity, which lacks containment.48 While art privileges the mind, pornography directly evokes a corporeal response. Newton ‘breaks the seal’ of the idealised female body by picturing pubic hair and realistic details, transgressing the objectivity of the nude and bringing the woman too close for comfort. The fine details of Newton’s painting, from the soft dark mound of the figure’s pubic hair to the fine hairs on Illyashenko’s jacket, and the woman’s individuated features, are reminiscent of the power of photography’s naturalism to evoke visceral pleasure. Pornography’s disruption of the conventions of the idealised nude in painting also dismantled the space of fantasy that had previously concealed the male ego’s lack. The soft edges, anonymous faces and allegorised settings of the nudes in art history provided the presumed male spectator with a fantastical lie meant to repress his sense of fractured subjectivity. In Newton’s nude painting, the inclusion of a portrait behind the nude woman, coupled with the woman’s

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‘Naked Ladies’ own fictive pose, remind the viewer that the model and the artist were engaged in a performative encounter in Newton’s studio. The figure’s realism challenged commentators of the day. The contemporary details that form the image’s most jarring aspects – her modern fashion and accessories – reinforce the model’s contemporaneity and mobility as a New Woman. These features, along with her toned physique, signify the new aesthetic criteria embodied by the flapper and reflect the changing ideals of feminine beauty between the wars.49 As with Russell’s nude in the prosperous 1920s, Newton’s painting also prompted viewers to connect it to social changes outside the gallery. Some journalists connected the moral and physical health of the nation directly to the propriety of the nation’s young women. The many polemics that circulated about the best way to regulate sexual and gender norms in the interwar period support Foucault’s well-known argument that policing sex – or in the case of fine art in Canada, the censorship of nude painting – does not in fact repress sexuality but rather creates an incitement and proliferation of discourse around it.50 The anxious pleasure evoked by Newton’s painting stoked the fires of debate about women’s emancipation. Gallery officials read the fashionable hair, shoes, make-up and confident pose in Nude as evidence that the model was a New Woman. Modern artists in Canada explored the hermeneutic possibilities of the genre in their use of various visual strategies to transform their models into living subjects who seem in many instances to resist or call attention to the traditional objectivity of the nude. Defying easy categorisation, the equivocal nature of many nudes painted during the interwar period were variously praised, criticised and censored, often eliciting social and cultural anxiety. The desire to find a distinctly Canadian art was answered by the Group of Seven, whose dominance in the canon of Canadian art history has obfuscated the multiplicity and vibrancy of the visual arts at this time.51 As critic Barley Fairley complained in 1930, ‘[N]ot one Canadian in a hundred goes into an art gallery looking for anything but hills and trees and lakes and clouds and flowers and fruit.’52

Notes 1. Donald Buchanan, ‘Naked Ladies,’ Canadian Forum XV/175 (1935), p. 273. 2. For Kenneth Clark, the presence of the woman’s robe in Newton’s painting signals the difference between nakedness and nudity. In The Nude: A Study of

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Censoring Art Ideal Form – a book that remained the study on the subject for almost forty years – Clark claims that the nude is a metaphor for European civilisation in his postulation of a distinction between the naked, individualised body and representations of the nude or idealised body (Princeton, NJ, 1971, [1956]). I follow the critiques of many feminist art historians who have pointed out Clark’s evident distaste for the human (especially the female) biological body. His category of the ‘naked’ connotes a natural, unformed, corporeal matter that is female, transformed into a nude (that is, cultural product) through the intervention of a male artist – a figure whose innate genius is associated with the rational mind. Furthermore, I take issue with Clark’s notion that there is such a thing as a naked body outside of representation, or moreover, of an unmediated physical body outside of culture or society. See Helen McDonald, Erotic Ambiguities (London; New York, 2001); Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830 – 1908 (Cambridge, 1990); Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, 1992). 3. Bertram Brooker’s Figures in Landscape was also subject to censorship. Despite selection by a jury for the Ontario Society of Artists 1931 Spring Exhibition at the AGT, Figures in Landscape was withdrawn from the show and censored from the catalogue. Brooker took such offence at the removal of his painting that he wrote a scathing response in his essay, ‘Nudes and Prudes’, in which he staunchly defended sensuality as a legitimate subject matter for art. Brooker was adamant that education was key to the acceptance of the human form as an artistic subject, writing: To withhold knowledge of the human form and its functions and to discourage appreciation of its beauty at an early age is to bring up a child with a sneaking curiosity in respect to that unity which of all unities is perhaps the most mysterious and the most important for men and women. It is to implant in his mind the feeling that natural admiration for bodily beauty is sheer animalism, and something to be ashamed of. Appreciation of the beauties of the nude figure is not altogether due to the impulses of sex, and . . . surely it is better to shape such impulses openly into channels of decency and open-eyed admiration, than to let them smirkingly fester in secretive foulness of mind. This ‘secretive foulness of mind’ was precisely what the jurors and art gallery associations were reacting to when they decided to remove and censor Brooker’s and Newton’s paintings. The promised progress of modernity brought new kinds of fears and demands for stricter moral standards that were often mediated at the intersection of class, gender and youth. Bertram Brooker, ‘Nudes and Prudes’, in William Arthur Deacon and Wilfred Reeves (eds), Open House (Ottawa, 1931), pp. 93–106. 4. Prudence Heward’s Girl Under a Tree was deemed ‘the best nude ever painted in Canada’ by Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer. Natalie Luckyj,

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5.

6. 7.

8.

Expressions of Will: The Art of Prudence Heward (Kingston, ON, 1986), p. 43. In contrast, the artist’s friend and fellow painter John Lyman was less kind in his view of the painting, writing in 1932: ‘She has so stiffened her will that it mutes the strings of her sensibility. . .[it is] disconcerting to find with extreme analytical modulation of figures, [an] unmodulated and cloisonné-treatment of [the] background without interrelation’ and he describes the woman in the painting as a ‘Bouguereau nude against Cézanne background’. John Lyman, ‘Journal,’ vol. II, entry for 28 April 1932, Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Montreal. A.Y. Jackson, while praising the painting, could sense that viewers might be troubled and confounded by the artwork. He wrote, ‘The work of Prudence Heward may disturb some of our conventionally minded souls who like their pictures full of detail or painted obediently to long established formulas, but to those who have no preconceived ideas of art, this exhibition should prove very stimulating.’ A.Y. Jackson, ‘A Montreal Painter: Paintings by Prudence Heward Place on Exhibition in Montreal’, The Montreal Daily Star, 27 April 1932. Heward also painted a series of black nudes which, while praised by some, earned negative and racist commentary and were much more controversial than Girl Under a Tree. Jane Nicholas, ‘“A figure of a nude woman”: Art, Popular Culture, and Modernity at the Canadian National Exhibition, 1927’, Social History 41/82 (2008), p. 339. Ibid., p. 319. Michèle Grandbois, ‘The challenge of the nude’, in Michèle Grandbois, Anna Hudson and Esther Trépanier, The Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1920 – 1950 (Quebec City, 2009), p. 44. For example, the recent third edition of Dennis Reid’s Concise History of Canadian Painting makes no reference to the genre (Toronto, 2012); nor does Brian Foss, Sandra Paikowsky and Anne Whitelaw’s anthology from 2010, The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Don Mills, ON, 2010). The discursive alignment of modern art in Canada with the ‘wild’ and ‘untouched’ landscapes of the Group of Seven by the majority of Canada’s first art historians meant that the figure – and the nude in particular – were neglected topics in the first serious texts on Canadian art. The most notable early histories of Canadian art include: Newton MacTavish, The Fine Arts in Canada (Toronto, 1925); F.B. Housser, A Canadian Art Movement: The Story of the Group of Seven (Toronto, 1926); Graham McInnes, A Short History of Canadian Art (Toronto, 1939); William Colgate, Canadian Art: Its Origin and Development (Toronto, 1943); R.H. Hubbard, The Development of Canadian Art (Ottawa, 1963). The emergence of the ‘new’ art history and social history more broadly in the 1970s sparked more theoretical understandings of the important intersections of power and identity politics to the writing of art history. Canadian art historians (like those elsewhere) began to critically reassess the canon, the marginalisation of women and minority artists, and the continued dominance of the metanarrative of landscape painting. It was during

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9.

10.

11.

12.

this period that the private art dealer Jerrold Morris published his 1972 catalogue, The Nude in Canadian Painting (Toronto, 1972), which offers a generalised overview of the nude in Canadian art, focusing primarily on artworks produced after 1950. Some ten years later, Jacques de Roussan’s Le nu dans l’art au Québec (LaPrairie, QC, 1982) also offered an overview of over 150 artists in Quebec, demonstrating an interest in the genre from the eighteenth century until 1980. Brian Foss shed light on the topic in his analysis of Edwin Holgate’s nudes in his 2005 essay ‘Living Landscape’, in Rosalind Pepall and Brian Foss (eds), Edwin Holgate (Montreal, 2005). My own study is indebted to the rigorous archival research by Michèle Grandbois, Anna Hudson and Esther Trépanier, whose long overdue 2009 exhibition and accompanying catalogue, The Nude in Modern Canadian Art 1920 – 1950, along with my own work, form part of a growing interest in the body in art history and body histories more generally. See, for example: Lisa Helps, ‘Body, Power, Desire: Mapping Canadian Body History,’ Journal of Canadian Studies XLI/ 1 (Winter 2007) pp. 126– 50; Patrizia Gentile and Jane Nicholas (eds), Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History (Toronto, 2013). The Group of Seven originally comprised J.E.H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley, Frank/Franz Johnston and Frank Carmichael. Later A.J. Casson, Edwin Holgate and L.L. Fitzgerald were invited to join the Group. Brian Foss, ‘Into the new century: painting, c.1890– 1914’, in Anne Whitelaw, Brian Foss and Sandra Paikowsky (eds), The Visual Arts in Canada: The Twentieth Century (Don Mills, ON, 2010), pp. 18– 19. The Group of Seven was further canonised through a print reproduction programme in the 1940s which disseminated their artworks across the country so that their landscapes could be seen in post offices, classrooms and living rooms from coast to coast. Joyce Zemans has outlined how the National Gallery of Canada collaborated with the Sampson Matthews Ltd. print company to reproduce notable examples of Canadian art; among these examples, works by the Group of Seven from the 1920s and 1930s dominated the selection. Joyce Zemans, ‘Establishing the Canon: Nationhood, Identity, and the National Gallery’s First Reproduction Programme of Canadian Art,’ Journal of Canadian Art History 16 (1995), pp. 7– 35. From the 1990s onward, a number of exceptional coffee table volumes on the Group of Seven’s work have been published including Charles C. Hill’s The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (Ottawa; Toronto, 1995) and David P. Silcox’s The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson (Richmond Hill, ON, 2003), both of which preserve mythic associations between these artists and the Canadian nation. More recent critical re-appraisals of the work of Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven include: Anne Whitelaw, ‘Whiffs of balsam, pine and spruce: art museums and the production of a Canadian aesthetic’, in Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein (eds), Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (Montreal, 2000), pp. 122 –37; Leslie

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13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

Dawn, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s (Vancouver, 2006); Lynda Jessup, ‘Bushwhackers in the gallery: antimodernism and the Group of Seven,’ in Lynda Jessup (ed.), Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto, 2001), pp. 130 – 52; and John O’Brian and Peter White (eds), Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (Montreal, 2009). Anne Clendinning, ‘Exhibiting a Nation: Canada at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924 – 1925,’ Social History XXXIX/ 77 (2006), p. 82. Jessup, ‘Bushwhackers in the gallery’, pp. 130 –52; Ross D. Cole, ‘Tom Thomson, Antimodernism, and the Ideal of Manhood,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 10 (1998), pp. 185 – 208. For more on Lyman’s life and work see: Louise Dompierre, John Lyman: 1886– 1967 (Kingston, ON, 1986). Editorial, ‘The Shock of the Old: “Manet and the Post-Impressionists,”’ The Burlington Magazine CLII/ 1293 (December 2010). Available at http:// burlington.org.uk/archive/editorial/the-shock-of-the-old-manet-and-thepost-impressionists (accessed 4 September 2015). J.B. Bullen (ed.), Post-Impressionists in England (London; New York, 1988), p. 14. Blue Nude was burned in effigy when the exhibition toured to Chicago and young students also wanted to burn an effigy of Matisse following a mock trial of his artworks at the Art Institute of Chicago but according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, ‘authorities stopped this projected sacrilege’. ‘Cubists Depart; Students Joyful: Burn Copies of Matisse’s Works After Syncopated Art Is Shipped East’, Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 April 1913, p. 3. ‘Post-Impressionists Shock Local Art Lovers at the Spring Art Exhibition,’ Montreal Witness, 26 March 1913, p. 5. Ibid. ‘Pictures Will Revive Strife: Post-Impressionistic Canvases by Mr. John G. Lyman on View,’ The Montreal Gazette, 21 May 1913, p. 11. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Lorne Huston, ‘The 1913 Spring Exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal: Anatomy of a Public Debate’, Journal of Canadian Art History 34 (2013), p. 24. Lyman clearly blamed Montreal critics for his exile: ‘en 1913, j’avais eu ma première exposition au Canada. Exposition qui a soulevé des critiques d’une sauvagerie inouie et qui m’a chassé du pays. Je pense que si j’avais joui d’une reception différente, je serais resté au Canada.’ Louise Dompierre, John Lyman: 1886 –1967 (Kingston, ON, 1986), p. 39. I follow Sue Curry Jansen’s notion of constitutive censorship (rather than regulative censorship) in which social processes work to establish normative expectations for behaviour and social practice. She writes: ‘My definition of the term [censorship] encompasses all socially structured proscriptions or prescriptions which inhibit or prohibit dissemination of ideas, information,

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28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

images, and other messages through a society’s channels of communication whether these obstructions are secured by political, economic, religious, or other systems of authority. It includes both overt and covert proscriptions and prescriptions.’ Sue Curry Jansen, Censorship: The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge (New York, 1991), p. 221. Lyman spent his career celebrating the Fauves, Post-Impressionists and the Nabis as the best exemplars of the modernist impulse. The mixed reception of Lyman’s work in 1913 led to his departure for Paris and he did not return to Montreal for good until 1931, after which time he quickly became known as a progressive leader among Canada’s artistic intellectuals. Nonetheless, given Lyman’s support for modern art techniques that were more universal in appeal rather than nationalistic, his artwork remains underrated compared to other artists, like the Group of Seven. See: Lucie Dorais et al., Morrice and Lyman in the Company of Matisse (Buffalo, AB, 2014). Montreal was the dominant art city from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) was founded in 1860 while in Toronto the Art Museum of Toronto emerged in 1900 but did not acquire a proper gallery building until 1926, when it became the Art Gallery of Toronto (now the Art Gallery of Ontario). From the late 1800s, the Montreal art scene (while largely dominated by the Anglophone community) remained arguably slightly more open to avant-garde and European modern art, as well as to subject matter like the urban environment and human figure. In Toronto, by contrast, landscape painting and the work of the Group of Seven prevailed from the 1920s onward. Beginning in the 1880s, Toronto increasingly became the economic and industrial hub in Canada, slowly overshadowing Montreal to become the biggest city by 1960. ‘Nude by Toronto Artist Makes Paris Stop, Look’, Toronto Daily Star, 2 May 1927. Women in Canada won the right to vote in 1916. Women in Quebec won the right in 1940 and Indigenous women in 1960. Nicholas, ‘“A figure of a nude woman”’, p. 315. Jane Nicholas, The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, The Body, and Commodities in the 1920s (Toronto, 2015), p. 6. Cynthia Commachio, Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of a Modern Canada, 1920 – 1950 (Waterloo, 2006), p. 167. The Globe, 16 September 1927, p. 4. The Globe, 17 September 1927, p. 4. ‘“Nudes” Hung in Gallery Cause Controversy’, Toronto Daily Star, 27 August 1927, p. 22. The Globe, 17 September 1927, p. 4. Karen Stanworth, ‘Excesses of the bawdy body: John Wentworth Russell and his modern girls 1927 –1935,’ in Julia Skelly (ed.), The Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600 – 2010 (London, 2014), p. 214.

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‘Naked Ladies’ 40. Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture (Toronto, 1997), p. 119. 41. Elspeth Brown, ‘From artist’s model to the “natural girl”: containing sexuality in early-twentieth-century modelling’, in Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wissinger (eds), Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry (London; New York, 2012), p. 37. 42. Thank you to Sarah Chate and her colleagues at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto for their input on Russell’s A Modern Fantasy. Chate noted that such figurines would have been relatively rare in Canada: Canadian viewers would have understood them as decorative objects belonging to the upper classes. The same holds for Parisian audiences where such objects would have been affordable only to the wealthy. As much as Russell styled himself a bohemian, he was not living the life of a poor artist, and clearly had the means to acquire pin cushion dolls, vases and the ceramic figurines shown in many of his nude and still-life paintings. 43. Blackface refers to make-up worn by a white actor playing a black person who often performs in an exaggerated style as a black person. Blackface was a popular form of entertainment from 1830 to 1965, primarily in the United States, particularly in minstrel shows. 44. Buchanan, ‘Naked Ladies,’ pp. 273– 4. 45. Ibid., p. 273. 46. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (London, 1992), p. 6. 47. Kelly Dennis, Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (New York, 2009), p. 60. 48. Nead, The Female Nude, p. 8. 49. Esther Trépanier, ‘A Consideration of the nude and artistic modernity in Canada’, in Michèle Grandbois, Anna Hudson and Esther Trépanier, The Nude in Modern Canadian Art, 1920 – 1950 (Quebec City, 2009), p. 142. 50. Michel Foucault writes, ‘What is peculiar to modern societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.’ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (New York, 1990), p. 35. 51. While the Group of Seven did not set out to marginalise women artists or the genre of the nude, an unintended consequence of their hegemonic position in the writing of Canadian art history has been precisely that. 52. Barker Fairley, ‘Canadian Art: Man vs. Landscape,’ Canadian Forum 19 (1930), p. 286.

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6 Censorship in the Irish Free State and its Implications for Irish Art

Róisín Kennedy

Censorship and the nation state are inextricably connected. Referring to the imposition of censorship legislation in Australia in 1901, Nicole Moore notes how it enabled an ‘administrative cordon’ to be drawn around the country, providing a unifying feature of the newly post-colonial nation. In the Irish Free State official censorship was similarly an attempt to ‘delimit, institute and form the nation’s knowledge’.1 Censorship legislation also reinforced the wider process of ‘normalising’ society after a period of civic strife and of enforcing a stable image of Irish identity from which dissenting elements could be excluded.2 While visual art was not subjected to official censorship in Ireland, this chapter argues that the wider climate of institutional censorship had a major impact on its production, both in terms of the subjects that artists chose to address and in the style and manner in which they did so.

