Dirty Girl Things
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Number One-Hundred-Twenty
Seduced: is it art or is it porn?
The Barbican’s new exhibition which traces the history of sex in art raises difficult questions, says Frances Wilson, The London Telegraph
Challenging: The Beautiful Servant by Fragonard
When police seized a photograph from the Baltic art gallery in Gateshead recently, taken by the celebrated American photographer Nan Goldin and owned by Sir Elton John, the directors of the Barbican art gallery must have felt pretty nervous.
The Barbican’s new show, Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, deals with precisely the difference between art and pornography that the debate over Goldin’s image of two small girls has reignited.
Is Klare and Edda belly-dancing an example of child pornography, or does the fact of Goldin’s reputation as a serious documentary photographer, and the respectability of the Baltic as a museum, elevate the picture to the category of art?
What is sublime to one person can be smut to another, and Seduced does nothing if not tease out the difference between stimulating the mind and arousing the senses. Covering 2,000 years of representations of sex, Seduced sets out to seduce.
Chinese watercolours, Japanese prints, and Indian manuscripts rest alongside Fragonard’s playful but daring The Beautiful Servant.
Equally entertaining will be observing the viewers of the world’s most sensuous images, as they arrange their faces into expressions of scholarly interest. The relationship between viewer and image is part of the point, and the curators of Seduced try to tap the voyeur in us all.
The division of objects on moral, as opposed to scholarly, grounds can be traced to the late 18th century.
Archaeologists excavating the ruins of Pompeii, the vibrant Roman city destroyed in an afternoon by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, stumbled upon streets and houses in a state of perfect preservation, but they also found amulets, lamps, murals, statues, jugs, and reliefs, all depicting sex.
Their discovery changed forever our view of classical civilisation. It seems that the culture that provided our model of high thought and refined feeling had no problems either with lower thoughts and less refined feelings.
Daily life in the Roman Empire was not what the historians had had us believe, and – more’s the point – it was not like that of late-18th-century Europe. What were Pompeii’s excavators to do?
The problem was solved by suppression. In 1795, a “Gabinetto Segreto”, or secret cabinet, was constructed, in which the finds were displayed. They were categorised not as ancient talismans or fertility symbols but as “obscene objects” liable to pervert the morality of those who saw them.
Viewing – by permit only – was restricted to men of wealth and character who were thought unlikely to be depraved by what they saw. It was unthinkable that women and the poor would return from the visit unscathed.
Made secret in this way, removed from its social context, separated from the other exhibits, presented as serving one purpose alone, the material from Pompeii was further eroticised, and pornography as we know it was invented as a category.
By 1864, when “pornography” was first defined in a dictionary, it was as “licentious painting employed to decorate the walls of rooms sacred to Bacchanalian orgies, examples of which exist in Pompeii”.
Having been closed for a century, seven years ago the secret cabinet was unlocked. Today it stands behind imposing iron gates in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, and to gain entry you need to buy an extra ticket.
There is no clearer example of the way in which exhibitions reveal more of the present than they do of the past: the Secret Cabinet is as interesting for being a Victorian peep-show as it is for housing an unusual collection of Roman objects.
In 1861, the British were presented with their own challenge when the trustees of the British Museum were offered a collection of 434 “Symbols of Early Worship of Mankind”.
George Witt, the donor, was a doctor who wanted to ensure that his beloved Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Etruscan, Persian, Tibetan and Chinese phallic objects were left in safe hands. His gift put the museum’s trustees in a quandary.
There was no doubting their scholarly and historical merit, but there was the problem of what they said about the classical world. As the art historian John R Clarke put it, “here was a world before Christianity, before the Puritan ethic, before the association of shame and guilt with sexual acts”.
Pablo Picasso: Erotic Scene (known as La Douleur), 1900, Oil on canvas
Photograph: 1998 The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2007
In ancient Greece, very explicit images of heterosexual and homosexual sex were common, and yet they have been largely edited out of antiquarian museum collections.
The solution was for the museum to create a secret room of its own – the “Secretum”, founded in 1865.
It is now dispersed, but as late as 1948 a scholar who asked for a photocopy of the register of the collection was asked by the British Museum to state “the arrangements made for the disposal thereof at his death”.
Will the Barbican’s exhibition, open to women and the poor (but not to under-18s), be half as thrilling as those secret rooms must have been for 19th-century gentlemen? I wonder this as I sit in the British Library consulting books on erotic art in the Museum of Naples.
To look at these pictures, I have been placed apart from the other readers and under the strict gaze of a librarian. Will I emerge from the reading room morally intact? Will the fact that I am in a respectable location save me from being defiled? Whatever happens, I must keep that scholarly expression on my face.
