The mother of all controversies
Sophia
> But in Anglo-American culture, she argues, we tend to sexualize our
> general anxieties about social change. These days, she says, "much of
> our anxiety is centred around the impact of the media, the Internet
To opoio sumfwvei me ta faivomeva usterias pou eidame oi ev Agglia persi
to kalokairi otav e3afavistnke mia avnlikn kai oloi epemevav oti:
a. ntav se3oualiko egklnma
b. tnv paresure kapoios agvwstos apo to kako ivtervet
(gia to deutero tolmnsa va pw se mia parea oti mou akougovtav sav
usteria twv MME kai pngav va me skotwsouv)
Telika o dolofovos ntav gvwstos tns mikrns, yuxas0evns kai dev upnrxe
se3 stnv oln upo0esn, mallov atuxnma ntav pou meta prospa0nse va
koukoulwsei 0abovtas to ptwma.
>
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030225/RVBABY
>
> The mother of all controversies
> We are a long way from the days when naked children were considered
> the safe stuff in art, writes SARAH MILROY, judging by the troubling
> questions raised by the work of artists such as Lyla Rye and Sally
> Mann
>
> By SARAH MILROY
> Tuesday, February 25, 2003 - Page R1
> CAMBRIDGE, ONT. -- When one raises the subject of children in art,
> many Canadian art-history buffs will think first of Paul Peel's
> Venetian Bather of 1889, a painting now in the collection of the
> National Gallery of Canada. A sinuous and silky rear view of a naked
> boy, it was the first nude to be exhibited publicly in Canada. While
> portraits of women (or men) in the buff were still considered too
> outré, naked children were considered safe stuff.
> Today, however, the painting provokes giggles, perhaps even
> denigration from gallery viewers. Kiddie porn! And that's nothing
> compared to Peel's works in the Art Gallery of Ontario, like his 1890
> painting After the Bath, depicting two chubby cherubs warming
> themselves in front of the fire. Or The Tired Model, a studio scene in
> which a naked tot hides weeping behind the easel, his Cupid's quiver
> fallen to the floor. The artist, a kindly looking figure with a long
> white beard, peers around the canvas edge, cajoling the boy to resume
> his model's duties. "That's the picture that draws the most comment,"
> says Toronto artist and AGO docent Lyla Rye. "All the teenagers see it
> as sexual abuse."
> Rye is watching their reactions with special attentiveness these days,
> given her own wrangles with censorship. Last July, Rye found herself
> in the centre of controversy in Halifax for her video-loop
> installation titled Byte, which presented her and her baby daughter
> engaged in a sensual mother/child game -- singing into each other's
> open mouths -- a game abruptly terminated when her daughter bit her
> mother's lower lip.
> On the screen, however, their actions are ambiguous. Are they kissing?
> Fighting? "I wanted to maintain that moment of uncertainty as long as
> possible," says Rye, who deliberately escalated the viewer's anxiety
> by pixilating and blurring the image. Just what is going on here?
> It was this uncertainty, and the unease it engenders, that no doubt
> led to the confiscation of the tape by the Halifax authorities,
> prompted by the alarmed response of two teenaged girls. The police
> retained the video until after the end of the exhibition's run,
> returning it with a warning: "We won't be pressing charges, but we may
> press charges if she persists in showing it."
> A number of viewers apparently share their concerns. The comment book
> at the Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ont., where a small selection
> of Rye's recent work is being shown, speaks volumes about the
> generational shift that has occurred in the perception of appropriate
> adult/child interaction. If one can judge the age of the writer by
> their handwriting, a pattern seems to present itself -- teens
> responding with comments like "gross" and "sick," while older gallery
> visitors seem cautiously supportive. "I am impressed and intrigued
> with the levels of intimacy into which you are plunging," writes one
> woman; another writes, "Mothers and babies have always interacted in
> this physical way. The sense of touch is integral to emotional
> growth."
> Perversion, it seems, is in the eye of the beholder. While the law is
> quite specific on what constitutes child pornography -- the depiction
> of under-18-year-old children's genital or anal regions, and the
> explicit sexual activity of minors (not including hugging, kissing and
> touching) -- widespread public opinion is considerably more
> conservative. It's the rare artist, these days, who will even stick a
> toe in these troubled waters, for fear of either being accused of
> predatory inclinations toward children, or of fostering such
> inclinations in others.
> But how justified is the big chill? Judith Levine, the Brooklyn,
> N.Y.-based author of Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting
> Children from Sex (published last year), maps out the wide discrepancy
> between perceived and actual instances of pedophilia in North American
> society and argues that, from a purely statistical standpoint, "our
> fear of sexual assault far exceeds the actual need to feel fearful."