Censorship and the Irish Free State The Irish Free State (1922 – 49) was established in 1922 when twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties gained independence from Great Britain. 107

Censoring Art Despite the hopes of many that an independent Irish nation would be open and inclusive, the new regime enforced restrictive laws that reflected the predominantly Roman Catholic beliefs of the population. A defensive nationalism prevailed in which the Irish language was heavily promoted, while censorship was deployed to offset the unsavoury impact of British and American values on Irish society. Within a year of gaining independence, legislation was enacted against film (Censorship of Film Act, 1923) and later against literature (Censorship of Publications Act, 1929). A major drive for state censorship was the need to stem the potentially devastating impact on public morality of popular culture and consumerism which was readily accessible through film and literature. Such fears were widespread elsewhere in Europe. The call for censorship in the Free State came primarily however, from an idealised view of the Irish people as innately spiritual. ‘Purity of mind and sanity of outlook upon life were long ago regarded as characteristic of our people’ was how one leading proponent of censorship put it in the parliamentary debate on the Censorship of Film Bill in 1923.3 Furthermore, the curbing of films and offensive publications was part of a drive to de-Anglicise Irish culture. The need to advance those aspects of Irish civilisation that had escaped the influence of British life had been recognised during the Irish Cultural Revival, the intellectual movement that preceded independence. In this context the Irish language, traditional dress and folkloric traditions were valued in their ability to convey a distinctively native identity. Conversely, post-independence official censorship acted in a negative manner, as an extreme expression of a deeply conservative society in which social control was enforced largely through community pressure and conformity. The general population appeared to welcome censorship and was notably forward in informing the Censorship Boards of any potentially damaging material. As one historian has put it, ‘the laity shared the desire to keep nationalist Ireland free and uncontaminated from the ways of the world’.4 This attitude did not, however, impede on the widespread consumption of Anglo-American popular culture in Ireland, where it remained widely available, not least via the extensive diaspora networks in Britain and North America. Furthermore, while the state privileged traditional forms of Irish culture, it also took a pragmatic view of modernity and prioritised both a progressive image of the nation through the deployment of modernist art and design in official representations, and through

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Censorship in the Irish Free State programmes of modernisation at home, most notably in the construction of the hydro-electric scheme on the Shannon, the major technological project of the Free State era.5 Censorship in the Irish Free State was closely bound up with Catholic moral teaching on sexuality and reproduction. References to birth control and abortion were immediate grounds for the banning of literature and film. The 1929 Censorship of Publications Act stipulated that it was an offence to print, publish or distribute ‘any book or periodical publication which advocates or which might be reasonably supposed to advocate the unnatural prevention of conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage or any method, treatment or appliance to be used for the purpose of such prevention or such procurement’.6 Equally, film censorship repressed ‘representations of any “embarrassing” matters dealing with personal morality or the human body’.7 The fixation on birth control came out of a wider preoccupation with sexual morality, fertility and the female body in particular. There was concern among some influential clerics and politicians about the rising levels of illegitimacy, prostitution and venereal disease in the country. These were seen to be the prime responsibility of young women, whose appearance, behaviour and even dress came under scrutiny.8 Inevitably, in 1935 a full ban on contraception was introduced into the Irish Free State.9 The 1937 constitution placed women firmly within the home and family, cementing legislation that banned married women from the workplace. While the Censorship of Publications Act was primarily intended to curtail mass-circulated material and family planning manuals, it also banned serious literature. Whereas film censorship was broadly tolerated, this incursion into the realm of high culture provoked a more serious, if ineffective, response among Irish intellectuals. The Irish Academy of Letters was founded in 1932 by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner W.B. Yeats as a lobby group for writers against censorship.10 The greatest concern for Yeats and other opponents of censorship was its long-term negative impact on intellectual life in Ireland. Writers and academics have since prioritised the text rather than the image, the Irish writer rather than the Irish artist, in their analysis of the effects of censorship. Kevin Rockett’s major study of Irish film censorship has balanced this perception by showing that the visual as much as the textual was perceived as a threat to public morality in the Free State. Rockett reminds us that film was

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Censoring Art primarily silent throughout the 1920s and that during the early years of his role, the film censor was preoccupied entirely by imagery until about 1930 when talkies became more prevalent. The publicity material provided by the film distributors caused as much anxiety as the films themselves in its ability to convey through colourful and enticing pictures the immoral attractions of Hollywood. This, as well as the film, was subjected to the control of the censor. Between 1929 and 1940, 7,596 advertisements were suppressed.11 The main difference between film and visual art from the point of view of the censor was the context in which they were viewed and the perceived different social and educational standing of their respective publics. In discussing the potentially negative impact of film posters, a leading advocate of film censorship noted that Inside a picture gallery, where these things are for the entertainment of people of culture, or where they are for the higher education of those aspiring to culture, these things are absolutely right, and I would contend defensible, but as a stimulus to prurience, as sensational items and as things intended to appeal to the lower instincts, they should not be tolerated to deface the hoardings of our towns or villages.12

The sophisticated nature of the visual art audience placed the artwork beyond the immediate concerns of the censorship lobby. In addition, its very limited distribution made it less able to transmit improper ideas to the general populace. It has been noted that in the debates on censorship, ‘the likely prospective audience [particularly children] was key’.13 The paternalistic attitude of the censors reinforced its class-based nature in which the middle and upper classes (especially men) were deemed capable of judging the moral content of a film, a book, or a work of art in contrast to the lower orders.14 (The fixation of censorship on sexuality distracted attention from the real economic and social difficulties faced by the less well-off citizens of the Free State.)15 However, when art moved outside the confined jurisdictions of the private gallery or studio it came under scrutiny. There were several controversies concerning the exhibition of what were regarded as immoral or blasphemous works of art in public museums and spaces in Free State Ireland. Their repression was usually achieved through bureaucratic delay combined with little, if any, formal 110

Censorship in the Irish Free State explanation or justification for what amounted to insidious rather than an official censorship.

Harry Clarke’s Geneva Wi ndow One of the most notorious cases was the rejection of Harry Clarke’s (1881 – 1931) Geneva Window (Figure 6.1). In 1927 the government commissioned the young and successful stained-glass artist to design and make a window for the headquarters of the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. This was an important opportunity for the newly created Free State to promote a distinctive cultural identity to an international audience in a powerful political forum. Clarke devised a scheme for the window that illustrated excerpts from the work of fifteen

Figure 6.1 Harry Clarke, The Geneva Window, 1929. Stained glass, 181.6 £ 101.6 cm.

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Censoring Art modern Irish writers. These included poems, plays and novels by such controversial figures as James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, John Millington Synge, Liam O’Flaherty and George Bernard Shaw. The emphasis on literature was an acknowledgement of the high international standing that Irish writing enjoyed at this period. It was also a tribute to the achievements of writers and dramatists of the Celtic Revival and their contribution to the foundation of the new Irish state. The intricate decoration and elaborate manner of production of Clarke’s Window highlighted the ability of visual art to rival the text or the performance. Clarke’s distinctive technique combined long-standing stained-glass methods of plating and aciding with details that he painted directly on or incised into the glass.16 Clarke’s plan for the Window was made at precisely the moment in which literature was being subjected to official censorship in Ireland. Clarke consulted with W.B. Yeats and the playwright and director of the Abbey Theatre, Lennox Robinson, on his choice of texts for the Window. (Both their work is included in his scheme.) Both were also outspoken critics of censorship. The government gave its approval to the scheme without seeing the final design. It is likely that, given Clarke’s prolific work as a religious stained-glass artist, no conflict with an acceptable image of Irish culture was anticipated. However, Clarke, a critically acclaimed illustrator, was deeply involved and aware of the role of literature in contemporary Irish and European culture. His illustrations, such as those for Faust by Goethe (Harrap, 1925), are notable for their menacing and often highly erotic nature. A contemporary Dublin review noted that in Clarke’s Faust illustrations ‘Every creature depicted is diseased and indescribable abortions people the dim backgrounds of the scenes.’17 Clarke completed the Geneva Window in the summer of 1930 and it was subsequently inspected by representatives of the government, including the President, William Cosgrave. Its imagery, although fantastic and other-worldly, is dominated by the bodies of young and beautiful female figures which, given the proscriptive attitude of Irish society towards sexuality in 1930, must have been an unsettling feature of the work for some viewers. Cosgrave suggested that the panel illustrating O’Flaherty’s 1926 novel Mr Gilhooley be replaced or altered. This depicts a middle-aged drunken man leering at a young woman, who dances naked

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Censorship in the Irish Free State before him, her body partly masked by the folds of a diaphanous mantle. Cosgrave told Clarke that, ‘I feel that it would be unjust to you as well as to the council to lay open to hostile criticism the beautiful work which the window contains by associating it with subjects that would displease.’18 Rather than outwardly censoring the artwork, Cosgrave took a defensive stance and warned of the potential antagonism that the work would evoke in others. Clarke, who was gravely ill with TB, offered to show Cosgrave two alternative designs for the panel but he refused to change the subject from that of O’Flaherty’s text.19 In 1931 the Roman Catholic Bishop of Killaloe was asked by the government to give his opinion on the Window. He expressed reservations about another panel based on Seumas O’Sullivan’s 1922 poem, The Others. In this image two young lovers are shown cavorting in a fantasy landscape. Watched by spirits, the almost naked male figure clasps his companion’s hand to his crotch. Despite this shocking scene, the Bishop was in favour of the Window being installed. He stated that it was simply a ‘pity that Clarke had chosen to “immortalise” a group who did not represent “the mind or character of Ireland”’.20 Clarke died in January 1931 without ever receiving approval for this, his last great work. The requests for clarification on the future of the Window were continued after his death by his widow, the artist Margaret Clarke, who eventually bought it back from the Free State government at its full price. The work was neither displayed nor discussed in public, except for a mention in the staunchly reactionary Catholic Bulletin. It was to remain in Clarke’s studio until the 1960s, when it was temporarily exhibited in the Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. In 1988 it was acquired by the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami. Its censorship emanated from the conflict of placing a highly individualistic work of art within a public context. But the artist’s reluctance to alter the work in line with Cosgrave’s suggestion, coupled with his desire to base its composition on contemporary Irish writing, is significant in the light of the current debate about censorship. Clarke chose to celebrate an aspect of Irish cultural life that was coming under fire from official legislation. While the rejection of the Window was not surprising, the lack of public debate is notable. This silence was principally due to the fact that its commissioning and display were shrouded in secrecy. There was no overt refusal by the government, nor even a statement justifying its inaction in not erecting the Window.

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Censoring Art Clarke’s negotiations with officials indicate his genuine surprise at their negative reception of the Window. Its open references to sexuality were, however, extremely rare in art in the Free State. The reluctance of the majority of artists to portray the nude, and especially the female figure, indicates their acceptance of, or at least a submission to, the wider ‘foreclosure’ of such subject matter. The fact that Irish women were rarely represented as sensual or openly sexual in Irish art of this period has been noted by later art historians, although it was rarely commented on at the time. Young female figures become increasingly absent from the west of Ireland landscapes and genre scenes that were so popular with the art going public in the 1920s and 1930s. As Catherine Nash has discussed, the representation of women in modern Irish art had to be reconciled ‘with the use of women by cultural nationalists as signifiers of moral purity and sexual innocence’.21 Few, if any, artists challenged this agenda.

Jack B. Yeats’s Jazz Babi es A more direct response to women in contemporary life can be detected in the work of one of Free State Ireland’s most highly regarded painters, Jack B. Yeats (1871–1957). His painting Jazz Babies (1929, private collection) (Figure 6.2) was exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1929. Its title and subject are, in terms of contemporary Irish art, both unusual and provocative – a young fashionably dressed woman stands amidst a crowd as they browse in a busy shop or public house. The centre of the composition opens onto a view of a counter with lines of black stacked forms in the background. The artificial light indicates a night-time activity. The group of customers is dominated by a well-dressed man in a hat, holding a cigarette in one hand, and a young woman wearing a fashionable black cloche and sleeveless dress, whose back is turned towards the viewer. She has a golden armlet around her upper arm which holds in place a blue handkerchief. Her significance is highlighted by the dabs of bright yellow on her costume which stand out from the surface of the canvas. The selfpossessed poses of these two central figures are contrasted with those of their fellow browsers, whose cut-off features form a circle around them. The worldliness of the prominent male figure is counteracted by a second male figure, wearing a flat cap, who is bending down to peer at something. A sign on the counter reads ‘Record’, indicating that music is being played. 114

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Figure 6.2 Jack B. Yeats, Jazz Babies, 1929, 61 £ 91.5 cm.

The title Jazz Babies refers particularly to women whose lives were both curtailed and emancipated by the combined forces of modernity and conservatism in the Ireland of their day. The term refers to ‘lively and passionate young women’.22 The costume and posture of the woman at the centre of the composition radiates a sense of modernity and sophistication. But the reference to jazz in the title had other specific implications for Irish viewers in 1929. Along with cinema and literature, popular music and the associated activity of dancing was a cause of grave concern to those lobbying for a purer, more Irish culture. From 1924 to the 1940s the Dáil (Free State parliament) was continually engaged in debates over the impact of popular music, usually referred to as jazz, on the impressionable youth of Ireland. Pressure from clerics and politicians led to the passing of the Dance Hall Act in 1935 which prevented unlicensed dancing of any kind.23 As early as 1924 jazz music and immodest dress, like that seen in Yeats’s painting, were linked in the Catholic church’s hostility towards dancing and its potentially immoral impact. In 1924 the Lenten pastoral letter condemned women’s fashions and immodest dress and ‘indecent dancing’.24 By contrast, the figures in

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Censoring Art Yeats’s painting, relatively mature in years and rather demure in manner, are far from the victims of jazz so maligned in the Irish media of the day. Instead, the painting presents a sophisticated and diverse group of individuals who in their restrained behaviour appear to be slightly in awe of the music to which they are listening. In this light, the title Jazz Babies seems to make whimsical reference to the ways in which Irish citizens engaged with metropolitan culture, especially modern music. Yeats makes literal reference to music in the manner in which he has constructed the painting. The jarring rhythm of the brushstrokes in the work is reminiscent of the syncopation of jazz music. The diverse surface moves from the black rectangular shapes in the background, made from scraping the paint in a regular pattern, to the rich impasto of the figures in the foreground. This ebullient use of paint and the complexity of the composition proclaim the future direction of Yeats’s painting. Jazz Babies is a pivotal work in the development of Yeats’s oeuvre. It departs dramatically from the realism of his earlier work. Its elusiveness caused much puzzlement and even some amusement to contemporary viewers. The writer and artist George Russell found himself strangely drawn to this new style: ‘I find myself fascinated as before by these mysterious pictures of Jack Yeats. I cannot rationalise my liking for them’, he wrote.25 The popular satirical journal Dublin Opinion good humouredly caricatured the new manner with a cartoon showing a man attempting to view one of Yeats’s canvases from all angles before being carted off to the lunatic asylum.26 While comical and not particularly original, the cartoon emphasises one important aspect of Yeats’s new style, its physical demand on the viewer. Those who wished to make sense of it literally had to contort themselves to do so. This strategy by which the viewer’s curiosity was aroused and confounded is remarkably akin to the process of film censorship whereby the narrative is disrupted through cutting and editing. Contemporary accounts criticised Yeats for what they perceived as his unruly approach. Some even suggested that he was incapable of exercising control over the application of paint and the planning of his paintings. A London review which mentions Jazz Babies scolded, ‘A good artist should not only feel, but be schooled to control his feeling at the right time and in the way most appropriate to his art. This element of self-discipline is

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Censorship in the Irish Free State lacking in Yeats. He seems unable to realise that some of his impressions are more valuable than others.’27 A more recent biographer of Yeats, alluding to his training as a graphic artist, has asserted that he ‘did not recognise the know how to handle self-discipline as a painter since he was never taught what it meant’.28 A more plausible explanation, as Yvonne Scott has written, is that Yeats ‘blatantly contravened or ignored standard academic techniques . . . [and] . . . flouted rules of harmony of colours and assembled unlikely combinations’.29 David Lloyd argues that Yeats’s late style reveals a conflicted attitude towards contemporary Ireland by its refusal to create easily legible images.30 Commentators of the 1930s and 1940s also saw it as reflective of national issues and especially the shaky foundations of the Free State which were based on the partition of the island of Ireland and the new state’s continuing existence within the British Commonwealth (until 1948). Its subversive quality attracted collectors and admirers such as the former republican leader Ernie O’Malley and the modernist writers James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Joyce acquired two of Yeats’s paintings in London in 1929 when they were shown at the Alpine Club Gallery, at the same venue but a year before that of Jazz Babies.31 Joyce declared at the time that ‘he and Jack have the same method’.32 Coincidentally, Yeats’s own career as a writer and dramatist began at this time. The first of his six novels, Sligo, was published in 1930. His prose, like his painting, was unconventional and circumspect. Based on meandering anecdotes and nomadic figures, it was inoffensive in its content but modernist and experimental in its approach. It has been described thus: By turning inward, by seeking forms to express his vision, he transcended the despair that the revolution’s failure to create a new Ireland might have induced. His primary theme became the need to transcend present reality, to accept change, chance, and randomness by uniting oneself to the spiritual forces of the universe, those larger than the individual.33

In a similar non-confrontational manner Jazz Babies engages with the wider issues of censorship and control that were rapidly pervading postindependence life in Ireland. Its focus on a female figure as symbolic of the interface between tradition and modernity reflects wider concerns about femininity and mass culture found in modernism and more specifically in 117

Censoring Art an Irish context. In the latter the connection between the two was reinforced by censorship legislation. A number of other works by Yeats, also painted in the late 1920s, Crossing the Metal Bridge (1928, private collection) and Lovers in a Cinema (1930, private collection), touch on a similar theme. Such paintings were not banned nor even criticised in terms of their subject matter but they remained unsold in the artist’s studio until Yeats’s later style became fashionable with a new group of admirers. These, like O’Malley and Beckett, were troubled by the state’s censorious attitude towards high culture.34

‘Defensive Attitudes’ – the Long-Term Implications of Censorship Arguably the climate of censorship had long-lasting implications for Irish art. In 1971 an insightful essay on modern Irish art noted the lack of a tradition of depicting the nude in Irish painting. ‘What emerges’, from those few nudes painted by Irish artists, the critic Brian O’Doherty declared, ‘is a sense of moderation, a politeness of approach that may be a reflex of the Irishman’s terror of sex or his approach to women.’35 He concluded ‘that the nude – which is never naked in Irish art – brings into play psychological embarrassments which find the most discreet formal rationalisation’.36 O’Doherty suggested that this avoidance was reflective of a national attitude towards sex. Such an analysis implies that official censorship merely enforced the natural inclination of the average Irish man and woman, and that this prurient attitude towards sexuality and the body had become normalised in the intervening decades. In reality Irish attitudes towards sex were as ‘complicated and multi-layered’ as those of any other country.37 Rather than challenging the official view of sexuality by engaging with the body as a subject, Irish artists focused instead on the much less contentious theme of landscape. In such work the ‘atmospheric mode’, the key feature of twentieth-century Irish painting according to O’Doherty, held sway.38 The evasiveness, O’Doherty argues, ‘summarises a whole defensive and infinitely discursive mode of existence in Ireland in the forties and fifties’.39 While this ambiguity has been closely linked to centuries of colonialism, it can equally be related to post-independence attitudes towards the body in Ireland, attitudes that were given official sanction in the two Censorship Acts. 118

Censorship in the Irish Free State In postwar Irish painting, as in the paintings of Jack B. Yeats, the artist skirts around the core issues of sexuality and the body. But at the same time their work acknowledges their own and their viewer’s physical presence. In the 1940s the English artist Elizabeth Rivers noted that Irish artists ‘feel sensuously in terms of paint but they paint with their bodies. The quality of mind that goes into good French painting is lacking here.’40 Such circumspect art suggests a timid attitude towards authority. In the 1970s younger artists, who had grown up in a more liberal era, lamented the passivity of their elders. According to them, their work had affected ‘the most convincing simulation of vigorous modernism while giving least offence’.41 The reliance on elusive form rather than direct confrontation by artists working in the Free State indicates their strong sense of commitment to the new nation and a reluctance to openly challenge its fragile foundations. It can also be recognised as a subtle response to the narrow cultural ethos in which they chose to live and practise. It shows, as O’Doherty observed, ‘a reluctance to disclose anything about what is being painted’ and invites the viewer to share in its furtive recalcitrance.42

Notes 1. Nicole Moore, ‘Censorship is’, Australian Humanities Review 54 (2013). 2. Brad Kent, ‘Zealots, Censors and Perverts’, Irish Studies Review 14/3 (2006), pp. 345–6. The Free State was formed after a war of independence and its early years (1922– 3) were consumed by civil war. Republicans, the losing side in the former, were a constant source of instability. 3. William Magennis TD, quoted in Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography (Dublin, 2004), p. 65. 4. Dermot Keogh, ‘The role of the Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland, 1922– 95’, in Studies Commissioned by the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, Building Trust in Ireland (Belfast, 1996), p. 128. 5. Linda King and Elaine Sisson (eds), Ireland, Design and Visual Culture: Negotiating Modernity, 1922 – 1992 (Cork, 2011). 6. Censorship of Publications Act 1929, section 16(1). 7. Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, p. 78. 8. Maria Luddy, ‘Sex and the Single Girl in 1920s and 1930s Ireland’, Irish Review 35 (Summer 2007), pp. 79–91. 9. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland (London, 2004), p. 193.

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Censoring Art 10. Brad Kent, ‘The Banning of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God” and the Decline of the Irish Academy of Letters’, Irish University Review 38/2 (Autumn – Winter 2008), pp. 274–91. 11. Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, p. 68. The Censorship of Film (amendment) Act 1925 allowed the censor to inspect film publicity material. See also Luke Gibbons, ‘Modalities of the Visible’ in King and Sisson, Ireland, Design and Visual Culture, pp. 19–25. 12. William Magennis TD, Dail Debates, II, col.1646, May 1925, quoted in Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, p. 69. 13. Joan Fitzpatrick Dean, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth Century Ireland (Wisconsin, 2004), p. 7. 14. The class-based nature of censorship is pervasive and not unique to Ireland. See Annabel Patterson, ‘Censorship’ in M. Coyle (ed.), Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism (Abingdon-on-Thames, 1990), pp. 901 –14. 15. Kent, ‘Zealots, Censors and Perverts’, pp. 343– 58. 16. Letter from Harry Clarke to Thomas Bodkin, 3 November 1918, NLI Harry Clarke papers, MS 39,202 (a). In plating, two sheets of coloured glass are plated together to create different colours. Through a process of being dipped in acid the range of colours was extended. In addition to this, stopping out parts of the glass in hot wax protected it from the acid, preserving the original tone. 17. Anonymous, Irish Times, 20 November 1925, quoted in Nicola Gordon-Bowe, The Life and Work of Harry Clarke (Dublin, 2012), pp. 350– 1. 18. Letter from Liam Cosgrave to Harry Clarke, 30 September 1930, HCA.1.88, Harry Clarke Archive, Dublin City Gallery. 19. Rough draft of letter from Harry Clarke to Taoiseach Cosgrave, 26 September 1930, HCA.1.87, Harry Clarke Archive, Dublin City Gallery. 20. Quoted in Andrew J. Haggerty, ‘Stained glass and censorship: The suppression of Harry Clarke’s Geneva Windows’, New Hibernia Review (1999), p. 115. 21. Catherine Nash, ‘Re-mapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland’, Feminist Review 44 (1993), pp. 39– 57. See also Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, ‘Landscape, Space and Gender: Their Role in the Construction of Identity in Newly Independent Ireland’, in S. BhreathnachLynch (ed.), Ireland’s Art. Ireland’s History. Representing Ireland, 1845 to Present (Omaha, NE, 2007), pp. 85– 101. 22. The American Thesaurus of Slang. A Complete Reference Book of Colloquial Speech (London, 1954), pp. 413, 449, Yeats Archive, National Gallery of Ireland. 23. Georóid Ó hAllmhuráin, ‘Dancing on the Hobs of Hell: Rural Communities in Clare and the Dance Hall Act of 1935’, New Hibernian Review 9/4 (Winter 2005), pp. 9– 18. 24. Ibid., p. 9. 25. George Russell, [AE], Irish Statesman, 13 April 1929. 26. ‘The Man who Tried to get the Hang of a Jack Yeats’ Picture’, Dublin Opinion, May 1929, p. 73.