-- Frances Wilson’s biography of Harriette Wilson, ‘The Courtesan’s Revenge: the Woman who Blackmailed the King’, is published by Faber. ‘Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now’ opens at the Barbican on Fri. Tickets: 020 7638 8891
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The art of seduction: sex through the ages, from every possible angle
by Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent for The Guardian
From ancient miniatures to modern film, 2,000 years of civilisation’s frankest moments go on show
Thomas Ruff’s nudes ama14 which is featured in the exhibition
The City of London police have been in, and, says Graham Sheffield, artistic director of the Barbican, “they are completely cool. We’re kosher.” That means, come Friday, the first ever mainstream exhibition devoted to sex will be unleashed upon an unsuspecting British public.
According to co-curator Martin Kemp: “We are not setting out to shock, but it is certainly provoking.” Marina Wallace, another of the curators, added: “We want London to be thinking about nothing but sex for three months.”
Graphic hardly does justice to the romp through 2,000 years of art history’s frankest moments. But the organisers argue that context is all: which is why Robert Mapplethorpe’s fetish photographs; Nan Goldin’s slide of a man ejaculating while having sex with his male partner; even an eye-opening 18th century Arabic manuscript illustrating 10 men having group sex, are all absolutely fine by the police.
This is a serious, art-historical exhibition, which is why even potentially controversial material - such as certain photographs by Goldin showing nude children as part of her sometimes explicit work Heartbeat - is, according to the curators, acceptable.
Nobuyoshi Araki: From Erotos, 1993, Gelatin silver print
Photograph: Nobuyoshi Arak
It includes around 250 works, spanning over 2000 years, including Roman marbles, Indian manuscripts, Renaissance and Baroque paintings and sculptures, Chinese paintings and prints, Japanese woodcuts, 19th century photographs and contemporary video.
“It’s partly about intention,” said Prof Kemp. “The job of pornography is to do just one thing; and if it’s doing anything else, it’s not doing its job properly.” By implication, then, the exhibition is not pornographic.
The curators - Prof Kemp, Prof Wallace and Joanne Bernstein - have been researching the exhibition for five years. Its scope is vast, covering everything from ancient Greek and Roman vases and sculpture - including the stunning life-size marble Sleeping Hermaphrodite from the Galleria Borghese in Rome - to Old Masters, drawings by Turner and Rodin, and photographs of Jean-Jacques Level’s 1966 happening, 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis, in which the artist used obscenity to expose the political obscenity he observed in the French regime at the time at war in Algeria. Memorably, this features a girl with a leek. Except that “she” turns out to be a transsexual.
Good luck charms
The exhibition begins with the “secret cabinets” of the British Museum and the Naples Museum - reserved areas where material deemed too saucy for general consumption was placed to protect delicate nerves and impressionable minds from the late 18th century. Here is an amber, life-size carving of male genitalia, and a tintinnabulum, a Roman bronze windchime featuring a winged phallus. “These are absolutely wonderful objects,” said Prof Wallace. “They are good luck charms: the idea is that the penis is the only part of the body that moves up and down without control. That links it to fate or fortune, which also moves up and down of its own volition.”
The inclusion of partial re-creations of these reserved areas in museums relates to the programme of the exhibition, which is not to tell us how people had sex, but the way people have represented sex, and, often, attempted to control those representations. If there is a message, said Ms Bernstein, it is that “sex is a universal part of our being. It doesn’t matter when or where or with whom sex is had: sex is sex is sex.” The Queen, it turns out, is the unlikely keeper of some of the more explicit material - including Annibale Carracci’s 16th-century pen and ink drawing of Leda, from classical myth, making out particularly enthusiastically with a swan, the god Jupiter in disguise.
Nearby hangs one of the few works in the exhibition by a woman: the erotically charged Minerva in the Act of Dressing by Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614). Serious academic museums such as the Fitzwilliam, the Wellcome Foundation, and the Victoria and Albert Museum have loaned rarely seen Indian erotic miniatures, 19th-century Iranian manuscripts illustrating various sexual positions, and Japanese prints.
Japanese contortionists
“The Japanese get into positions contortionists would be pressed to achieve. As do the Indian women, though not the men; the expectation on Indian men seems rather less, I am encouraged to see,” said Prof Kemp. Back to Europe, and there are tiny, illustrated pornographic books - “small enough to fit into one hand, leaving one hand free”, pointed out Ms Bernstein.
The final stages of the exhibition take the viewer through a tiny portion of Rodin’s 7,000 drawings of nudes to k r buxey’s 2002 video of her face as she is given oral sex, to the background music of Fauré’s Requiem.
“We do talk about arousal,” said Prof Wallace. “We do want the show to be arousing for all the senses. This is what we want it to be about, rather than nudge-nudge, wink-wink.”
· Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now is open to over-18s from Friday.
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