> But in Anglo-American culture, she argues, we tend to sexualize our
> general anxieties about social change. These days, she says, "much of
> our anxiety is centred around the impact of the media, the Internet
> and the commercial marketplace in general, which uses kids as both its
> target and as its sales force. These vehicles," she adds, "engage kids
> in previously adult activities and give kids access to images and
> ideas that we were previously able to barricade from them. It
> represents a perceived loss of control over children's lives -- which
> was a little illusory to begin with."
> Whatever the roots of the unease, there is no doubt that our culture
> is riven by a deep contradiction: aggressively asserting the
> precocious sexuality of children in mainstream culture on the one
> hand, while reflecting terror about its implications on the other. As
> AGO contemporary art curator Jessica Bradley puts it, "What interests
> me here is what kind of visual imagery we will accept in any other
> domains -- like music videos, advertising, cinema, magazines -- that
> we will not accept in art. I think this reveals some of our notions
> about what art must be. It's a very conservative clinging, perhaps, to
> a notion of art's social duties."
> Can art help us to unravel these contradictions? There have been a few
> pioneers -- most of them women -- who have ventured into this
> dangerous territory. In the United States, photographer Sally Mann is
> the most striking exemplar, defiantly continuing to photograph her
> children -- often nude -- as they go about their lives in rural
> Virginia. No adult can look at these pictures and not feel the
> rapturous lens through which Mann sees her children, or not envy the
> lazy, sensual lifestyle of children who can run around naked, swim in
> the river and play in the mud all day. "Many of these pictures are
> intimate," Mann wrote in the preface to her 1992 book, Immediate
> Family. "Some are fictions and some are fantastic but most are of
> ordinary things every mother has seen -- a wet bed, a bloody nose,
> candy cigarettes. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint
> their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river."
> But my children, confronted with these images (including one called
> Popsicle Drips, which shows her son's nude torso spattered with dark
> Popsicle juice stains), reacted with an appeal for the privacy of the
> child. How will they feel about these pictures when they grow up, they
> asked? Why couldn't the mother just keep the picture for herself,
> instead of putting it in a book where strangers could see it? To what
> extent, I wondered as I listened to them, can Mann's children truly be
> considered partners in the art-making process, as she asserts then to
> be, when they cannot possibly understand the adult context in which
> the work is to be received?
> I found myself weighing the same questions looking at Rye's most
> recent work in the Cambridge show. Provocatively titled Carnal, the
> video projection starts small on the wall -- we see her daughter, now
> four years old, licking the melted ice cream off a spoon -- but the
> image grows and grows until it envelops us, bringing us closer to her
> tangled thatch of blond hair, her pearly, luminous skin and downturned
> lashes, and her glistening lips and delicate, slithery pink tongue,
> which works its way methodically around the spoon. Rye has slowed the
> image down, heightening the sensuality of the moment.
> The work, she says, records her daughter's total absorption in her
> innocent pleasure and her mother's pleasure in watching. "I wanted a
> deeply saturated, luscious colour," says Rye, and she got it. But how
> will this imagery be received by others who visit the gallery? Is she
> not leaving her child open to danger by placing her loveliness on
> public view?
> When it comes to liberalism, this is where the rubber meets the road.
> Does our fear of how such an image might be interpreted entitle us to
> remove it from public view? The answer must be no; all images of
> innocence could then be censored as enticements to depravity.
> That's not to say that the choices for the artist are made without
> trepidation and human cost. Lyla Rye recalls the aftermath of the
> Halifax episode: "We decided to hire a social worker to come and do an
> assessment of our home, and of my relationship with my daughter, just
> to be prepared, in case of the worst. I wanted to know: If they come
> for her, I know they will come unannounced. But will they come at
> night? How many will there be?" So far, thank God, there has been no
> knock at the door.
> In the end, works like this may help us to sort through our own
> feelings about the parent/child bond, about sensuality, innocence,
> trust and maybe even the betrayal of those things. One note inscribed
> in ladylike cursive in the exhibition's comment book spoke volumes
> about the complexity of audience response. "I need time to process the
> pieces here . . . " wrote this visitor. "As a past survivor of sexual
> abuse at the hands of my own parents, I can say that watching the
> images surfaced in me anger and hostility similar to others who have
> commented here. Perhaps if I had had a more 'pure' childhood I would
> be less disturbed?"
> But, she adds, "I'll probably be back again."
> Lyla Rye continues at Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ont., until
> Sunday (519-621-0460).
>
--
###### ### ### # ### # ___
# # # # # # # # # # <*,->
# # # # # # # # # # [`-'] H ev tn pura elaiov riptousa
### ### ### ## ### # -"-"-
#
#