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Censorship in the Irish Free State 27. R.R. Tatlock, ‘Puzzle and Charm. Mr Jack Yeats’s Pictures. Delicacy of the Celt, Daily Telegraph, 27 June 1929. 28. Bruce Arnold, ‘Jack Yeats: The Need for Reassessment’, in Yvonne Scott (ed.), Jack B. Yeats. New and Old Departures (Dublin, 2008), p. 50. Arnold is author of Jack Yeats (New Haven and London, 1998). 29. Yvonne Scott, ‘Chaos Theory’, in Scott, Jack B. Yeats. New and Old Departures, p. 89. 30. D. Lloyd, ‘Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett’, Third Text 76/19 (September 2005), p. 473. 31. Porter Boats, 1927 and Salmon Leap, Leixlip, 1929, whereabouts unknown. See Hilary Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings (London, 1992), I, pp. 297, 353. 32. Letter from W.B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, May 1929, quoted in Pyle, Jack B. Yeats. A catalogue raisonné, I, p. 297. This was perhaps a reference to the contradictory pull between tradition and modernity that characterises their work. 33. Norah McGuinness, The Literary Universe of Jack B. Yeats (Washington, DC, 1992), p. 87. 34. See S. Beckett, ‘Censorship and the Free State’ (1934), reprinted in Julia Carlson, Banned in Ireland (London, 1990). 35. O’Doherty was presuming, of course, that the artist was a man. 36. Brian O’Doherty, ‘The Puritan Nude’ in The Irish Imagination 1959 –1971 (exhibition catalogue, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, 1971), p. 22. 37. Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin. Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London, 2009), p. 2. 38. This is exemplified in the expressive and ambiguous form found in the work of several distinguished Irish painters of the post-World War II period such as Patrick Collins (1911– 94), Patrick Scott (1921– 2014) and Louis le Brocquy (1916 –2012). 39. O’Doherty, ‘The Irish Imagination 1959-71’, p. 11. 40. Elizabeth Rivers quoted in Róisín Kennedy and Cormac K. H. O’Malley (eds), Nobody’s Business. The Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley, 1941 – 1956 (Dublin, 2017), p. 21. 41. Michael Kane, ‘The Independent Artists – Fragments of a History’, Structure 1/3 (1972), p. 4. 42. O’Doherty, ‘The Irish Imagination 1959 –71’, p. 11.

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7 Post-Soviet and Post-colonial Forms of Art Censorship in Central Asia

Alexey Ulko

Five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) found themselves politically independent in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For more than a quarter of a century, each country has been developing its own nationbuilding programmes ‘that did not depend on either of its most immediate sources: its recent Communist identity or its persistent Muslim identity’.1 These programmes involve considerable efforts by the state and its national art communities to identify or create art forms that seem appropriate for its fledgling national ideologies and to censor or restrict art forms which are deemed inappropriate. In Central Asia, censorship of artistic activities or public display of artwork reflects the complex cultural heritage of the society. Dubbed by the British travel writer Colin Thubron ‘the Lost Heart of Asia’,2 this once prosperous region which had given the world Avicenna and Tamerlane was, in the nineteenth century, a remote stage on which the Great Game was played between the British and the Russian Empires. Its northern part was ultimately absorbed by the latter. That Soviet Central Asia (CA) was a specific cultural region in its own right within the USSR was known

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Censoring Art in the West only to specialists or occasional tourists. For most of the twentieth century Central Asia suffered an identity crisis. The key to the Central Asian (and, indeed, post-Soviet) concept of a nation has been a narrative of its primordial ethnic origin, retrospectively devised by the Soviets as a way of progress from a pre-national to the Socialist society. The Soviet obsession with ethnicity only strengthened with independence but clashed with the need to build a modern multicultural nation loyal to the state rather than one titular ethnic group. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the five independent states found that they were no longer seen as part of ‘Russia’ but as part of the ‘stans’, of which Pakistan and Afghanistan were the better known. This has strongly influenced the emerging post-Soviet and post-colonial discourses that differ not only from state to state but also rely on different political and cultural intellectual traditions within one country. The relations between the discourses are therefore highly contradictory and the main debate seems to focus on whether the Soviet system was genuinely liberating and antiimperialistic or merely colonisation in disguise, exacerbated by the Civil War and Stalin’s repressions. Nevertheless, hardly anyone questions the validity or authenticity of the Soviet ethnic and national identities or sees them as socially constructed, which makes the whole debate peculiarly lopsided. The post-Soviet period, therefore, has been a time of chaotic and contradictory attempts to re-traditionalise and to modernise the society at the same time, a mixture of different kinds of nationalism and the need to adapt to global as well as local contexts. As a result, each Central Asian state has developed its own combination of modernism and traditionalist authoritarianism. The contradictions between these two sets of values are less severe in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where artists enjoy relatively more freedom of expression, than in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan (and lately, Tajikistan with its newly discovered ‘Aryan’ national doctrine). In each case the state is trying to develop an ideology which can reconcile so-called ‘national traditions’ and modernity in a single discourse. However, in all Central Asian states, the Soviet top-down governmental control has mutated into equally heavy-handed forms of conservative and bureaucratic censorship. Unsurprisingly, different stakeholders often see censorship in the region as black-and-white, depending on their cultural and political background. The liberal and ‘progressive’ minority regard it as a form of

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Censorship in Central Asia ruthless repression by the authorities of the freedom of creative expression. The conservative majority believe that it is an ethically justified measure against artists’ unacceptable attempts to trespass on forbidden ground. Thus, the public view of censorship has become polarised and in the context of the increasing re-traditionalisation of CA society the issue of artistic censorship is becoming more and more pertinent. However, there is evidence that mixed attitudes to different elements of the region’s cultural heritage and different definitions of ‘normalcy’ place the practice of censorship within a more sophisticated framework than is often envisaged by this, rather simplistic, dichotomy. In this chapter I would like to discuss several examples of formal and informal censorship taken from different countries of the CA region, to identify the narratives, meanings and paradigms that emerge in the process of censorship and to look at the way it is functioning in this particular context. Firstly, the position of a censoring body or individual, whether formal or informal, in most cases is conservative and traditionalist. The nature of this traditionalism is two-fold. Commonly the agents who carry out censoring view themselves as defenders of values, taboos, traditions, world views and practices that stem from two sources: the Soviet past and the conservative, traditionalist discourse or the so-called ‘national mentality’ that is rooted in the specific local form of post-colonial reaction. This is best exemplified by the criminal prosecution of the Uzbek photographer Umida Akhmedova (which I will discuss below) for her films and photography apparently depicting Uzbekistan as a backward country inhabited by uncivilised people.3 Although these traditionalist values are essentialised and only claim to be authentic and primordial, in many respects this claim goes back to the Soviet period of nation building. The current post-Soviet and post-colonial discourses, both conservative and liberal, affect the perception of art in a complex and often contradictory way. Sometimes it is difficult to establish which kind of cultural reaction is ‘progressive’ and which is not. Censorship of particular artworks seems to be applied selectively and critics usually focus only on some features of an art piece they find objectionable and ignore all others as well as the wider context. Such arbitrary selectiveness of artistic objects, or elements of them, for censorship is, indeed, remarkable. For example, in 1991 –2016, Uzbekistan has made consistent efforts to eradicate its Soviet and Russian colonial

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Censoring Art past.4 Surprisingly, the wide-scale censoring of Soviet artworks in Uzbekistan, especially those on public display, has hardly affected the Soviet orientalism, a representation of the Soviet Asia as the exotic ‘Other’, pitched against the ‘normal’, universalist backdrop of the Russian or European culture and extremely common in the art of the region beginning right from the moment of its colonisation by the Russian Empire in the 1860s. On the contrary, the colonial perspective most vividly exemplified by such Orientalist painters as Vassily Vereshchagin (1842 – 1904) and Nikolay Karazin (1842 –1908) was partly inherited by the Soviet ‘national’ art and later became the foundation of modern Uzbek neotraditionalism and self-exoticisation.5 While Russian imperialism is strongly condemned by the Uzbek authorities, Russian colonial art and photography have been uncritically and widely appropriated to represent the ‘original East’. Although explicit political symbols of the Soviet regime (emblems, sculptures, monuments and even the red colour of public propaganda posters) were subjected to strict censorship, official art still uses the same methods of public propaganda in new posters, sculptures and emblems. What is remarkable is that the authorities’ anti-Soviet reaction against certain art narratives and forms of the past has effortlessly borrowed the same artistic codes that had emerged in the region at the end of the Soviet period (the so-called ‘perestroika’). Hardly any traces of postcolonial reaction can be identified here. Laura L. Adams in her insightful book on culture and identity in Uzbekistan discusses the complex and often purely arbitrary patterns of ascribing to some art forms (for example, ballet) the status of universalist culture and to others, like the ‘national dance’, the label of a national or authentic art.6 These patterns consciously, or subconsciously, inform the audience about the way certain art forms should be perceived, interpreted and censored. In general, a colonial attitude continues to affect the perception of Central Asian artists by the Russian art world. When Kanat Ibragimov, a Kazakh artist and actionist, staged a performance in Moscow in March 1997 that involved the slaughtering of a sheep and drinking of its blood, this was perceived not only as a provocatively cruel intervention, but first of all as a symptom of ‘Asiatic barbarity’.7 Several members of the gallery staff proclaimed that Kazakhstan was inhabited by wild people who should not be allowed in Moscow. German animal rights activists tried to prevent the slaughtering of the hapless sheep. This post-colonial conflict,

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Censorship in Central Asia rooted in the perception of ‘the Other’ and the artist’s provocative intention, resonates with other scandalous performances by the ‘virtual Kazakh’ Borat Sagdiyev (the fictitious character invented by Sacha Baron Cohen, the British comedic actor),8 where the borders of political correctness and social taboos are also put to the test. That extrinsic colonial marking plays the key role in this kind of cultural censorship is exemplified by the art world’s reaction to a performance by another artist from Kazakhstan, Sergey Maslov (an ethnic Russian), who mirrored Ibragimov’s intervention in a State Museum of Art in Almaty. In this he publicly extracted some ‘virgin’s blood’ from a naked girl (his former student) and used it as ink to make a sketch and then drank the remaining ‘ink’. Maslov knew that his performance would be interpreted differently from Ibragimov’s because of their different ethnic background and later gave the following explanation for his intervention: ‘Europeans often think too high of themselves only because they do not understand the culture of other people.9 That is why being a Russian artist I decided to do the same or may be something even more frightening.’10 Although this intervention shocked both the administration of the museum and the visitors, Maslov’s intention to challenge existing ethnic and cultural stereotypes and thus offer a form of post-colonial critique was not acknowledged by the authorities. Their response was emphatically bureaucratic and selective. In the best Soviet tradition, Maslov was sacked from the art school where he had taught and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Almaty severed links with him. Surprisingly, no charges of sexual misconduct or, indeed, any charges related to gender issues, were made against Maslov. His only trespass in the eyes of the authorities was a grave and public violation of the normal relationship between a teacher and a student, which they declared ‘unpedagogical’ and provocative. All other considerations were seen as secondary. In other words, the performance of an ethnic Kazakh artist in Russia was marked and censored as ‘ethnic’ while a similar performance by an ethnic Russian artist in Kazakhstan was judged only against the perceived civil ‘normalcy’ despite its provocative cultural and gender message. Complex relationships between artists’ ethnic and national identities as well as those of the audience are at the core of all forms of censorship in CA, irrespective of the particular political context within each country. Socially construed identities and policies of re-asserting, reinterpreting and

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Censoring Art inventing different public memories play a more important role in public life than political parties or trade unions. At the same time, specific conflicts of identity, such as the reaction to Ibragimov’s and Maslov’s performances, can be articulated completely differently. The presence of an ‘ethnic’ component in a conflict between the artist and the censor can be identified even when colonial or post-colonial narratives are not evoked directly. In such cases, this component becomes woven within political and conceptual confrontation. A telling example of this complexity is the current cultural situation in Kyrgyzstan, where radical forms of Kyrgyz nationalism have for many years coexisted with the most liberal and emancipatory political programmes. Of all the countries in the region, Kyrgyzstan has had the most open and volatile public life, involving two revolutions in 2005 and 2010. At the same time the Kyrgyz authorities have become increasingly supportive of the Russian interpretation of its colonial policies and practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a way of helping the Kyrgyz to assert their national identity against more powerful neighbours. However, this closeness to Russia backfired as Russia’s politics became more conservative and aggressive in the 2010s. In 2012 the Bishkek Theatre of Russian Drama, originally established to promote Stalin’s version of ‘friendship between nations’ in the country, cancelled the media performance of the Russian playwright and artist Olga Zhitlina. Called The Week of Silence, this was supported by the local radical left-wing School of Theory and Activism Bishkek (STAB). The play is an artistic reaction against the tightening of anti-abortion laws in Russia and focuses on personal experience and the dilemmas that a woman faces as well as ‘the forces that are trying to influence her decision: from the partner and relatives to the clergy and authorities’.11 Giving his justification for the cancellation of the performance, the theatre’s director quoted the irrelevance of the Russiaspecific narratives to the Kyrgyz context, although the main reason for the censorship was the feminist criticism of the patriarchal standpoints and practices of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian authorities. While the performance was seemingly focused entirely on Russian gender policies unconnected to Kyrgyz realities, the act of censorship was triggered by two sets of implied (or inferred) meanings developing along metonymical and metaphorical trajectories. The feminist criticism of the Orthodox Church’s parochialism in the play can be metonymically

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Censorship in Central Asia associated with the explicitly anti-Putin and anti-clerical stance of Pussy Riot and the subsequent scandalous imprisonment of its members.12 Obviously, this form of political criticism was considered too sensitive and therefore impermissible by the newly inaugurated staunchly pro-Russian Kyrgyz government. On the other hand, this criticism of Russian patriarchal reaction can be metaphorically applied to all other patriarchal and traditionalist societies as well as to their viewpoints and practices. The former reason seems to be of a more immediate and direct concern to the authorities but, in my opinion, it is the implicit criticism of the foundations of the neo-traditionalist doctrine of the modern Kyrgyz state that was considered most inappropriate and undesirable. As I have noted above, all CA societies are facing the dilemma between the need to revive once suppressed ‘national traditions’ and the desire to develop a modern society in line with current international standards. This perceived need for an integral national policy administered by the state in the name of the people is not simply a leftover of the Soviet regime. It is a conscious desire to follow the familiar model of dominance where Marxism is replaced with socially construed ‘national values’. This choice of power structure somewhat questions the validity of the prefix ‘post’ when CA countries are described in terms of being post-colonial and postSoviet despite the anti-colonial and anti-Soviet rhetoric adopted by some of the CA states. A smooth transition of power from the Soviet regime to independence has ensured a seamless transfer of ideologies. One of the most telling examples of censorship based on these new ideological foundations is the case of Umida Akhmedova, a well-known Uzbek photographer,13 who was found guilty of libel and defamation against the Uzbek people for an album of documentary photographs showing different ‘national traditions’ in a ‘disrespectful and mocking manner’.14 Her album, Women and Men from Sunrise to Sunset, explores the complex relationship between the two genders in Uzbek society but contains no explicit, shocking or particularly revealing scenes. Akhmedova’s photographs, mostly made in her native town of Parkent and a few other villages, look beautiful and innocuous to the western eye. Yet the prosecution charged her with the deliberate intention to show Uzbek society as ‘backward’ and to project this vision to the imaginary international audience. A specially appointed committee, including ‘experts in spirituality, religion and psychology’, drew together a curious document analysing some of the

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Censoring Art photographs in an attempt to back the prosecution’s case. Their comments provide an interesting and useful insight into the semantic mechanism of censorship. A photograph of a crying girl in a wedding dress standing near her father (Figure 7.1) was found offensive and received the following commentary: Of course, each girl leaving her parents’ home is crying because she is leaving it for good. She will have to live far away from her relatives. There is no such feeling of crying [sic ] in the West. When people in the West look at such photos they will think that the poor girl was married against her will. In Europe when girls get married, they do not cry because they have no such feelings. That is why any Westerner looking at this photo will definitely conclude that in Uzbekistan girls are forced to marry and this is why they cry.15

It is evident from this text that one of the censors’ key concerns was the need to protect ‘national traditions’ from the imaginary misunderstanding by the West and to punish the author for the intention ‘to portray Uzbeks as barbarians’. This perceived need goes back to the authorities’ desire to

Figure 7.1 2005.

Umida Akhmedova, from Women and Men from Sunrise to Sunset,

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Censorship in Central Asia produce thoroughly sanitised versions of national traditions which would at the same time comply with the image of Uzbekistan as a modern and civilised country. It echoes (if not replicates) the complex relationships between the doctrine of Socialist Realism and the reality, with an emphasis on the ‘typical’ rather than the merely ‘realistic’ where specific artworks were meant to represent a larger whole. This metonymical transfer of meaning (in the quotation above, from a specific girl to all the Uzbek girls and therefore the Uzbek people) is also partly due to the diffuse-oriented Central Asian culture where the distinction between private and public spaces is blurred and both are seen as in need of protection, in this case from the critical, albeit imaginary, Western observer. That most of Akhmedova’s photographs featuring neighbours and relatives were made in her native town and therefore could not possibly be taken with an intention ‘to show Uzbeks as barbarians’ did not diminish the power of the scenario of the cross-cultural encounter invented by the censors. Neither were the censors interested in what the Western audience really thought of Akhmedova’s photographs. Finally, over-sensitive about the international image of Uzbekistan, they were not excessively concerned about the damage inflicted on the country’s reputation by the persecution of an artist for an album showing the everyday life of ordinary people. Here I would like to underline the importance of metonymy as a tool for the invention of new meanings. The connections between artistic images or actions and multiple realities are artificially construed and hyperbolised. Censors often reify their own interpretations, treat them as real and then respond to these imaginary threats posed by artworks and artists. Of course, these are the very reactions that contemporary art seeks to provoke and challenge. Similarly, any dominant culture, irrespective of its political standpoint and the extent of declared freedom, will always resist the threats of the deconstruction of its core values. However, it would be wrong to assume that this conflict always involves the left-wing or liberal, progressive and contemporary discourse as a challenger and the traditionalist, conservative and metaphysical culture as dominant and reactionary. Sides are easily switched when the contemporary politically correct and ‘progressive’ discourse is challenged and then a similar metonymically driven censorship may follow, as can be seen from the following example when a critically acclaimed artwork and the artist were strongly criticised by left-wing art critics and verbally abused by their followers in social networks.

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Censoring Art The work in question is the installation Abdication of Swastika by Vyacheslav Useinov (Figure 7.2), an artist from Uzbekistan, which won the Grand Prix at the seventh Tashkent Biennale in 2013. Although the curators of the exhibition at first expressed some doubts as to whether the stylised ‘fascist emblem’ should be exhibited, they were later convinced by the artist’s arguments. He maintained that his ‘objective was a rehabilitation of the origins of the swastika, an attempt to revive its historic meaning by artistic means [. . .] I position the swastika with the help of historic architecture, folk art: embroidery, skull caps where it has always been a necessary decorative element which carries an important positive message’.16 An influential internet news agency Fergana.ru published a large article dedicated to the event and became the platform for a hot discussion of the work. Quite a few left-wing Uzbek intellectuals (mostly living outside Uzbekistan) as well as some international CA scholars voiced an explicit criticism of the work. Useinov was pronounced a ‘Nazi’, and some commentators went as far as to demand that he should be punished for ‘visually shouting “Heil Hitler”’ for the very attempt of de-tabooing the swastika. There were calls for internet news agencies to withdraw their coverage of the Biennale and Useinov’s work. Boris Chukhovich, one of the

Figure 7.2 artist.

Vyacheslav Useinov, Abdication of Swastika, 2013. Permission of the

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Censorship in Central Asia world’s leading experts in contemporary art in CA (and an ardent defender of Umida Akhmedova), provided the most profound criticism of the installation. He interpreted it as a purely commercial and decorative project, only imitating a contemporary artwork and identified the following five areas where its message complied with the official artistic doctrine which eventually landed it the Grand Prix: 1. The artist as well as the official art critics from Uzbekistan share and promote the idea that Uzbek art is metaphysical and asocial. 2. The authorities and the artist are trying to ‘extend’ national history in the past through the use of ancient symbols. 3. The use of ‘Aryan’ symbols ‘for an unconscious but a Nazi purpose’. 4. Islam as a point of reference for official artists. 5. Implicit criticism of the contemporary world that committed ‘injustice’ against the swastika, an ancient Asian symbol.17 Although Chukhovich’s points are well substantiated, by directly linking the artwork to the official, dominant art world in Uzbekistan, however, he almost automatically granted justification to all forms of the left-wing censorship of the piece. He chose to overlook the socially construed and thoroughly metonymical way the swastika has acquired the current meaning of absolute evil (‘a Nazi purpose’). Useinov saw his task to be the re-appropriation and revival of the metaphorical and metaphysical understanding of the ancient symbol, often seen in Central Asian decor. The artist’s hopes may be regarded as naïve but it does not obscure the fact that in this case it was the representatives of the left-wing ‘progressive’ discourse who employed far-fetched rhetoric of reification similar to that used by their traditionalist political opponents in the examples discussed above. The art critic Georgy Mamedov, one of the founders of the STAB, interprets Useinov’s artistic intention as ‘a call for the refutation of the historical and the assertion of essentialism and metaphysics’ and concludes that such an objective ‘is not fascism per se, but it provides a fertile soil for the growth of fascism’.18 Leaving aside the political content of the debate, I see the main cause of such discrepancy of interpretations lying in the context-based strength of metonymical links between the symbol and the meanings generated by it. By claiming that ‘the swastika is absolutely and inseparably linked to 133

Censoring Art Nazism’, the left-wing censors of the installation reify the link and treat it as an absolute and given ‘fact’ that cannot be subjected to deconstruction or critical analysis. Another important dimension of the debate is whether the current sensitivities of Western society to the depiction of the swastika and the limits of ‘political correctness’ can be rightfully and unquestionably imposed on other cultures. This post-colonial dimension is underpinned by the fact that the critics involved in the controversy have acknowledged that the swastika carries less political connotation in CA, where it can be seen in everyday life as part of traditional decor. The censorship was directed against the artist’s attempts to make an intervention in the world of contemporary art dominated by current cultural and theoretical paradigms formulated outside the CA region. To conclude, censorship of art in CA cannot be reduced to a simple juxtaposition of the essential challenge posed by contemporary art against the primordial conservatism of dominant cultures. The complexity and controversy of Central Asian society often leads to clashes between different identities, theories, subcultures and taboos within it. These multiple discourses involve different interpretations of the meanings generated within the society. Paradoxically, followers of each of these discourses tend to ascribe their underlying principles and presumptions to an absolute or dominant value in a post-modern and fragmented society. This craving for the return of ‘grand narratives’ and refutation of postmodernity, often from diametrically opposite standpoints, usually results merely in an over-judgmental and critical attitude to artworks created within a different theoretical or artistic paradigm. In this context, only conscious acceptance of the multiple languages used to describe the world, society and art in CA can be a starting point for an understanding that is not immediately reduced to ethical relativism or moralising partisanship. Central Asian art in all its complexity deserves multiple and profound context-based cross-disciplinary studies not hollow and biased criticism and subsequent censorship.

Notes 1. Laura L. Adams, The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan (Durham, NC, 2010), p. 61. 2. Colin Thubron, The Lost Heart of Asia (New York, 2008).

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Censorship in Central Asia 3. Rachel Aspden, ‘Uzbek documentary maker found guilty of slander’, Guardian, 11 February 2010. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/ 2010/feb/11/uzbekistan-umida-akhmedova-slander (accessed 30 January 2016). 4. Adams, The Spectacular State, p. 29. 5. Alexey Ulko, The Shift of the Paradigm in Modern Central Asian Art (2011), p. 4. Available at https://www.academia.edu/5534113/The_paradigm_shift_in_ the_modern_Central_Asian_art (accessed 30 January 2016). 6. Adams, The Spectacular State. 7. Bogdan Mamonov, ‘Galereya M. Gelmana Moskva’, in Yu. Sorokina (ed.) Mezhdu proshlim I budushchim. Arkheologiya aktualnosti (Almaty, Kazakhstan, 2011), pp. 97–9. 8. Borat Sagdiev (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borat_Sagdiyev (accessed 30 January 2016). 9. In Central Asia, there is no clear term to identify the coloniser. ‘Whites’ sounds coarse and racist to a Russian-speaker, ‘Russians’ is misleading (as there were many Germans, Ukrainians, Armenians, etc. in the community) as well as ‘Christians’. One of the locally adopted term is ‘Europeans’ juxtaposed against ‘locals’, although its use remains confusing not only to western Europeans but even to the Russians from Russia proper. 10. Sergey Maslov, Zdes byl Maslov (Almaty, 2004), p. 191. 11. Georgy Mamedov, Rukovodstvo novoe, poriadki stary’e: ocherednoi’ akt cenzury’ v otnoshenii proektov SHTABA so storony’ Russkogo dramaticheskogo teatra im. Ch. Ai’tmatova (2013). Available at http://www.art-initiatives.org/ ?p¼10207 (accessed 30 January 2016). 12. Pussy Riot (2013). Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pussy_Riot (accessed 30 January 2016). 13. In May 2016, Umida Akhmedova was awarded a prestigious Vaclav Havel Prize for her creative dissent. 14. Aspden, Uzbek documentary maker. 15. Boris Chukhovich, Zakliuchenie po povodu ‘kompleksnoi’ e’kspertizy’’ tvorchestva Umidy’ Akhmedovoi’ (2010) Available at http://www.fergananews. com/news.php?id¼13876 (accessed 30 January 2016). 16. Pavel Kravets, Uzbekistan: «Pohishchenie svastiki» hudozhnika Yuriia Useinova (2013) Available at http://www.fergananews.com/articles/7961 (accessed 30 January 2016). 17. Boris Chukhovich, Uzbekistan: ‘Pohishchenie svastiki’ hudozhnika Yuriia Useinova (2013), [Fergana.ru] Available at http://www.fergananews.com/articles/ 7961 (accessed 3 December 2013). Link to the message board no longer working. 18. Georgy Mamedov, Uzbekistan: ‘Pohishchenie svastiki’ hudozhnika Yuriia Useinova (2013), [Fergana.ru] Available at http://www.fergananews.com/ articles/7961 (accessed 3 December 2013). Link to the message board no longer working.

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8 In the Shadow of Alexander the Great: Censorship, Ideology and Contemporary Art in Macedonia

Jonathan Blackwood

In this chapter, we will consider how censorship affects discourses of contemporary art in the Republic of Macedonia. To do so, we must first outline the cultural, political and social contexts in Macedonia; consider some differing standpoints on what constitutes contemporary art practice in the country; and, having done so, develop in detail two case studies which will allow the reader to gain an understanding of how censorship is deployed as a tactic in erasing, or in rendering illegitimate, critical contemporary art. Although, as we shall see, contemporary art occupies a marginal and, arguably, subterranean position in Macedonia, such censorial interventions are an acknowledgement of its potential to shape cultural debate in a different way. The censorship we will be discussing here is not of the blunt, totalitarian kind, involving bans, exile, prison or other judicial punishment for the artists concerned. The artists we mention in this text are still working as artists, and have not been subjected to a judicial process on the basis of the work censored. Nonetheless, in the case studies that follow, works of art, commissioned and following all proper legal procedure, have 137

Censoring Art been removed from public scrutiny by being destroyed, on the orders of persons unknown. The censorship we are concerned with here is a censorship of deletion and erasure, and the troubling traces of these events remain foremost in the consciousness of critical artists in Macedonia. Moreover, this is a censorship by stealth; those doing the censoring have remained anonymous, and therefore beyond democratic accountability. It is a pattern wearily familiar to those observing different ‘managed democracies’, in the former Communist world, in central and eastern Europe. It is also an irony that seems lost on Macedonia’s politicians that, in censoring artworks, they give to them a life and notoriety that they might otherwise not have enjoyed had they been ignored. To begin, we shall turn to an overview of contemporary art in Macedonia and, in particular, that part of it subject to censorship by those who occupy positions of political and religious power in Macedonian society. Public artworks produced from a position of critical opposition cannot be fully understood without the brief ecology of contemporary Macedonian art that follows.

An Ecology of Contemporary Art in Macedonia The Republic of Macedonia voted to secede from the disintegrating former Yugoslav federation on 8 September 1991 and, in so doing, effected the only peaceful withdrawal from Yugoslavia of all its six constituent republics. Not that Macedonia’s history since independence has been entirely peaceful; the country suffered from a long international isolation in the 1990s, owing to Greek objections to the country’s name and flag.1 In 2001 an insurgency to the north and west of the country saw a small but vicious war fought between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians, in the short-lived so-called Macedonian insurgency.2 The current political epoch in Macedonia begins in 2006, with the election of a conservative nationalist government under Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, leader of VMRO-DPMNE, the biggest right-wing party in the country. VMRO-DPMNE, which traces its roots to Macedonian secessionist nationalism in the late nineteenth century,3 has remained in power ever since, winning four successive elections and currently governing in partnership with the largest party representing the Albanian 138

In the Shadow of Alexander the Great minority, the DUI.4 The political turbulence and popular demonstrations against the government, from May 2015 onwards, derive in part from the questionable legitimacy of some of those election ‘victories’.5 Ultimately, Gruevski and VMRO-DPMNE were finally removed from power following a tight election in December 2016, and months of tense power-brokering in the first months of 2017. The type of government represented by VMRO-DPMNE and its allies has been characterised by the social scientist Katerina Kolozova as a ‘hybrid regime’.6 Kolozova defines a ‘hybrid regime’ in patriarchal terms, as follows: Typical of the state model at issue is the centrality of the role of a strong leader, such as Victor Órban in Hungary or Vladimir Putin in Russia. As a rule, it is an authoritarian figure enacting the essentially patriarchal role of paterfamilias whereby the nation is treated as a community of genetic kinship, a ‘family’ (ethnos as genos) rather than a nation (or demos)[. . .] The general trait of the style of ruling is, I would argue, patriarchalism. The latter enables ethnocentrism, religious conservatism and strong state control.7

It is Nikola Gruevski who has, since 2006, sought to build for himself an image as a firm but fair paterfamilias; someone not afraid to make necessary reforms, such as the 2009 overhaul of a previously sclerotic and widely ignored tax system, but also someone who defends and defines the ethnic group of which he claims a leading role – Macedonians. It should be noted that, by implication, Gruevski regards the Macedonian nation as congruent with this largest ethnic group, rather than as representing a mix of differing ethnicities and religious beliefs. Macedonian people who adhere to the Orthodox Christian faith may well constitute the largest ethno-religious group in the country, but to limit a definition of contemporary Macedonian statehood to this group excludes, by implication, Albanians, Macedonian Muslims, Roma people, and smaller ethnic minorities such as Vlachs, Bosniaks and Turks from ever being regarded as full and equal citizens within the modern Macedonian state. This is a type of nationalism that has been transmitted through ‘official’ Macedonian culture, more so than in any other sphere of government influence. It is in this context that we should approach the highly controversial Skopje 2014 programme, publicly announced by VMRO-DPMNE 139

Censoring Art planners in February 2010, and which, eight years later, is yet to be completed. This scheme is nothing less than the biggest ‘neo-classical’ and ‘Baroque’ building scheme anywhere in the world. For proponents of the makeover, Skopje 2014 aims at a truly Macedonian style of architecture; for opponents, it is nothing more than aesthetically and architecturally illiterate kitsch, which has ruined the city. The aim of this scheme has been to alter, fundamentally, the appearance of late Yugoslav Skopje. The city was 80 per cent destroyed by a disastrous earthquake on 26 July 1963, and had to be rebuilt with international help. The renowned Japanese architect Kenzo Tange devised a masterplan for the city centre, arranged according to his architectural principles;8 a broader reconstruction plan for the urban area was devised by the Polish architect Adolf Ciborowski, and a Greek architectural practice. On the grounds of practicality and cost, only a small part of Tange’s vision was completed, around the new railway station, south east of the city centre, while Soviet architects built new housing, in the Karpoš area to the west of the city centre; Poles contributed the new museum of contemporary art. Many other nationalities on both sides of the Cold War divide helped either physically, or in kind, in the re-construction effort. The aim of the Skopje 2014 scheme, then, is fundamentally a rejection of the modernism and internationalism that characterised the rebuilding of Skopje in the 1960s and 1970s, and the international atmosphere that some remember in the Yugoslav capital in the 1980s, in the last decade of Yugoslavia. Skopje 2014 is an attempt to re-cast the Macedonian capital physically, and dominate its public spaces ideologically. The architects of Skopje 2014 have sought to over-write or erase the previous appearance of Yugoslav Skopje, and to emphasise what they regard as the national identity of Macedonia. In the words of the anthropologist Andrew Graan: [Skopje 2014] houses a cascading set of state goals, each targeted to different audiences: it aims to sculpt Macedonia’s image and boost its international visibility, to ‘normalise‘ and ‘Europeanise’ the capital, and to assert (ethnic) Macedonian identity against factors perceived to be threatening (i.e. Greeks and ethnic Albanians). By proactively establishing Macedonia’s ‘European’ character among international publics via branding strategies, Macedonian leaders hope to secure economic advantages and also to trump

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In the Shadow of Alexander the Great regional and internal challenges to state authority and national authenticity.9

It is this complicated, delicate and overlapping set of competing cultural discourses that frames the terrain for the production of contemporary art in Macedonia. In response to these circumstances, artists have four broad choices. Firstly, they can seek to take part in the Skopje 2014 re-building process itself, as many artists have chosen to do, for reasons of material gain or ideological conviction. Artists, from late Yugoslav avant-gardists such as Aleksandar Stankoski10 to relative unknowns such as Valentina Stefanovska, have participated fully both in the ideological justification and material outworking of the Skopje 2014 project. While Stankoski has functioned consciously as an ideologue for the project, the younger Stefanovska has specifically avoided political comment, preferring instead to use the project as a means of exhibiting her sculptural ideas on a grand public scale. Stefanovska is the author of the centrepiece of the Skopje 2014 project, the monumental bronze Warrior on Horseback (2010/11), commonly known to locals as Aleksandar Veliki (Alexander the Great), as well as a Triumphal Arch, and a sculpture of Filip II of Macedon, within walking distance of this flagship equestrian sculpture. At the time of writing, the total cost for Skopje 2014, estimated at around e80 million when the plans were first revealed to public scrutiny, has mushroomed nearly eightfold. A forensic investigation by the online journal Balkan Insight, in September 2015, revealed that over e630 million had been spent on the realisation of Skopje 2014.11 The scheme continued right up until the new Social Democrat administration, under Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, ordered an immediate stop to all building works at the end of May 2017. A second group of artists chooses not to take sides; not to participate in the Skopje 2014 project personally but, equally, not to condemn it either. In many ways, this is an insidious form of self-censorship and is rooted in the pre-independence academic idea that ‘great’ art should not be ‘political’ art, but, rather, that any artwork produced should address the audience on its own terms. Artists from the Renaissance, such as Leonardo or Michelangelo, a French modernist like Henri Matisse, or American pop artists, would be

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Censoring Art held up in academies of Fine Art as examples of ‘great’ artists addressing their audience in aesthetic, rather than in political, terms. By implication, Yugoslav-era artists such as Borko Lazeski,12 whose work addressed specifically political narratives of the Yugoslav state, can be dismissed as second rate, as the primary motivation for the work can be deemed political. The irony of a parallel silence on the overtly political nature of the Skopje 2014 scheme tells a story not only about the selective application of modernist aesthetics in judging artworks, but also about the quality of aesthetic debate within contemporary Macedonian educational institutions. In terms of Macedonian artists’ perceptions of art, this apolitical position, taught at Fine Art Academies, is still unchallenged by a significant majority active in producing and consuming art. Evidence for such a position can be found in the widespread appreciation of dead Macedonian painters from the last century, such as Petar Mazev, whose work continues to exert a disproportionate influence on the work of students who were not born at the time of his death in 1993; and reference, in particular, to French and American modernist painters who were most active in the early to mid-twentieth century. This is a position partly deriving from selfcensorship, and partly from the comparative isolation of Macedonian art, internationally. A third position is associated with those who work at national institutions and galleries in Macedonia. On paper, there is a strong network of national galleries and museums, with a comprehensible funding system, little changed from Yugoslav times, in place. By common consent, however, national institutions in Macedonia do not function as they should, and have arguably been in crisis for the last decade. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, there is a lack of managerial and organisational capacity in Macedonian cultural institutions. Directorial appointments are made on the basis of political loyalty rather than professional competence; those still on the staffs of national institutions, who have professional competence, find themselves working to management who have no understanding of or sympathy with development strategies. Further, in a country with around 28 per cent unemployment, officially, and up to 50 per cent according to unofficial figures, the vast majority of all cultural funding has been channelled towards the realisation of Skopje 2014.

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In the Shadow of Alexander the Great Self-evidently, the ideological trajectory of the re-building of the Macedonian capital sees national institutions starved of the funding necessary to develop a genuinely independent or critical discourse on contemporary culture. In the shadow of Alexander, audiences for cultural events have fallen away significantly, as has the ability of national institutions to mount them. In these circumstances, the National Gallery of Macedonia, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, struggle to fulfil their basic functions as cultural institutions. Regional galleries such as the ‘Marko Čepenkov’ Cultural Centre in Prilep, and independent cultural festivals such as the long-established AKTO festival in Bitola, run on little more than enthusiasm in present times.13 It may seem remarkable that an independent cultural sector can exist in the circumstances outlined above. It is this small independent group of artists, curators and activists whose work is the obvious target for censorial intervention by the state. While the three broad positions outlined above are recognisable parts of the contemporary cultural ecology in Macedonia, small, and largely marginal, independent cultural activities are not. These activities have grown exponentially since the end of the last decade, in response to the increasingly non-functional nature of the Macedonian cultural infrastructure, and as part of a growing critique of the ‘official’ discourses of Macedonian culture associated with the Skopje 2014 project. Fundamental to this fourth, ‘critical’ position, is dialogue, debate, discussion, informal co-operation, solidarity and mutual support. Critical art in Macedonia is also almost entirely self-funded and part-time in nature; it is not possible to make a full-time living from art, made from this standpoint. Although there are different approaches within this ‘critical’ grouping of artists, the focus on mutual support and dialogue is common to all. Organisations such as Press to Exit, established by Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska in 2004, have sought to provide residency and networking opportunities for local artists; A.R.T I.N.S.T.I.T.U.T (2009 – 11) and MOMI (2011 – present), with a shifting cast of artists, develop a practice which focuses on art as a vehicle for emotional and psychological investigations; the satirical, action-based Sviracinje and the choir Raspeani Skopjani use humour, appropriation and the surreal as provocations to critique. Alongside self-identifying groups such as those listed above, individual practices, such as those of the graphic artist and painter Matej

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Censoring Art Bogdanovski, and independent critics such as Bojan Ivanov and Nebojša Vilić, add to the mix of people identified with, and active in, the development of critical and independent art practice. Perhaps most significantly, the grouping KOOPERACIJA, founded in April 2012 and which formally dissolved in the summer of 2015, adopted techniques of institutional critique, political analysis and site-specificity in developing a collectivist response to prevailing cultural conditions. In many ways, KOOPERACIJA operated as far as possible outwith the confines of contemporary visual culture; intervening briefly in a non-art space (laundromats, empty flats, business premises in between leases) according to a specifically agreed theme or discussion point, and then moving on to the next project. With a founding membership including Gjorgje Jovanovik, Filip Jovanovski, Igor Toševski, OPA, Nikola Uzunovski, KOOPERACIJA, during the three years of its operation, it functioned as a critical, oppositional core to hegemonic cultural and political positions in Macedonia. The approach of KOOPERACIJA focused on democratic deficit, institutional critique, the role and status of art practice in neo-liberalism, and ownership of space as key issues in the development of its collectively authored programme. Commenting on the possibilities for the artist in Macedonia at the beginning of 2014, the KOOPERACIJA grouping observed that: Politicians are known to use art as a propaganda tool, but it is the artist who can recognise the manipulations concealed behind these strategies and is capable of exposing the workings of such mechanisms. Therefore, it becomes a responsibility to challenge these and similar issues by any means possible. In this context, art is indeed a powerful tool: it can deliver a high impact by sending a strong message while using simple means.14

By the time that this statement was written, three of the artists had direct experience of the spectacular response that such critical actions, based on expressing a clear message in a comprehensible way, could have. These incidents, respectively, are Igor Toševski’s Territory on Plostad Makedonija, the main square of the nation’s capital, in 2009; and a gently mocking billboard produced by the artistic duo, OPA (Obsessive Possessive Aggression), three years later, as part of an official festival 144

In the Shadow of Alexander the Great organised by the city of Skopje. We now turn to these incidents as examples of the operation of censorship in contemporary Macedonian art.

Case Study: Igor Toševski’s Terri tory, Plostad Makedonija, 2009 Territories was a project of the Skopje artist Igor Toševski, an ongoing series of works begun in 2004 and continuing in various locations around the world, in both Europe and America, ending in 2011. Toševski produced 38 ‘Territories’ in total. Territories revisits the language of Utopian modernism and re-casts this in temporary free locations, in urban spaces. The space of each ‘Territory’ is delineated by yellow plastic tape which is durable, and which can be easily removed. The future methodology of KOOPERACIJA, of which Toševski was a founder member, can be found here; using simple ephemeral aesthetic means for the strongest impact. The ideas behind these Territories are fourfold. Firstly, the artist questions the relationship between the individual citizen and public space; how is behaviour regulated and what is possible? According to the rubric of the ‘Territory’, an activity or object that takes place within its border is considered a work of art. Following on from this, Toševski focuses on the notion of the line as border, as arbitrary symbol of the division between human beings and the different societies in which we live. Thirdly, the territory is site-specific. In each articulation of the ‘Territory’, the artist grounds contemporary practice in the legacy of the international language of early twentieth-century modernism. Refusing to engage with the limitations of the Macedonian present, he instead confronts his audience with the possibility of imagined alternatives becoming, temporarily, real; the possibility of a different set of social relations and creative interactions. These works also contain a strong relational element, with the documentation and response to each ‘Territory’ showing how it has been shaped, by those interacting with it. In the spring and early summer of 2009, Plostad Makedonija – then an open space whose centrepiece was a circular installation of flowers in the national colours of red and yellow – was the focus of protest and violence. VMRO-DPMNE’s plans for the antiquating of the capital’s ceremonial square were being discussed in the media and by citizens, with public 145

Censoring Art opinion strongly divided as to the merit of the proposed scheme. In this early articulation of the plans, a space for a monumental Macedonian Orthodox church was envisaged, as a key part of the new architectural layout. It was in this sense that Toševski’s proposed ‘Territory’ (Figure 8.1) was calibrated as a pointed intervention, for it occupied exactly the same spot as the site of the proposed church, in the shape of a cross. The artist recounts that, initially, the whole process for installing the piece went without any problems. Discussions with relevant curators and officials, in the spring of 2009, were amicable and no objections to the scheme were raised. But the artist could not have foreseen that, in March and April 2009, tensions were provoked as the extent and nature of the antiquation plans were revealed. Looking back at the incident, in 2015, Toševski observed that ‘people saw that the city was about to become a caricature, and they rightly protested. This protest led to an open conflict’.15 The focus of the protests were differing groups of students, and NGO activists, with Plostad Sloboda (Free Square) prominent amongst them. The peaceful protests were confronted with violent disorder on 28 March

Figure 8.1 Igor Toševski, Territory, 2009. Plostad Makedonija, Skopje, Macedonia. Destroyed.

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In the Shadow of Alexander the Great 2011, when a group of Orthodox believers, estimated at 1,500, physically assaulted those protesting at the building of the church, with the police standing idly by.16 The grim events of the day, with a peaceful demonstration violently dispersed by hooligans, was described by the journalist Harald Schenker as follows: On this sunny Saturday, a group of young urbanites was prevented from expressing two of their fundamental rights: the one to gather in peaceful protest, the other to freely express their opinion. And to make it worse – they were ‘prevented’ by blank violence, exercised by a bunch of hooded hooligans – in the name of the church, in the name of Christianity.17

The increasing sense of foreboding at the direction the government was taking culminated in the tragic murder of 22-year-old Martin Nešovski, on 6 June 2011, at the hands of a Macedonian police officer.18 Protests against the plans, merged with citizen outrage at Nešovski’s death, and demands that individuals and government agencies responsible be held accountable for their actions, continued throughout June and July of that year. In this fraught political context, Toševski’s territory piece was bound to provoke strong reactions. The unveiling of the piece was scheduled for Autumn 2009, as part of a broader exhibition with three German artists. The necessary permits to install an artwork, temporarily, in a public space, were obtained from different levels of city authority. As a final hurdle, the artist had to get the approval of the city mayor of Skopje; this was forthcoming a matter of days before the exhibition opened. The quick process of establishing the artwork in its position was completed, in the presence of police who, with all legal and administrative formalities complete, supervised the work, but did not intervene. The reaction to this new territory was almost immediate. The work was condemned by the NGO Plostad Sloboda as a provocation, and this narrative was taken up in the local media. Within a matter of hours of the work being completed, un-named government officials ordered the work painted over as a priority, by city council workers. Reflecting on this experience, Igor Toševski said: the government ordered the erasing of the yellow cross, and it became the black cross, which was lovely in a way [. . .] it was a really

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Censoring Art interesting situation, as everyone saw one another naked [. . .] I didn’t expect such a reaction, I had done thirty-eight territories before and never encountered such a response. The whole context is important; I suppose it was a good time and a good place, to do this.19

The resonance of this work lasted longer than the tense situation in Skopje in 2009. It is important to acknowledge that, while this work took place in the context of the beginnings of protest at the Skopje 2014 scheme, it was not a protest against that scheme itself, whose details were not officially announced until February 2010. Rather, this piece was about ownership of public space and, by extension, the divisive use of religion and ethnicity as a means of control in contemporary Macedonian society. As events transpired, the proposed Orthodox church was not built in Plostad Makedonija, as there simply was not the space there for it. Toševski continued to re-visit the ‘Territory’ notion, with his final work being commissioned in Gdansk, Poland in 2012. He placed a territory outline at a historically significant spot for the trade union and subsequent government party, Solidarnosc (Solidarity). In spite of the historic sensitivities of this piece, the work passed off without comment from the authorities, in stark contrast to the experience on Plostad Makedonjia. The lessons of Toševski’s quickly erased artwork are painful. The complete impotence of the country’s cultural institutions to defend a work of art from destruction was cruelly exposed in a display of brute political force. The sad contrast between the destruction of this work in a public place, and the indifference that it would have generated in an indoor gallery space, seen only by a few visitors, was stark. Further, it revealed the dreadfully low level of public debate surrounding art in Macedonia, and the increasingly violent divisions being torn open amongst the broader public. The role of a work of art is to ask questions, or to invite discussion. Unfortunately, such a debate is of interest only to a vanishingly small number, a small group of welleducated, urban-dwelling citizens. As soon as the resonance and potential power of this particular artwork was recognised by the political and religious establishments, it was destroyed without any further discussion. This was despite all the necessary permissions having been granted. Furthermore, the possible infringement of the artist’s right to freedom of expression, and not to have his work destroyed, was raised. Regrettably, in 148

In the Shadow of Alexander the Great this context, the rights of an individual, de facto if not de jure, come second to the interests of the state. In contemporary Macedonia artworks such as this have the effect of shutting down rather than opening up debate about difficult topics.

Case study: Obsessive Possessive Aggression’s Soluti on, 2012 In April 2012, many Macedonian Orthodox adherents believed that they had witnessed a miracle, at St Demetrius Church, one of the oldest churches extant in Skopje. The frescoes on the walls of the church, long stained with dirt, appeared to have cleaned themselves miraculously; the gold haloes of the saints once again shone out brightly in the church interior, without having been cleaned or treated at all. Many who witnessed the transformation claimed the mysterious cleansing as a miraculous event, even if scientists and religious leaders treated the matter more cautiously. Thousands of worshippers came to see the frescoes, which were also the subject of a visit by Prime Minister Gruevski.20 Coincidentally, the Macedonian art duo Obsessive Possessive Aggression (OPA), consisting of Slobodanka Stevceska and Denis Saraginovski, had been invited to take part in a festival organised by the Ars Akta organisation, in June 2012. Entitled Skopje Creative Festival, the project featured twelve commissioned billboards, allocated to different artists and designers to come up with an example of the city’s creative potential. OPA decided to produce a witty response to the miracle incident at St Demetrius church (Figure 8.2). Producing an ‘advertisement’ for a fake cleaning product, their work showed what appeared to be a cleaning spray placed in front of the outline of eight glowing haloes. Underneath the spray, a strapline text says ‘Reaches Even the Most Hardto-Reach Places’. Initially, there was little overt response to the work. The key difference between this incident and that involving Igor Toševski three years previously was the use and increasing popularity of social media in Macedonia, particularly Facebook. Slowly, images of the work began to be shared on social media by users, with many enjoying the sardonic joke at the expense of the alleged miracle earlier in the year. From social media, television journalists picked up the story, and began to run it on the 149

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Figure 8.2 Obsessive Possessive Aggression, Solution, June 2012. Poster print on billboard. Skopje, Macedonia. Destroyed.

mainstream media, a rapidly evolving process which provoked a sudden backlash from the conservative and religious right. The public debate surrounding the work, in response to items on television, quickly provoked heated online debate. Church officials complained that, although the work had been sanctioned by the Skopje Creative Festival, and the billboard space had been paid for, the Church’s approval had not been sought before the image had been erected. Rapidly, aggressive, unpleasant and threatening comments began to be left online about this image. The use of parody, and a cheap, poor, readily comprehensible aesthetic, was morphing rapidly into a full-blown scandal, the scale of which surprised the artists and their peers. Reflecting on the incident in summer 2015, Slobodanka Stevceska observed that: People became more and more aggressive [. . .] people like this have support from higher up. When you discuss religion, it is problematic, as you appear to be attacking their beliefs. When we made the project, we realized it would have consequences[. . .] but we didn’t think that response would be so intensive. It was a good experience, and good for our work.21

From the other side, the KOOPERACIJA grouping, which had had its first public exhibition in a Skopje laundromat in April 2012, rallied all the

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In the Shadow of Alexander the Great support it could in defence of the image. By this stage, however, events had taken on their own momentum. The image was unveiled on 10 June; within 24 hours, an agent acting on the orders of unknown officials had ripped the image off the billboard, destroying it totally. As had happened with Toševski, this provoked further exchanges, on the violent and aggressive tone of the debate, the pointlessness of destroying the artwork (the original image is still available to see online for anyone who wishes to find it), and the trampling over the rights of the individual artist, their rights to freedom of speech and not to have their property destroyed. This image fulfilled three broad functions. Firstly, it encouraged a public response by using a simple, easy to understand image and gentle parodic humour of the alleged miracle at St Demetrius. Through this humour, OPA sought to open up a broader debate about the power of the image; the power of the Church to use religious imagery for manipulative ends, counteracted by the ability of the artist to reveal those networks of power in response. Further, it opened up discussion on the acceptable boundaries of image making, and on the responsibilities of the artist in a society such as Macedonia. Notions of taste and decency, humour and offensiveness, those who exercise power and those who are subject to the actions of power, were all issues furiously debated in mainstream media, and in online and social media forums. This was a brief and intense paroxysm of discussion surrounding an artwork that would simply not have taken place if it had been exhibited in a gallery context. Consequently, this is also a work that deals implicitly with self-censorship, and the failure of art institutions and artists to function in any meaningful way. If engagement with the public is an afterthought, then what is the purpose of making the image in the first place? Finally, this image laid bare the close inter-relationship between church and state, and the unspoken power of the Church to affect offence on behalf of their congregation, and demand immediate action accordingly. In the vacuum left by the collapse of Titoist Communism and Yugoslavia, and in a post-ideological age, the Church has capitalised adroitly in filling these vacated spaces. The visible destruction of this artwork – exactly the same fate as happened with Toševski’s work – produced an image that was much more powerful and raw than these artists had ever expected. In many ways, the destruction of OPA’s billboard was the final manipulation by the Church of the ‘miracle’ at St Demetrius.

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Conclusion The question remains though: how can art actually participate in society as an instrument of change and as such make a difference?22

In this chapter, we have provided an ecology of Macedonian contemporary art, in outline, and identified those ‘critical’ artists who employ mixed strategies of institutional critique, site specificity, and gentle humour, as being most likely to suffer some kind of censorship. To have presented our two case studies as isolated and atypical responses to critical contemporary art would have been untrue. Had there been greater space and time, we could have considered many more examples – the response of the authorities, using ‘outraged citizens’ as a proxy, to Velimir Zernovski’s exhibition All Beauty Must Die in 2013, again in Plostad Makedonija, or, more recently, the refusal of any Macedonian printer to produce a copy of an image produced by Irena Paskali, for another exhibition on advertising billboards, in 2014. More insidious than these actions is the prevailing air of self-censorship; the quiet accommodation with prevailing political and religious orthodoxies that sees artists either attaching themselves to the antiquating projects of the government or, at the very least, retreating into a kind of twenty-first-century ‘art for art’s sake’ position, represented by exhibitions attended by derisory audiences and evincing few, if any, comments in the mainstream media. In this sense, then, the ability of critically minded artists to provoke a reaction from both the state and the public, to open up discussion – even if it may be passingly unpleasant discussion, in the form of a social media feeding frenzy – is a precious one. It is precious because it still claims a small public profile for contemporary art in a country where visual culture has been dragooned into the service of a right-wing ethno-nationalist view of Macedonian history and its present neo-liberal reality.

Notes 1. Although Macedonia declared independence in September 1991, it was not officially recognised by the United Nations until 13 April 1993, in the face of Greek objections to the name ‘Republic of Macedonia’. From the Greek perspective, this name implies a territorial claim on the Greek region also called Macedonia. It is from this dispute that the country’s official name at the

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2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

United Nations, ‘Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’ or FYROM, arose, although this formulation is not so commonly used now. The British government refers to the country as ‘The Republic of Macedonia’ in all diplomatic relations. However, continuing Greek objections have seen the country’s accession to supranational political and military bodies, such as the EU and NATO, effectively blocked. The Macedonian insurgency began in late January 2001 and was terminated by the signing of the Ohrid agreement, between the political representatives of the state government and National Liberation Army insurgents, in August 2001. The insurgency claimed 1,000 casualties in total, of whom between 150 and 250 were killed. VMRO, which stands for Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, was founded in 1893, and lasted until the middle 1930s, when it was forced underground and outlawed in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The present-day VMRO-DPMNE (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation-Party for Democratic Renewal) is a new party, founded on 17 June 1990, which claims ideological descent from the original grouping. The DUI (Democratic Union for Integration) was founded in 2001, under the leadership of Ali Ahmeti. The DUI, as a political organisation, grew out of the ethnic Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA), which briefly fought with government forces in the 2001 Macedonian insurgency. The military conflict was brought to an end by the signing of the Ohrid agreement, which saw the NLA disarmed, and the DUI, amongst other ethnic Albanian parties, founded. See BBC World, ‘Macedonian Protests; Anti-Gruevski Rally in Skopje’, 17 May 2015. Available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32771233. K. Kolozova, The Uses and Abuses of Neoliberalism and Technocracy in the Post-Totalitarian Regimes in Eastern Europe: The Case of Macedonia (Skopje, 2015), p. 7. Ibid., pp. 8 –9. See Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (Oxford, 2010). See also ‘Kenzo Tange’s Reconstruction Plan for Skopje’. Available at http://tststsss.tumblr.com/post/8342830969/kenzotange-reconstruction-plan-for-skopje. Andrew Graan, ‘Counterfeiting the Nation? Skopje 2014 and the Politics of Nation Branding in Macedonia’, Cultural Anthropology XXVIII/1 (2013), p. 170. Stankoski (b. Kičevo, 1959) was a member of the leading contemporary art group, Grupa Zero, based in Skopje, in the 1980s. In present times his practice features a pseudo-historical, mock neoclassical style dealing with some events from Macedonian history. Zero began their activities in Štip in 1984, with the group fizzling out at the beginning of the 1990s. Membership included Igor Toševski, who, in an interview with the author, remembered the international flavour of late Yugoslav Skopje, with students from the Middle East and North Africa prominent. Other members of Zero included Sinisa Cvetkovski,

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11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

Miodrag Desovski, Perica Georgiev-Pepsi, Bedi Ibrahim, Zoran Janevski, Tatjana Miljovska and Zlatko Trajkovski. For more details of Zero’s activities see S. Milevska and V. Veličovski, Zero: Retrospective 1984–2009 (Skopje, 2009). See the special investigation of the Balkan Insight web portal, with its page dedicated to the cost of the Skopje 2014 project, which can be found at: skopje2014.prizma.birn.eu.com/en/. As of 8 December 2015, the cost of the still unfinished project is said to be e633,265,564. Borko Lazeski (b. Prilep 1917, d. Skopje 1993) was a monumental painter and decorative artist who began to develop a specifically left-wing body of work concentrated around Macedonian fishermen in the late 1930s. In the years of socialist Yugoslavia, Lazeski was prominent in securing public commissions, notably a mural on the National Liberation War for Skopje railway station, destroyed in the July 1963 earthquake; and a mural on the same subject for Skopje’s Post Office in the late 1970s. Representations of these works can be found online at http://www3.varesenews.it/blog/labottegadelpittore/?p¼318. A version of Lazeski’s Monument to the National Liberation War can be seen in the 11 October 1941 Museum in Prilep – see http://whereismacedonia.org/ where-to-go-in-macedonia/museums-in-macedonia/426-memorial-museum11th-october-in-prilep. The only text with an English section on Lazeski’s work is Sonia Abadzieva’s Borko Lazeski, Museum of Contemporary Art (Skopje, 1980). Filip Jovanovski, interview with the author, Skopje, 25 July 2015. See ‘Art and Politics? Kooperacija’, 13 January 2014. Available at www.openspacezkp.org/2013/en/journal.php?j¼5&t ¼ 32#bio. Igor Toševski, interview with the author, Skopje, 23 July 2015; edited transcript in Jonathan Blackwood, Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia (Skopje, 2016). See E. Igantova, ‘Macedonia: Student Protests End in Violence’, Global Voices web portal (2009). Harald Schenker, ‘Tribal Patients on a Rampage’, 30 March 2009. Available at https://hschenker.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/tribal-patients-on-a-rampage/. See, for example, Elizabeth Flock, ‘Hundreds Protest Macedonian beating death’, Washington Post, 7 June 2011. Available at www.washingtonpost.com/ blogs/worldviews/post/hundreds-protest-macedonian-beating-death/2011/06/ 07/AGwsJHLH_blog.html. In summer 2015, as part of an ongoing campaign of releasing wiretapped evidence covering government corruption, nepotism and malfeasance, the opposition SDSM released compelling evidence that senior Macedonian politicians colluded with state institutions to cover up the exact details of the Nešovski murder. See ‘Zaev’s Bomb: Nikola Gruevski tried to hide the truth about Martin Nešovski’, meta.mk news agency, 5 May 2015. Available at http:// meta.mk/en/bomba-na-zaev-nikola-gruevski-se-obidel-da-ja-uvie-vistinata-zamartin-neshkovski/. Igor Toševski, conversation with the author, 23 July 2015.

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In the Shadow of Alexander the Great 20. See Sinisa Jakov Marusic, ‘Macedonian Scientists Ponder Fresco “Miracle”’, Balkan insight, 12 April 2012. Available atwww.balkaninsight.com/en/article/ science-cautious-about-macedonian-miracle. 21. Conversation between OPA and the author, 18 July 2015. Edited transcript in Blackwood, Critical Art in Contemporary Macedonia, pp. 166– 81. 22. ‘Art and Politics? Kooperacija’, Reader: Balkans, Open Systems journal. Available at www.openspace-zkp.org/2013/en/journal.php?j¼5&t ¼ 32#bio.

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9 The Contemporary Condition of Eilís O’Connell’s The Great Wall of Kinsale

Sean Lynch

Modern public sculpture, by its very definition, is not only shaped by its makers, but by the society it subsequently inhabits. Within the traditions of modernist autonomy, these objects are often understood formally within their own composition and physicality, sometimes generating allusive metaphors or emphasising the nature of the material they are made from. Yet, such a carefully constructed interpretative frame fails to take into account the nature of art as a shifting social and discursive entity often reactive to audience and context. This reality, often played out in how sculptures are encountered and understood in their day-to-day existence, points to divided opinion and a lack of any consensus rather than a holistic overview. Countless examples throughout the world, no doubt, can be cited. After winning the National Tidy Town of Ireland contest of 1986 (the country’s popular competition to encourage picturesque townscapes through active community involvement), the town of Kinsale in county Cork was recipient of a public art commission sponsored by the Arts Council of Ireland. Artist Eilís O’Connell presented The Great Wall of Kinsale on 22 July 1988, when over a thousand people turned up to an

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Censoring Art unveiling ceremony. Located at the town’s seafront, the sculpture was composed of three tent-like arches linked together by a low winding form. Stretching fifty-five metres in length, the piece was then the largest of its kind in Ireland or the UK. A small group of twelve protesters attended the unveiling, some holding placards. Among them, local painter Phillip French was quoted in the press that children were ‘trying to ride up it on bicycles,’ and that someone would be injured due to the sculpture’s presence.1 Local councillor Dermot Collins objected on the basis that the piece was not in keeping with the touristic ‘old world’ charm of the town. The group vociferously continued to lobby against the sculpture’s presence through local petitions, articles and letters in newspapers, publicly criticising the sculpture’s corten steel finish, then gradually turning from a rusted surface to a patina of deep red and purple. Eventually, alterations to the sculpture, suggested by an Arts Council delegation, helped defeat a motion to have the sculpture removed by five votes to three at the local town hall. The risk of removal of such a large sculpture would have been a major blow to the promotion of public art in Ireland and O’Connell’s work effectively became a sacrificial lamb to avoid such an embarrassing scenario for the state-funded Arts Council. The changes, including the painting of the sculpture’s surface rather than allowing the Corten steel finish to mature, and the installation of ground level water pools are still seen at the location. Later additions of metal barriers, a memorial bust, bins and potted plants also all directly conflict with the O’Connell’s original artistic intentions. Such detail can be seen in the accompanying photo-essay, excerpted from an installation coproduced in collaboration with the artist for A Rocky Road, an exhibition examining conservatism towards visual art in Ireland that I curated at the Crawford Art Gallery in 2011 –12.2 When O’Connell sought legal advice, the Berne Convention of 1886 came to the fore. This international law imposes on nations to provide for the moral rights of authors; that is to say, the right to be identified as the author, and the right to object to derogatory treatment of artworks. Over time, a series of acts have updated the principles of the convention, but the Irish state failed to sign or ratify the Paris Act of 1971, meaning that all artworks made in Ireland for almost thirty years were technically without copyright, including O’Connell’s. Eventually, in 2000, the European

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O’Connell’s Great Wall of Kinsale Commission initiated a case against Ireland in the European Court of Justice, alleging that Ireland was in breach of its obligations to adhere to the Paris Act and forcing substantive compliance. A tendency in much art criticism has been to consider large abstract public artworks as a dogmatic endeavour, where sculptures have a questionable contextual relationship to the site in which they are placed. While many still cite the removal of Richard Serra’s monumental Tilted Arc in 1980s New York as an important reference, little has been discussed around the desire for an artist to work with a modernist vocabulary, based on formal autonomy, in an accessible public arena outside the cosmopolitan centre. In this case, any formal illusions in O’Connell’s work to the nearby seashore and local architecture were relegated in an argument that prioritised local politics rather than artistic concerns. The fact that the work remains, despite the invalidation of many of her original intentions, suggests that abstraction on this scale can still be thought of as an active radical aesthetic.

Notes 1. Cork Examiner, 25 July 1988. 2. All images from Sean Lynch and Eilís O'Connell, The Contemporary Condition of The Great Wall of Kinsale, A Rocky Road, 2011. 35 mm slide projection with archival elements. Courtesy of Sean Lynch and Eilís O'Connell. (c) Eilís O'Connell.

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The Contemporary Condition of The Great Wall of Kinsale, A Rocky Road

10 Corporate Censorship

Alana Jelinek

Not only is corporate censorship bad for art, but it has a profoundly corrosive impact on wider society and democracy.1 All the acts of censorship and self-censorship I will describe here relate to the London contemporary art world. I have avoided cherry-picking examples from across the globe because, while both neo-liberalism and censorship are global phenomena, they occur differently in different places and it would be inaccurate to imply global homogeneity. This chapter is about the specific pressures that have occurred in London over the past decades, advancing a trend in censorship and self-censorship. In order to provide insight for the London context, I cite an ethnography of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. By its inclusion, I do not wish to convey a sense that the contexts of the United States and UK are the same, only that the insights of its author are relevant more broadly. Those who are fond of the London contemporary art world may argue against the idea of a growing culture of censorship. They may argue there has never been so wide a variety of art produced and readily available, taking this as evidence of artistic freedom and therefore a lack of institutional or pervasive censorship. Belying any grounds for complacency are two recent events. The first is the London conference on censorship in the arts organised in 2013 by Index on Censorship, an international 177

Censoring Art organisation founded in 1972 to promote and defend the right to freedom of expression.2 The second is the launch of the Museums Association’s new Code of Ethics in 2015 to tackle issues of ‘undue influence’.3 At the launch of the new Code of Ethics, Sally Yerkovich, Director of the Institute of Museum Ethics, warned delegates of the increasingly pernicious role played by private funders in guiding curatorial practice and even exhibition content.4 Corporate censorship, and the self-censorship some forms of corporate sponsorship engenders, is a growing problem. Yet, aside from these two examples, it remains little discussed within the art or museum worlds, with one notable exception: there has been heightened visibility around the role of oil companies in sponsoring arts and cultural institutions since the sustained actions of the Art Not Oil coalition (see below). Generally, though, silence about the pervasiveness of self-censorship in the London art world remains the keynote while, paradoxically, we also champion freedom of expression, as the press coverage around Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei amply demonstrates.5 Perhaps illustrating the pervasiveness of self-censorship in the London art world is the fact that very few of the 300 colleagues I contacted to obtain examples from personal experience of censorship and self-censorship responded.6 While there may be numerous reasons why a person does not respond to a question sent by a colleague and friend, included in my email list were those I knew to have been subject to censorship, who have since gone on to elevated positions in the art world and who had discussed this openly and with anger at the time. Institutional self-censorship may be inescapable in our current neoliberal climate, as ethnographer Matti Bunzl concludes: [T]he task of the curator continues to evolve. No longer centered on the quest for the new, challenging, and difficult, it has become a position of managerial mediation. Success, in this context, comes from the ability to domesticate contemporary art in ways that make it amenable to maximum audience engagement and donor involvement. The curator of the moment, in other words, is someone who can readily execute populist shows without losing conceptual credibility, reconcile institution and market without seeming a sell-out, and build exhibitions around patron’s collections without being too obvious about it.7

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Not Censorship but Something Else: The Art World Before I describe corporate censorship, I will first describe what is not censorship but something else instead. The ordinary operations of the art world to police its boundaries; creating orthodoxies, centres, margins and exclusions may be felt as censorship, but it is not. These ordinary normative art world practices have been described by philosophers since the 1960s as the ‘institutional definition of art’.8 While Arthur Danto is the more famous proponent of the institutional definition of art, it is George Dickie who takes his ideas further and, I believe, onto more accurate ground. I describe this more fully elsewhere,9 but, in short, George Dickie argues that a thing becomes art because the art world deems one thing to be art and another not art.10 This process happens in a largely unconscious way and it happens collectively. No one individual determines whether a thing is art and another is not art, though some individuals are better placed than others within existing art world structures to exert this power of inclusion and exclusion. Building on Dickie’s understanding, I argue that the work artists do in defining art is comparable to the work that scientists do to define science. This is an important point in terms of censorship. By comparison, scientists not only do science but they define what is science and scientific method through that process. What they include as science (both scientific fact and appropriate methods for creating scientific fact) determines what is science for wider society. That there are social processes at work in the formation of knowledge in the laboratory was demonstrated in the ethnography of Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar,11 and it is comparable to the social process in defining art described by Dickie. Art, like science, proceeds via social processes. This is an idea of disciplinarity supported by historian of science, G.E.R. Lloyd.12 Because all forms of knowledge are ultimately created through social processes, all disciplines have processes subject to the vagaries of fashion and exclusion, he argues, and all disciplines are subject to orthodoxies and to periodic revolution. This includes both science and art. If some things are art, other things are not art. This is true whether or not artists acknowledge their participation in the process of exclusion. In addition to exclusions produced as a consequence of the ordinary operation of the art world, there is another form of exclusion that is not

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Censoring Art true censorship, even though it has been described as such in the Index on Censorship 2013 report. This type of exclusion can be described as institutional bias. Prejudice or biases that create exclusions include sexism, racism and class exclusion, to name a few. When these biases emerge as systemic in institutions, exclusions that are over and above the strictly disciplinary also emerge. The Index on Censorship conference provides a few examples of this form of bias exclusion. Kenan Malik, for example, observes an art world tendency to homogenise minority communities, thereby creating significant obstacles for artists coming from ethnic minorities who may not conform to the idea of what is acceptable or expected by the mainstream. Jeanette BainBurnett, Artistic Director of the Association for Dance of the African Diaspora, describes a deep-seated prejudice in the UK that limits the range of work that minority ethnic artists are able to produce, based on specific yet unspoken expectations; that ‘artists critiquing their own minority communities were more likely to get their work produced than artists critiquing the mainstream [or] challenging misconceptions’.13 While the Index on Censorship reports these forms of bias as censorship, it is important to make a distinction between true censorship and the type of exclusion that occurs based on prejudice. The exclusions Bain-Burnett and Malik describe are not exclusions made on the basis of art values. They are instances of institutional racism and the (largely unconscious) perpetuation of the dominance of white, often male, voices at the expense of others. It goes without saying that institutional racism and other institutional bias inherently impoverishes art. Such institutional bias denies access to, and representation of, some types of art and artists as well as undermining art’s potential as a democratic form.

Not Censorship but Something Else: The Market In addition to the operation of the art world to define art, and the operation of the art world to exclude by dint of ethnicity or gender prejudice, the market also creates its own exclusions. These, too, are not censorship, despite arguments to the contrary. Current prevailing ideology assumes that markets are the best, most efficient and most appropriate means of providing for everything in society, including what used to be called public goods (those goods and 180

Corporate Censorship services that provide for public welfare, such as sanitation, electricity, health, education, and so on). This ideology is called neo-liberalism and it is an extreme variant of capitalism.14 It is a tenet of neo-liberalism that markets are the only way to arbitrate correctly as to the value of a thing. Good or useful things do well in a market. Conversely, it is believed that only if something is bad or useless will it fail in a market system. Within neo-liberal capitalism, the state should never prop up any form of production that has no market. Arguing against this assumption, but from a pro-market perspective, is Jean Gadrey, a French economist, who states: Markets [have an] inability to create, on a commercial basis, all the intellectual, cultural and social conditions for economic and social development of sufficient quality and variety to be sustainable. Markets are powerful and flexible and can offer freedom in the short term, however, they are reductive, since they need to stabilise the identity of their objects, of their agents and of the framework within which their reckonings take place.15

In other words, markets have their own inherent processes of exclusion. They characteristically kill off competition so that only limited, constrained options are left, on which a rational competitive market can be based. A process of ‘rationalisation’ occurs in markets when valuing commodities, including art. Markets disable other options or wider diversity by dis-investing from other starting points and subsequently destroy radical alternatives.16 Reduction in diversity is the product of how markets operate. It is not censorship. A single corporation or business may dis-invest and a market’s support for a narrow range of all the available options may create a distortion. Those who support ‘mid-list’ authors against Amazon’s ‘censorship’ alert us to the distortions of the market, but they are wrong to name it censorship.17 It is not censorship. It is what markets do. Because any monopolistic authority will reduce diversity, including markets, Gadrey argues for a balance and variety of systems to ensure a diversity of innovation. He argues that the market, the state or academia will all succeed equally in reducing plurality and diversity, the bedrock of innovation, if allowed to become monopolistic authorities. For diversity to thrive, Gadrey’s argument is that we need a diversity of systems. 181

Censoring Art At one time, the London art world could boast such a diversity of systems. Prior to the New Labour government (1997 – 2010) who introduced the ‘mixed economy’ or public – private partnerships, governments of all hues maintained an ‘arm’s length’ policy towards arts funding and a wide range of art and artists were supported.18 Indeed, publicly funded art tended to be different from that which was championed by the market. By the late 1980s and early 1990s different artists from a wider variety of backgrounds were shown in publicly funded galleries than were shown in commercial galleries. The public and the private were two distinct models of support for art, and different opportunities were afforded through the different systems. In general, the commercial system fostered the talents of white men, usually of a similar class background to the patrons, and public funding directly to artists, artist-led organisations and to ‘alternative’ galleries supported both white men and everyone else as well, including those doing the most challenging of art practices, and those who took a counter-cultural and dissident view of art and society.19 Once it became a requirement for museums and galleries to develop relationships with corporate sponsors and individual patrons and to achieve ‘self-generated income’, in order to receive state funding, homogenisation of the London art world became the, perhaps unintended, consequence of policies for the arts and culture in the new millennium. This policy-led convergence in models of support was further exacerbated by the increasing dominance of one patron during the 1990s, namely Charles Saatchi and, adding to the drift towards homogeneity, the new millennium saw a dramatic increase in property prices. Subsequent development closed down the informal structures that support artists, bringing about the end of London studios, artist-led spaces and workshops. As we might expect from a fully converged market, with the new millennium there is little or no difference in the range of artists seen in publicly funded spaces as compared with commercial spaces. Jack Vettriano’s highly commercial paintings were appreciated at Kelvingrove Museum, a publicly funded national museum in Glasgow in 2013. By contrast, the commercial gallery Hauser and Wirth hosted Christoph Büchel’s powerful political intervention-installation in 2007, Simply Botiful: a squalid factory and impoverished apartment staged on Cheshire Street, East London. Again, this may appear as diversity to some. As the commercial sector supports the type of work previously seen only in

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Corporate Censorship non-commercial, publicly funded art venues, publicly funded spaces host the highly commercial. But a wide diversity of voices, positions and subtleties are sidelined in the homogeneously mixed economy model, including the widest range of those from non-white, non-dominant cultures and many types of women’s voice.20 It was this level of diversity that had been supported in previous times through the distinct, and also sometimes overlapping, models of support that existed in London during the latter half of the twentieth century. Both the operation of a discipline to include and exclude and the operation of a market to narrow and limit genuine diversity are fundamentally different from censorship. The London art world may be institutionally biased, as described above, notwithstanding leagues of liberals attesting the opposite, but to understand censorship we need to disentangle confounders like racism and sexism from the operation of censorship and self-censorship. The operation of a market to limit and withdraw support has also been mistakenly called censorship. Indeed, markets can and do limit and withdraw support on the grounds of racist and sexist assumptions as well as the ‘purely economic’. Again, this is not censorship and, while they are contemptible, mistaking these exclusions for censorship does not add to our understanding.

Corporate Censorship Corporate censorship exists in at least three forms. The first, and most rare, is when a corporation acts in a way reminiscent of egregious state censorship and the censorship exercised by private patrons.21 This occurs when an artwork or exhibition is altered, dismantled, covered, cancelled or destroyed as a result of direct interference by a corporation. The second form occurs when an art institution anticipates a negative reaction from a corporate sponsor and so, assuming this will be the case, self-censors. The third happens when an art organisation or individual artist, in protecting an image or brand, self-censors. There are a number of examples over the last twenty years of direct corporate censorship, that is, when an artwork or exhibition is directly altered or threatened with alteration, dismantled or deleted because of corporate intervention. These acts of censorship range from the modest to the flagrant, though modest acts of censorship are far more common. 183

Censoring Art One modest attempt at censorship occurred when the global luxury fashion company Louis Vuitton (LVMH) aligned their brand with the London art college Central St Martins, over ten years ago. Louis Vuitton had sponsored various events at the art school and lent their name to the students’ lecture hall (now called the LVMH lecture room).22 Despite choosing to ally themselves with the creativity and freedom associated with art students, they requested that a section of online content be deleted from the Central St Martins website in 2012. It featured a project that included a general discussion about the role of corporate sponsorship at Central St Martins.23 Their request was refused. Unlike the response to Louis Vuitton, elsewhere small-scale corporate interventions have been met with little or no resistance. When BP demanded that the youth programme of Tate Britain’s education department be renamed to one more in keeping with their brand image, Tate Britain capitulated. Instead of using the name the young people themselves had chosen, the programme was renamed ‘Loud’. Apparently the word was more innocuous and family-friendly than the choice the young people had made.24 My informant understood the decision as a clear case of corporate censorship. Discussing the incident with someone else who had been the head of education at the time revealed another reaction altogether. For the head of education the decision seemed uncomplicated and ‘business-as-usual’.25 This echoes Bunzl’s observations about operations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in which curators and educators alter, however slightly, their programme of work in order to accommodate the real or imaginary whims of corporate donors. A similar process of institutional corporate censorship also appears to have occurred when Peter Kennard exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 1997. He was dissuaded from pursuing a commission to make work for the deck chairs around the gallery on the grounds that it might be censored. Having been invited to apply to produce artwork for the gallery, Kennard received a letter containing the following: ‘I fear that this project may not be the best place for an overtly political artist. The indication was that “controversial” work may be at risk of censorship and I feel it would be unfair to ask you to invest in the project when this is a possible outcome.’26 Kennard, whose artwork is found in national collections including Tate, has seen a number of instances of direct corporate censorship at its most flagrant. These include the occasion on 15 July 1985, when one image

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Corporate Censorship in the exhibition, Peter Kennard: Images Against War 1965 – 1985, at Barbican Arts Centre, was censored by the gallery director Henry Wrong, because, according to Kennard, the Chilean finance minister at the time was coming to talk to British bankers at the venue and might happen upon his work.27 More recently, in November 2003 his Peace on Earth image, which was to be projected on Trinity House in the City of London at Christmas time, was censored by Orange (now EE) and never shown.28 (Figure 10.1) Institutional self-censorship is far more common than direct intervention and occurs in anticipation of censure, opprobrium, or difficulty with the corporate sponsor. I was subject to this form of corporate self-censorship working for Tate Modern in the Interpretation and Education department. Writing the ‘Teacher’s Kit’ for the exhibition Century City (1 February – 29 April 2001), sponsored by CGNU plc, I contextualised the experimental large-scale temporary exhibition within a background of debate on the impact of globalisation. My tone was ambivalent, including both positive and negative impacts. On publication, ambivalence was altered to an unequivocally positive account of the impact of globalisation. I received no forewarning of the change yet my name remained as sole author of the publication. Shortly after the exhibition, CGNU carried out a successful merger to become the transnational global corporation Aviva. More flagrantly, in 2005, Southbank Centre (SC) cancelled a programme of events commissioned by the Hayward Gallery’s education department which sought to critique the role of corporate sponsorship in the arts. The reason given for the cancellation of a programme of live events and the new Pankof Bank commission was fear of alienating its corporate partners and particularly Starbucks, who held a franchise at the time. The Pankof Bank commission, Another Waste of Space, was to be a temporary structure occupying part of the car park and connected by a lift from Starbucks café and the Dan Graham ‘Interaction Space’ above it. A series of events on the work of Georges Bataille was programmed for the temporary structure and the space was to boast a traditional ‘greasy spoon’ cafe run by restauranteurs recently evicted as part of Southwark’s regeneration project (Figure 10.2). Another Waste of Space is an example of institutional critique which, even within the walls of the establishment art world, has a history reaching

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Figure 10.1

Peter Kennard, Peace on Earth, 2003. Image for projection.

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Figure 10.2 Pankof Bank (Manon Awst, Sam Causer, Simon Fujiwara), Another Waste of Space, 2005.

back to the 1960s.29 While censorship has periodically dogged the heels of artists who work in this vein – and Hans Haacke is the most famous example of this – it is also worth noting that the approach is much vaunted. A number of high-profile artists working today, including, for example, Andrea Fraser, have a body of work that operates within that history. After all, institutional critique demonstrates the art world’s commitment to freedom of expression.

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Censoring Art Nevertheless, this freedom does not apply to all artists equally. On three different occasions, in 2007, 2008 and 2011, SBC censored Platform, an art-activist organisation devoted to campaigning on the social, economic and environmental impacts of the global oil industry.30 Shell Oil are large corporate sponsors of SBC then and now. A comparable act of corporate (self)-censorship occurred in 2009 when John Jordan was invited to lead a workshop about art and activism at the request of the education department of Tate Modern. Attempts were made subsequently to censor the content of the workshop in order to protect oil company BP. An email was sent to him, saying: Ultimately, it is also important to be aware that we cannot host any activism directed against Tate and its sponsors, however, we very much welcome and encourage a debate and reflection on the relationship between art and activism.31

In agreement with Amber Hickey, who offered the invitation on Tate’s behalf in the first place,32 instead of proceeding with a general workshop on art and activism, Jordan chose to read the email to the workshop participants and let them decide on a course of action. According to him, the group had been mixed in their politics and variously positioned regarding questions of art and activism, but it was decided unanimously to act against the blatant attempt at censoring the artist and the subject of the workshop.33 Liberate Tate was formed as a consequence with the aim of ‘freeing art from oil’.34 They had an initial and primary focus on Tate ending its sponsorship deal with BP and, in the end, Liberate Tate succeeded in this aim. In March 2016, BP announced that it would end its sponsorship of Tate in 2017, though equivocations are given as to the reasons behind this decision.35 Liberate Tate is one of the organisations that form the Art Not Oil coalition, whose ambitions extend to all other arts recipients of oil sponsorship. The work of Art Not Oil brings to light the various impacts and compromises surrounding oil sponsorship and proves that creative action can effect change. Not only have BP pulled out of sponsoring Tate, but their ‘undue influence’ was investigated by the Museums Association.36 According to The Guardian newspaper, in addition, there is evidence that BP put pressure on the institutions to investigate employees for specific trade union membership with regard their political and ecological views. 188

Corporate Censorship (It remains illegal to interfere with a worker’s right to membership of a trade union or to interfere with a worker’s right to affiliate with any particular politics.)37 In 2002, Chin Tao Wu provided the art world with a rigorous and detailed analysis of the impact of a wider range of corporations on the arts since the 1980s.38 Unfortunately, the impact of her work and of those academics following her, has been confined to the ivory tower. Consequent on BP’s exposure to media and public scrutiny by the work of the artistactivists, corporate sponsorship in general began to attract media scrutiny, though it remains to be seen whether there is any lasting impact.39 Direct censorship continues at Tate. To date, Tate continues to refuse Freedom of Information (FoI) requests regarding BP sponsorship, despite losing their first battle in the courts and being required to disclose the sponsorship arrangements with Tate between 1990 – 2006. After protracted recalcitrance on the part of Tate to comply with the rules of FoI, they were taken to court and lost. At the close of 2014, Tate grudgingly disclosed the moderate amount donated by BP in return for high visibility branding.40 Tate continued to refuse to answer a FoI request enquiring about the level of sponsorship by BP between 2007 – 11, until being required by law to disclose.41 Refusing to answer FoI requests can be seen as censorship. Tate's response to later action by Liberate Tate was not. However I acknowledge that Liberate Tate feels otherwise. Unsanctioned art interventions happen periodically at Tate by various artists, and, as with any unsanctioned art in the gallery, attempts are made to erase, transfer or distract audience attention away from it. This is as true of Liberate Tate as it is of any other artist or group. From their earliest performance interventions, for example, Licence to Spill (2010), until the final ones, including Birthmark (2015) and Time Piece (2015), Tate’s strategy was to limit audience exposure to the work, not to stop or prevent the art-action.42 It is not censorship.

The Self-Censoring Artist What is new in the context of neo-liberalism is the type of self-censorship that artists, ourselves, are choosing to enact. Our avant-garde predecessors, fuelled by Romantic notions of genius and supported in their endeavours by various models of support and self-support, seem to have been cowed 189

Censoring Art only by the most totalitarian of regimes.43 By contrast, in the UK in the first decades of the twenty-first century there is accumulating evidence that artists prioritise exogenous pressures like markets, audiences and ‘careers’ over endogenous art values.44 This trade-off may be reasonable for the art institution. As Bunzl concludes: censorship and self-censorship may be understood as ‘a set of strategies devised to persist during a particular economic and cultural moment’,45 but it is highly corrosive of both art itself and democratic values when individual artists choose to self-censor. I will argue that, as distinct from the action of the institution, the fact that artists self-censor, bowing under the pressures of a neo-liberal market, is not only largely unobserved and normalised, but also dangerous, both for wider society and for art. Sophie Hope’s doctoral research, ‘Participating in the Wrong Way? Practice-Based Research into Cultural Democracy and the Commissioning of Art to Effect Social Change’ (2006 – 10), tracked instances of self-censorship in the UK art world. Her work makes it evident that self-censorship has become part of the working practice of UK artists including, and perhaps especially, those with radically progressive political agendas.46 Self-censorship is understood here as the choice to alter an artwork fundamentally from its original conception to one that is more palatable to institutions or funders. With the internalisation of neo-liberal values, UK artists find it acceptable, or part of the professionalisation of their practice, to self-censor in these terms, altering artworks in order to make them more palatable to commissioners, exhibitions and funders. This marks a distinct change from past artistic norms, values and practices. In a similar process, artists conspicuously ‘hone their brand’, expelling extraneous concerns, ethics or aesthetic elaboration in order to create a brand more readily consumed within the market (Figure 10.3). Hope’s interviews were presented anonymously. The interviews themselves were performed with animal masks worn by informants. Most of the interviewees requested anonymity before they would speak, hence the use of masks. According to Hope, only one person was happy to be named and understood that it was important to stand by their remarks.47 The overwhelming choice was to participate in the research project anonymously, demonstrating a tendency to avoid thinking through ideas of representation and politics, despite an avowed progressive or radical agenda and a passing acquaintance with the ideas of Mouffe and

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Figure 10.3

Sophie Hope, Performative Interviews, video still, London, 2010.

Arendt.48 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe more fully the problematics of anonymity in the constitution of the social realm. Suffice to say, the argument here is that anonymity fundamentally undermines the condition for plurality. The actor becomes potent in this process, according to Arendt, only when ‘he identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends to do’.49 When I was asked to write a piece critiquing the London art world of 2013 anonymously for Artquest’s series of pamphlets, I accepted on the proviso that my work would be published under my own name and not anonymously. This was refused; I assume because it would have thrown into question the anonymity of other contributors. I then suggested that I contribute a piece about anonymity in the art world and, for reasons of irony, contribute that anonymously. This offer was also rejected and, as we had reached an impasse, the offer to publish any criticism of the London art world was withdrawn.50 While this may be an example of poor curating, considering the esteemed history of institutional critique, it is not an example of censorship. However, as with Sophie Hope’s informants, the Artquest Pamphlets demonstrate a growing complacency, even normativity, around anonymity. Self-censorship undermines art’s vital role within a democracy; so, too, do trends, established in the wider world, to accept unthinkingly norms for 191

Censoring Art cultural participation, such as anonymity and measuring achievement in terms of website hits and sales figures. Internalising neo-liberal norms, including the desirability for smoothing a career trajectory by selfcensoring, impoverishes art and the definition of art. It severs the potential for art as truth. I have argued above briefly and elsewhere in more depth,51 that artists not only make art but also define what is art, collectively and often unconsciously, just as scientists both do science and define what is science and its methods. So the rules by which we, artists, make art are of fundamental importance. It is fundamentally important because what we do is not simply the act of an individual but because we, collectively, define art, setting the parameters for art and, ultimately, defining what is art for society as a whole. If artists working within the discipline of art self-censor, the methods of self-censorship become the methods of art, unless or until the community of artists, the art world, denounce the practice. This is comparable to when a scientist falsifies results or dilutes scientific method in order to achieve a desirable outcome. In that case, the scientist is deemed to be acting non-scientifically and is expelled from the scientific community, or if the science community fails in their role of policing appropriate methods, science itself is altered fundamentally to incorporate such methods.52 Self-censorship also undermines art’s vital role in society. I have argued elsewhere at length that the role and value of art in society is to create the public realm, or to create ‘dissensus’, as Jacques Rancière expresses it.53 The public realm is the space for the establishment of our public identities, for the recognition of a common reality, and for the assessment of the actions of others. It is in the public realm that democracy is instantiated and reiterated. Democracy is made possible, or otherwise, by action in public, as Hannah Arendt argues.54 Because art enacts plurality, diversity, the alterity that baffles simple categorisation and hierarchies (Rancière’s ‘dissensus’), art is constitutive of democracy. The vital social role of art in society is to instantiate freedom and plurality within the public realm. When we censor ourselves we undermine this social role. We undermine the enactment and the possibility of plurality: ‘this plurality [which] is specifically the condition – not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam – of all political life’.55 When we self-censor, we fail to instantiate the plurality that is the very condition of democracy.

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Corporate Censorship As artists, we collectively define art. Those who self-censor are defining art within neo-liberal values and reneging on our pre-existing commitment to drive art towards understanding and truth (however contested), towards instantiating plurality and freedom, in other words, democracy. On the one hand, it is democratic values that are at stake and on the other it is the value of truth. Artists both make art and define what is art. We define art in what we do and in what we accept are the rules for making art. Every artist who self-censors for the sake of their brand image or for their career defines art in those terms. There is much at stake when we fail to recognise or normalise corporate censorship.

Notes 1. As Tocqueville observed, democracy is not merely the organisation of voting rights or government. It is a set of values and cultural assumptions with the then new and specific emphasis on equality. For a discussion of this see James T. Schleifer, The Chicago Companion to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Chicago, 2012). 2. Index on Censorship conference held at Southbank Centre, London, in January 2013 (http://www.indexoncensorship.org/takingtheoffensive). 3. Museums Association Code of Ethics 2015 1.2 ‘Ensure editorial integrity in programming and interpretation. Resist attempts to influence interpretation or content by particular interest groups, including lenders, donors and funders.’ 4. Sally Yerkovich’s talk is available on the Museum Association website at http:// www.museumsassociation.org/video/17112015-sally-yerkovich-conference. 5. For example, http://creativetimereports.org/2013/04/15/china-every-daywe-put-the-state-on-trial/, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/19/aiweiwei-self-censorship-ullens_n_5509225.html and, in the USA, http://www. smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next¼ /arts-culture/is-ai-weiwei-chinas-mostdangerous-man-17989316/. 6. Snowball sampling, which is the name for this method of finding data, is a valid social science qualitative method of data collection, though it is also acknowledged to be a biased network-based method. Participants were offered anonymity which could be waived. I decided to present most of my informants’ material anonymously in order to protect those who chose this option. 7. Matti Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde: An Anthropologist Investigates the Contemporary Art Museum (Chicago, 2014), p. 91. 8. Arthur Danto, ‘The Artworld’, Journal of Philosophy, 61/19, pp. 571– 84. 9. Alana Jelinek, This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (London, 2013), pp. 47 –58. 10. George Dickie, Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Chicago, 1997).

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Censoring Art 11. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London, 1979). 12. The point here is not whether a discipline creates facts that are also empirically true but that disciplines create orthodoxies and innovation within what is ‘true’ in its broader disciplinary sense. G.E.R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making: CrossCultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning and Innovation (Oxford, 2009); G.E.R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford, 2007); G.E.R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making (Chicago, 1977). 13. Julia Farrington, ‘Taking the Offensive: Defending artistic freedom of expression in the UK’, Index on Censorship Conference Report (May 2013), p. 11. 14. It is worth noting, if only in footnote, that neo-liberalism is so named for its being a re-visitation of the conditions of economic liberalism that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, as critiqued by Marx and Engels. This is an observation of Foucault’s. Yet, neither Foucault nor I would, on the other hand, wish to overstate the similarities between then and now. My own emphasis in the analysis of the micro-physics of power is attention given to the particularities of conditions at a specific time and location. Michel Foucault (Michel Senellart (ed.); Franc ois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (general eds); Graham Burchell (trans.)), The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 –1979 (Basingstoke, 2010). 15. Jean Gadrey, New Economy, New Myth (New York and London, 2001), p. 82. 16. Michel Callon (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Laws of the Markets (Oxford, 1998). 17. An instance of perceived, but not actual, corporate censorship following the ordinary operations of a corporation and the market can be seen in the report by David Streitfeld, ‘Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-book Tactics’, New York Times, 29 September 2014. 18. New Labour were building on Conservative policies for privatisation in general, not just for the arts. It was assumed by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair that what mattered was the provision of public services, not how they were paid for. This was understood as The Third Way. Alex Callinicos, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge, 2001). 19. I am not overly nostalgic about the previous model of arts funding, as it had its problems, namely, it was biased generally towards the art of already privileged white men. Nevertheless, the various ‘firsts’ for Black Arts Movement, live art and feminist art practices occurred within the walls of the publicly funded ICA and a few other publicly funded and self-funded venues. 20. Jennifer Thatcher, ‘Women are still woefully under-represented in the art world’, Art Monthly 367 (June 2013). Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London, 2002) pp. 258–70. 21. See, for example, Rockefeller’s censorship of Diego Rivera in Sharon Ann Musher, Democratic Art: The New Deal’s Influence on American Culture (Chicago, 2015).

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Corporate Censorship 22. Available at www.arts.ac.uk/csm/business-and-innovation/working-with-ourstudents/sponsorship/lvmh/. 23. Available at www.recreativeuk.com/resource/value-art-school. 24. Tate Press Release, BP Saturdays: Loud Tate (6 August 2010). Available at www.tate.org.uk/about/press-office/press-releases/bp-saturdays-loud-tate. 25. My informant(s) were not the previous head of that programme and I discussed the incident with at least two people who were in the meeting(s) at the time the decision was made. 26. Extract from letter to Peter Kennard from Serpentine Gallery employee, personal communication. 27. Personal communication. 28. Ibid. 29. Andrea Fraser, ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique’, Art Forum XLIV/ 1 (September 2005), pp. 278 –83. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA, 2009). 30. Personal communication. 31. Extract from email to John Jordan from Tate Modern (5 February 2009), personal communication. 32. Available at http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-20-reader/to-bp-ornot-to-bp-art-activism-and-the-future-of-institutional-sponsorship.html. 33. Various articles stand as testament to the outrage caused by the attempt at corporate self-censorship beginning with John Jordan’s, ‘On Refusing to pretend to do politics in a museum’, Art Monthly 334 (March 2010). 34. Available at https://liberatetate.wordpress.com/. 35. Despite disavowing any connection between the actions of Liberate Tate and the withdrawal of sponsorship from Tate, citing instead ‘a challenging business environment’ (Independent, 11 March 2016), there is a broad acceptance of the direct causal relationship. This was openly discussed at the annual conference of the Museums Association 2015. 36. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/29/museumsethics-investigation-influence-sponsor-bp-british-museum. 37. Available at https://www.gov.uk/join-trade-union/trade-union-membershipyour-employment-rights. Available at https://www.harpermacleod.co.uk/hminsights/2014/january/political-beliefs-and-the-equality-act-2010/. 38. Wu, Privatising culture. 39. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/02/arts-corporatesponsorship-tate-british-museum. 40. Mark Brown, ‘Tate ordered to reveal BP sponsorship details in case by environment activists’, Guardian, 23 December 2014. 41. Mark Brown, ‘Tate paid “paltry” £350k a year in BP sponsorship, figures reveal’, Guardian, 31 August 2016. 42. Personal communication.

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Censoring Art 43. Even under the Nazi regime, there is dispute about the full extent of artistic capitulation and complicity; see Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Harvard, 1996). 44. One example is the doctoral research of Sophie Hope in Logbook 3 Performative Interviews (London, 2010). Mirza’s critique of the ill effects of measurement on the visual arts can be read as further evidence: Munira Mirz et al., Culture Vultures: Is UK Arts Policy Damaging the Arts? (London, 2006). 45. Bunzl, In Search of a Lost Avant-Garde, p. 7. 46. Sophie Hope, Logbook 3 Performative Interviews, available at http://sophi ehope.org.uk/research/. 47. Personal communication. 48. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2000). Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985). 49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1965 [1958]), p. 179. 50. The published contributions are available at http://www.artquest.org.uk/ project/pamphlets/. 51. Alana Jelinek, ‘Introduction and response’ to the guest edited edition of Journal of Visual Art Practice XIII/3 (November 2014). 52. Scientific controversy regulates science as a discipline. For example, the science community’s reaction to Andrew Wakefield’s findings about the MMR vaccine was both to expel him from the community (he was struck off from the UK Medical Register) and to denounce his method, stating that his sample was too small to prove anything conclusive, and also that there were flaws in how he collected his data. For non-scientists, Wakefield’s scientific conclusions were undermined by ‘conflict of interest’. This point is less salient when understanding the case through the lens of disciplinarity. Understood through discipline, what matters is both the conduct of the individual and the conduct of the community reacting to an individual when they act to undermine the integrity of the discipline. 53. Jacques Rancière (Steven Corcoran (trans. and ed.)), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London and New York, 2010); Jelinek, This is Not Art. 54. Arendt, The Human Condition. 55. Ibid., p. 7.

196

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Adams, Laura L., The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan (Durham, NC, 2010). Akhavan, Niki, Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Revolution (New Brunswick; London, 2013). Alberro, A. and B. Stimson (eds), Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge, MA, 2009). Anonymous, ‘Unveiled: Art and Censorship in Iran’, Article 19 (London, 2006). Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1965 [1958]). Artizov, Andrei and Oleg Naumov (eds), Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaya intelligentsiya. Dokumenty TsK RKP-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul’turnoi politike. 1917 – 1953gg (Moscow, 1999). Asano, Sh
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197

Censoring Art Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York; London, 1997). Callinicos, Alex, Against the Third Way: An Anti-Capitalist Critique (Cambridge, 2001). Carlson, Julia, Banned in Ireland (London, 1990). Catching, Rebecca, ‘The New Face of Censorship: State Control of the Visual Arts in Shanghai, 2008 – 2011’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 11/ 2þ3 (2012), pp. 231– 49. Choldin, Marianna Tax and Maurice Friedberg (eds), The Red Pencil: Artists, Scholars and Censors in the USSR (Boston, 1989). Clark, Katerina and Evgeny Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Power: a History in Documents 1917 – 1953 (New Haven and London, 2007). Clark, Timothy, ‘Sexhibition: reflections on shunga in London, looking forward to shunga in Tokyo’, 文化資源学 (Bunka Shigengaku) 13 (2015), pp. 127– 36. Clark, Timothy, Gerstle, C. Andrew, Ishigami, Aki and Yano, Akiko (eds), Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art (London, 2013). Cullerne Bown, M., Art under Stalin (Oxford, 1991). ———, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven and London, 1998). Cullerne Bown, M., and B. Taylor (eds), Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in a One-Party State 1917 – 1922 (Manchester, 1993). Davis, Julie Nelson, ‘The trouble with Hideyoshi: censoring ukiyo-e and the Ehon Taik
oki incident of 1804’, Japan Forum 19/3 (2007), pp. 281–315. Dawn, Leslie, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s (Vancouver, 2006). Dean, Joan Fitzpatrick, Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth Century Ireland (Wisconsin, 2004). Dennis, Kelly, Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (New York, 2009). Devlin, Judith, ‘The Iconography of Power: Stalin and his Images’ in A. McElligott, L. Chambers, C. Breathnach and C. Lawless (eds), Power in History (Dublin; Portland Oregon, 2011), pp. 236–43. Dickie, George, Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Chicago, 1997). Dorais, Lucie et al., Morrice and Lyman in the Company of Matisse (Buffalo, 2014). Duplaix, Sophie, ‘Interview of Socratis Socratous’, in Socratis Socratous: Rumours (Nicosia, 2009), pp. 12– 46. Eichman, Shawn and Stephen Salel, Shunga: Stages of Desire (New York, 2014). Elliott, David and Pier Luigi Tazzi, Happiness: a Survival Guide for Art þ Life ¼ Hapinesu: a
to ni miru k
ofuku e no kagi (Tokyo and Kyoto, 2003). Emmelhainz, Irmgard, ‘Art and the cultural turn: Farewell to committed, autonomous art’, e-flux journal 42 (February 2013). Entwistle, Joanne, and Elizabeth Wissinger (eds), Fashioning Models: Image, Text, and Industry (London; New York, 2012). Ferriter, Diarmaid, Occasions of Sin. Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London, 2009). Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (New York, 1990). ———, The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 – 1979, Michel Senellart (ed.) (Basingstoke, 2010).

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Censoring Art Huston, Lorne,‘The 1913 Spring Exhibition of the Art Association of Montreal: Anatomy of a Public Debate’, Journal of Canadian Art History 34 (2013), pp. 12– 55. Imber, Kirstie, ‘Unveiling the Voice: the politics and poetics of the voice in contemporary Iranian art’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London, 2016). Jansen, Sue Curry, Censorship. The Knot that Binds Power and Knowledge (Oxford, 1988; New York, Oxford, 1991). Jelinek, Alana, This is Not Art: Activism and Other Not Art (London, 2013). ———, ‘Introduction and response’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 13/3 (November 2014). Jessup, Lynda (ed.), Antimodernism and Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (Toronto, 2001). Jordan, John, ‘On Refusing to pretend to do politics in a museum’, Art Monthly 334 (March 2010). Available at http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/ on-refusing-to-pretend-to-do-politics-in-a-museum-by-john-jordan-2010. Karimi-Hakak, Mahmood, ‘Exiled to Freedom: A Memoir of Cultural Censorship in Iran’, TDR/The Drama Review, 47/4 (2003), pp. 17 –50. Kent, Brad, ‘Zealots, Censors and Perverts’, Irish Studies Review 14/3 (2006), pp. 343– 58. ———, ‘The Banning of George Bernard Shaw’s “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God” and the Decline of the Irish Academy of Letters’, Irish University Review 38/2 (Autumn –Winter 2008), pp. 274 –91. Khalaji, Mostafa, Bronwen Robertson and Maryam Aghdami, Cultural Censorship in Iran: Iranian Culture in a State of Emergency, Small Media Foundation (London, 2011). Kolozova, K., The Uses and Abuses of Neoliberalism and Technocracy in the PostTotalitarian Regimes in Eastern Europe: The Case of Macedonia (Skopje, 2015). Kooperacija, ‘Art and Politics? Kooperacija’, Reader: Balkans, Open Systems journal (2014). Available at http://www.openspace-zkp.org/2013/en/journal.php?j¼5& t¼32#bio. Kostin,V.V., ‘Kto shagaet pervoi? Vospominaniya, ch. 2’ Panorama iskusstv 9 (1986), pp. 133–6. Koteska, J., ‘Troubles with History: Skopje 2014’, Art Margins Online (2011). Available at http://artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/655-troubles-withhistory-skopje-2014. Kuhn, Annette, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909 – 25 (London; New York, 1988). Latour, Bruno and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (London, 1979). Lloyd, David, ‘Republics of Difference: Yeats, MacGreevy, Beckett’, Third Text 76/19 (September 2005), pp. 461– 74. Lloyd, G.E.R., Disciplines in the Making (Chicago, 1977). ———, Cognitive Variations: Reflections on the Unity and Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford, 2007). ———, Disciplines in the Making: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Elites, Learning and Innovation (Oxford, 2009).

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Index

Note: References to images are in bold. abortion, 109 Accept-LGBT Cyprus, 13 Adams, Laura L., 126 African Diaspora, Association for Dance of the, 180 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 37 Akhavan, Niki, 42 Akhemedova, Umida, 8 –9, 125, 129–31, 133 Women and Men from Sunrise to Sunset, 129–30, 130 AkhRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia), 49– 51, 53, 56 AKTO festival, Bitola, 143 All-Russian Art Cooperative see Vsekokhudozhnik All-Union Artists’ Union, 50 Almaty Centre for Contemporary Art, 127 Almaty State Museum of Art, 127 Alpine Club Gallery, 117 Amazon, 181 Andreev, A.A., 59 Andreev, Vladimir, 60 anonymity, 87, 98, 138, 190 –2 anti-abortion laws (Russia), 128 Arendt, Hannah, 191, 192 Armory Show, 90 Ars Akta, 149

A.R.T. I.N.S.T.I.T.U.T., 143 Art Not Oil, 178, 188 Article, 19 36– 7 art(s) definition: 192– 3 funding, 23, 142–3, 182 institutional, 179 institutional theory of, 82 sponsorship, 11, 178, 182 artists, prosecution of, 2, 9, 74, 76, 125, 129–30 Artquest, 191 Arts Council of Ireland, 10, 158 artworks, destruction of, 2, 147 –8, 151 Asia, 8 see also Central Asia Australian censorship legislation, 107 Aviva, 185 Azadikhah, Niyaz, 42 Bain-Burnett, Jeanette, 180 Balkan Insight, 141 Baron Cohen, Sacha, 127 Bataille, Georges, 185 Beckett, Samuel, 117 –18 Berne Convention (1886), 158 Beskin, Osip, 53 –4 bias, institutional, 180, 183 Bibliotèque national de France, 76 L’enfer, 76 birth control, 7, 109

205

Censoring Art Bishkek, School of Theory and Activism (STAB), 128, 133 Bishkek Theatre of Russian Drama, 128 Bogdanovski, Matej, 143– 4 Bogorodsky, Fedor, 54, 55, 57 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2 BP, 184, 188–9 British Museum, 77 Kelly bequest, 79 Secretum, 6, 78 and shunga, 77– 83 exhibitions, 80– 3 Brodskii, Isaak, 48– 9, 61– 2 Voroshilov on a Private Walk, 48 Brooker, Bertram, 88 Brown, Elspeth, 95 Bruni, Lev, 60 Buchanan, Donald, 96 Büchel, Christoph, 182 Simply Botiful, 182 Buckland, Rosina, 74 Buddhism, 73– 4 Bunn, Matthew, 1 Bunzl, Matti, 178, 184, 190 Butler, Judith, 2, 4, 14, 22, 25, 34 Café Prague, Tehran, 41–2 Calovski, Yane, 143 Canada, 7, 87 –99 New Woman, 88, 94, 99 Canadian Group of Painters, 88 Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) (1927), 92 –6 Cannes Film Festival, 41 capitalism, 181 Catholic Bulletin, 113 Celtic Revival, 112 censorship anonymous, 138 and class, 76– 7 corporate, 177–80, 183– 93 degrees of, 14 film, 109– 10 gendered, 77

government, 35 implicit, 48 institutional, 6, 71, 77 –83, 107 legislation, 107 mechanisms, 1 –2, 15 paradox, 34 political, 145– 8 provocation of, 4 reports on, 36 –8 social, 74, 82 –3 state, 6, 107 universality, 3 Censorship of Film Act (Ireland) (1923), 108 Censorship of Publications Act (Ireland) (1929), 7, 108– 9 Central Asia, 123–34 see also specific countries national identities in, 123–31 nationalism in, 124– 8 post-colonial, 125– 7, 129 post-Soviet, 124–5, 129 Russian views of, 126 Soviet, 123–5 orientalism, 126 Central St Martins, 184 Century City exhibition, 185 CGNU plc, 185 Chiba City Museum, 83 Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, 177, 184 Chukhovich, Boris, 132– 3 Ciborowski, Adolf, 140 Clark, Tim, 72, 80 Clarke, Harry, 7– 9, 111–14 Faust illustrations, 112 Geneva Window, 7, 111, 111–14 Clarke, Margaret, 113 class exclusion, 180 Clendinning, Anne, 89 Cockburn, Sir Alexander, 76 –7 Cold War, 47, 140 Cole, Ross D., 89 –90 Collins, Dermot, 158

206

Index Committee for Artistic Affairs (USSR) see KDI conflict resolution art projects, 23 conservatism, 5, 8, 15, 36, 55, 108, 115, 124–5, 128, 131, 134, 138–9, 150, 158 consumerism, 93, 108 copyright, 158 Coroners and Justice Act (2009), 81 Cosgrave, William, 112 –13 Courbet, Gustave, 96 Crawford Art Gallery, 158 Cullerne Bown, Matthew, 48 Cyprus, 3 –4, 13 –26 buffer zone, 20 conflict, 15– 22 place names, 21 Republic of, 16 Press and Information Office (PIO), 18 Cyprus Pavilion, 16 Dance Hall Act (Ireland) (1935), 115 Darafsheh, Amir, 42 DeBano, Wendy, 35– 6 Deineka, Alexander, 54 democracy, 36, 138, 177, 180, 190 –3 Denissovsky, 51 Dickie, George, 179 diversity, 181, 183, 192 Drinkwater, George, 92 Dublin Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 113 Dublin Opinion, 116 Duchamp, Marcel, 90 DUI (Macedonia), 139 Duplaix, Sophie, 17 Eastern Europe, 8, 138 Edo period (Japan), 71– 4, 80, 82 e-flux, 23 Eisei Bunko Museum, 84 Eisenstein, Sergei, 63 Emslie, Rosalie, 92

ethnic identities, 8– 9, 16, 124, 127–8, 138– 40, 148 minorities, 9, 139, 180 European Commission, 158–9 European Court of Justice, 159 exhibitions, generally, 22– 3 protocols, 23 –4 Facebook, 149 Fairley, Barley, 99 fascism, 53, 133–4 Fergana.ru, 132 Filonov, Pavel, 47, 60 foreclosure, 2, 11, 114 Foucault, Michel, 34, 99 Fraser, Andrea, 187 French, Phillip, 158 Frieze Art Fair (London), 42 Frost, Stuart, 76 Gadrey, Jean, 181 Gaimster, David, 78 Gaponenko, Taras, 51 Gellately, Robert, 50 Gerasimov, Alexander, 49, 54, 58– 9, 61–2 Gerasimov, Sergei, 58 Gerstle, Andrew, 74 Glavlit, 50 globalisation, 11, 38, 185 Gozaar, 39 Graan, Andrew, 140– 1 Grabar, Igor, 51 Grafton Galleries, 90 Grandbois, Michèle, 89 Grigor, Talinn, 36, 44 Grigoriev, Alexander, 53–4, 58 Group of Seven, 7, 89, 96, 99 Gruevski, Nikola, 9, 138–9, 149 Guardian, 188 –9 Haacke, Hans, 187 Harunobu, Suzuki, 72

207

Censoring Art Hauser and Wirth, 182 Hayward Gallery, 185 hejab, 32 Heward, Prudence, 88 Hickey, Amber, 188 Hokusai, Katsushika, 72 Picture-book Models of Couples 79 Holgate, Edwin, 88 homosexuality see also LGBT community/content in art, 82 decriminalisation of, 78 Hope, Sophie, 11, 190–1 Performative Interviews 191 Hosomi Museum, 84 House of Artists, Tehran, 39 Hunt, Lynn, 76 Hunter, James Davison, 3 hybrid regimes, 139 Ibramigov, Kanat, 126–8 Ieyasu, Tokugawa, 73 Illyashenko, Andrey, 87 Imperial Academy (Russia), 50 Index on Censorship, 11, 177–8, 180 information and communication technologies, 4– 5 International Labour Organisation, 7, 111 International Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), 81 internet, 25, 37, 75, 132 art, 5, 42 Iran, 4 –5, 31– 44 Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, 35– 6 political system, 35 –6 Revolution, 35 Irish art, 114, 118– 19 landscape, 118 attitudes to sexuality, 118– 19 culture, 108

Irish Academy of Letters, 109 Irish Cultural Revival, 108 Irish Free State, 7, 107 –19 constitution (1937), 109 women in, 114–15, 117–18 Iskusstvo, 50, 56, 61 Islam, 5, 8 –9, 36, 39, 44, 133 Isogiz, 50 Ivanoska, Hristina, 143 Ivanov, Bojan, 144 Jannati, Ali, 35 Jansen, Sue Curry, 1– 2 Japan, 6, 71 –84 isolation, 73 obscenity laws, 83 Japanese Penal Code, 83 jazz, 115 Jessup, Lynda, 89– 90 Jordan, John, 188 Jovanovik, Gjorgje, 144 Jovanovski, Filip, 144 Joyce, James, 112, 117 Kamenev, Lev, 55, 58 Karakalpak Museum of Arts, 55 Karazin, Nikolay, 126 Karimi-Hakak, Mahmood, 36 Katsman, Yevgenii, 55, 57, 61– 2 Kazakhstan, 123– 4, 126–7 KDI (Committee for Artistic Affairs, USSR), 59, 62 –4 Kelvingrove Museum, 182 Kennard, Peter, 184– 5 Images Against War, 185 Peace on Earth, 185, 186 Khatami, Seyyed, 37 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 36 Killaloe, Bishop of, 113 Kinsale, Co. Cork, 157 Kirov, Sergei, 55, 58 Kolozova, Katerina, 139 Konnov, Fyodor, 58 kontraktatsiya, 49, 63

208

Index KOOPERACIJA, 9, 144– 5, 150–1 Kostin, V., 51– 2 Kuan Wood, Brian, 23– 4 Kuhn, Annette, 34 Kuniyoshi, Utagawa, 72 Ky
oh
o period (Japan), 74 Kyrgyzstan, 123–4, 129 nationalism, 128 Latour, Bruno, 179 Lazeski, Borko, 142 Lebedev, Vladimir, 59–60 Lecht, Fridrikh Karlovich, 53 Lenin, Vladimir, 60, 63 Lentulov, Aristarkh, 58 LGBT community/content, 13– 14, 82 see also homosexuality Liberate Tate, 188– 9 Birthmark, 189 Licence to Spill, 189 Time Piece, 189 liberalism, 5, 9 Lloyd, David, 117 Lloyd, G.E.R., 179 London, Kurt, 48, 51, 55 London art world, 10– 11, 177 –93 Louis Vuitton (LVMH), 184 Lukomskii, Georgii, 62 Lvov, Evegenii, 58 Lyman, John, 90– 2 Carmencita Maria Teresa, 91 Improvisation, 91 Macedonia(n), 9, 137–52 cultural institutions, 142–3 independence, 138 insurgency, 138 Museum of Contemporary Art, 143 National Gallery, 143 nationalism, 139–40 Malevich, Kazimir, 47 Malik, Kenan, 180 Mal’kov, Pavel, 62

Mamedov, Georgy, 133 Manet, Édouard, 90, 96 Olympia, 95 market system, 180–3 Marko Čepenkov Cultural Centre, Prilep, 143 Marxism, 129 Mashkov, Ilya, 51, 58, 61– 2 Mashkovtsev, Nikolai, 53 Maslov, Sergey, 127 –8 mass reproduction, 49 –50, 76 Matisse, Henri, 90 Mazev, Petar, 142 Meiji period (Japan), 74 Meshkov, V.N., 62 metonymy, 128, 131, 133 Mey, Kerstin, 6 Middle East, 8, 37 Mikhailov, Nikolai, 5– 7, 56–9 At Kirov’s Coffin, 6, 56– 7 minority groups, 23, 139, 180 Mirtahmasb, Mojtaba, 41 mixed economy, 182 modernism, 60, 90– 1, 145, 159 Moghaddam, Mandana, 38 –40, 41 The Well, 5, 38– 41, 39 Molotov –Ribbentrop Pact, 63 MOMI (Macedonia), 143 Montreal, Art Association of (AAM), 90–1 Montreal Daily Star, 91 Montreal Gazette, 91 Montreal Witness, 91 Moore, Nicole, 107 Morgan-Powell, Samuel, 91 Mori Art Musem, 84 Moronobu, Hishikawa, 72 Moshiri, Farhad, 42–3 MOSSKh, 50, 55 –9 Munn, Kathleen, 88 Muntadas, Antoni, 5 Museums Association Code of Ethics, 178

209

Censoring Art Museum Ethics, Institute of, 178 Museums Association, 188 music, popular, 115 Nash, Catherine, 114 national identity, 8 nationalism, 108 see also Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia Nazism, 1, 133– 4 Nead, Lynda, 98 neo-liberalism, 11, 144, 152, 177, 180–1, 189– 90, 192– 3 neo-traditionalism, 9, 126, 129 Nesovski, Martin, 147 New Labour (UK), 182 New York Times, 34 Newton, Lilias Torrance, 87 Nude in the Studio, 87, 96 –9, 97 NGO (Macedonia), 146 Nichibunken (International Research Centre for Japanese Studies), 81 Nicholas, Jane, 94 Nicol MacLeod, Pegi, 88 Nicosia International Airport, 20 Nikritin, Solomon, 52– 5 The Old and the New, 52 –4, 53 Niss-Goldman, Nina, 60– 1 Nooshin, Laudan, 43 Northern Cyprus, Turkish Republic of, 16 nudes, 7, 13, 87 –99, 114, 118 debates on, 91 modernist, 90– 1 Obscene Publications Acts (UK) (1857), 76– 8 (1959), 78 obscenity, 6, 75 –9, 83, 98 Obsessive Possessive Aggression (OPA), 144–5, 149– 51 Solution, 149 –50, 150 O’Casey, Sean, 112 O’Connell, Eilís, 10, 157–9

Great Wall of Kinsale, 157– 9 see also Rocky Road, A O’Doherty, Brian, 118–19 O’Flaherty, Liam, 112– 13 O’Malley, Ernie, 117–18 Orange, 185  Orban, Victor, 139 Orthodox Church, 9, 139, 146– 7, 149–51 see also Russian Orthodox Church O’Sullivan, Seumas, 113 € Oze, Erhan, 21, 23– 5 Extraterritorial Electromagnetic Interventions, 4, 15, 19 –22, 25 Panahi, Jafar, 40 –1 This Is Not a Film, 40– 1 Pankof Bank, 185 Another Waste of Space, 185, 187 Paraskevaidou, Pavlina, 20 Paris Act (1971), 158 parody, 150 partition of Ireland, 117 Paskali, Irena, 152 patriarchy, 128– 9, 139 Perelman, Viktor, 51, 58 perestroika, 126 Phileleftheros, 17 –18 photography, 8 – 10, 13, 17– 19, 31, 33, 56, 88, 98, 126, 129–31 Plastov, Arkady, 51 Platform, 188 Plostad Makenija, Skopje, 144 –8, 152 Plostsad Sloboda (Free Square), 146– 7 police, 147 raids, 13 –14 Politburo, 59 popular culture in Canada, 88, 94 –6 in Ireland, 108, 114–16 pornography, 75– 6, 82, 98 post-colonialism, 3, 11, 107, 124–9, 134 Post-Impressionism, 89– 92 Pravda, 53– 4, 59

210

Index Press to Exit, 143 propaganda, 16, 36, 40, 60, 126, 144 public – private partnerships, 182 Pussy Riot, 129 Putin, Vladimir, 129, 139 racism, 180, 183 institutional, 180 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 77 Raspeani Skopjani, 143 Regina v. Hicklin (1868), 76, 78 religious imagery, 151 Repin, Ilya, 49 Revenioti, Paola, 13 Ritsumeikan University, 81, 84 Rivers, Elizabeth, 119 Robinson, Lennox, 112 Rockett, Kevin, 109–10 Rocky Road, A (exhibition), 158, 159–76 Roman Catholic Church, 108 moral teachings, 109, 115 Roncière, Jacques, 192 Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 87 Royal Hibernian Academy, 114 Ross, Robert, 90 Russell, George, 116 Russell, John W., 88, 92 –6 A Modern Fantasy, 92 –6, 93, 99 Russia, 8, 47 –65, 123–9 see also Soviet Union Russian Orthodox Church, 128 –9 Ryazhskii, Georgii, 50, 55, 58 Saatchi, Charles, 182 St Demetrius Church, Skopje, 149 Saraginovski, Denis, 149 Savitsky, I.V., 55 Schenker, Harald, 147 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 81 Scott, Yvonne, 117 sculpture, public, 10, 157 –9 Secret Cabinet (Naples), 76

secret museums, 75– 6 Secretum see British Museum self-censorship, 2– 3, 14, 34, 37, 74, 92, 141, 178, 188, 189–93 institutional, 23, 75, 178 self-policing, 50–5, 61 Şenova, Başak, 20 Serpentine Gallery, 184 Serra, Richard, 10, 159 Tilted Arc, 159 sex art, 6, 72, 75 sexism, 180, 183 Sexual Offences Act (UK) (1967), 78 Shadr, Ivan, 61 Shannon hydro-electric scheme, 109 Shaw, George Bernard, 112 Shchekotov, Nikolai, 54 Shegal, Grigorii, 58 Shell Oil, 188 Shint
o 73 –4 Shostakovitch, Dmitri, 54 Shterenberg, David, 49 shunga, 6, 71–84 and the British Museum, 77– 83 collecting, 78– 9 description, 71– 3 exhibitions, 80– 4 in modern Japan, 83 –4 purposes, 73 suppression of, 74 tolerance of, 74 Simerini, 17– 18 Skopje 2014 building programme, 9, 139–43, 148 Skopje Creative Festival, 149 Small Media Foundation, 37 Smith, Lawrence, 78– 80 social media, 149, 151 –2 socialist realism, 48, 51, 60, 131 Socratous, Socratis, 24 Rumours, 4, 15– 19, 24 –5 Seascape 17 Sokolov-Skalya, Pavel, 53 Solidarnosc, 148

211

Censoring Art Southbank Centre (SB), 185, 188 Soviet bloc, former, 8 Soviet Union, 5, 47– 65 see also Russia Artistic Councils, 52, 63– 4 artists’ collectives, 49 Communist Party, 48– 50, 53, 56, 59, 64 Central Committee, 55 –6, 59 creative unions, 49– 50 mass culture, 49 Terror, 55 –60, 63, 64 Stalin, Josef, 6, 47, 59, 63, 124 portrait, 61– 2 sculpture, 60– 1 Stalin Prizes, 49 Stankoski, Aleksander, 141 Stanworth, Karen, 95 Starbucks, 185 Stefanovska, Valentina, 141 Warrior on Horseback, 141 Stevceska, Slobodanka, 149– 50 Sviracinje, 143 swastika, 9, 132– 4 Synge, John Millington, 112 Tajikistan, 123– 4 Tange, Kenzo, 140 Tashkent Biennale, 9, 132 Tate, 189 Tate Britain, 184 Tate Modern, 185, 188 Tel Aviv, 42 Thomson, Tom, 89– 90 Thubron, Colin, 123 Tidy Towns competition, 157 Toledano, Phillip, 31– 3, 38 The Absent Portrait, 31 –3, 32 Toronto, Art Gallery of (AGT), 88, 96 Toronto Star, 94 –5 Tosevski, Igor, 9, 144– 9, 151 Territories/Territory, 144– 9, 146 traditionalism, 3, 8– 9, 108, 124– 5, 129, 131, 133

Tretyakov Gallery, 62 Trump, Donald, 3 Turkey, role in Cyprus, 16– 18 Turkmenistan, 123– 4 Tyschler, Alexander, 51 ukiyo – e, 6, 72, 80 Uncovered project, 19 –20, 23 United Nations, 4, 20 Development Program – Action for Cooperation and Trust (UNDP-ACT), 19– 20, 23 Good Offices Mission, Cyprus, 19 Useinov, Vyacheslav, 9, 132–3 Abdication of Swastika 132, 132– 3 Utamaro, Kitigawa, 72, 74, 80 –1, 83 Utamakura 72, 80 Uzbekistan, 8 –9, 123– 6, 129 –31 Uzunovski, Nikola, 144 Vahabi, Kianoosh, 43 Valuev, [A.S.] 60 van Gogh, Vincent, 90 Varley, F.H., 90 Venice Biennale, 4, 15, 24– 5 Vereshchagin, Vassily, 126 Vettriano, Jack, 182 Vidokle, Antone, 23–4 Vilic, Nebojsa, 144 VMRO-DPMNE (Macedonia), 138–40, 145 Volter, A.A., 55 Voroshilov, Kliment, 55 Sculpture Council, 60 Vsekokhudozhnik (All-Russia Arts Cooperative), 49– 52 Warren Cup, 82, 84 Weiwei, Ai, 3, 34 –5, 178 Witt, George, 77– 8 Wolfsonian Museum, 113 Woolgar, Steve, 179 Wrong, Henry, 185

212

Index Wu, Chin-Tao, 189 Yanovskaya, Olga, 62 Yeats, Jack B., 7 –8, 114– 18 Crossing the Metal Bridge, 118 Jazz Babies, 8, 114– 18, 115 Lovers in a Cinema, 118 Yeats, W.B., 109, 112 Yerkovich, Sally, 178 YouTube, 21, 25

Yugoslavia, 138, 140 Yuon, Konstantin, 58 Zaev, Zoran, 141 Zernovski, Velimir, 152 All Beauty Must Die, 152 Zhitlina, Olga, 128 Zinoviev, Grigorii, 55 –6, 58 Zolghadr, Tirdad, 43– 4

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