It was very challenging to watch, last night, Mary Beard’s film about the possible limits to what might be permissible for artists to depict in their work. On the whole I tend to be pretty permissive about these things, and my principle criterion of acceptability would probably boil down to the serious intentions of there artist. For that reason I would find it more readily acceptable to ban the self-regarding exhibitionism of Gilbert and George than I would limit our exposure to Tracey Emin’s engagement with menstruation. Beard’s presentation gave me plenty to think about.
I realised that there have been two occasions in my own experience when I have been totally revolted by artistic productions, but on each occasion I might want to defend the legitimacy of the artist’s depiction of events, although in one case my acceptance might be qualified heavily.
There was an occasion many years ago when I viewed an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, by a Peruvian artist (a photographer) whose name I forget. This included material devoted to the exposure of torture by the regime in her home country. I have to admit that I left the exhibition before I had completed the tour. My reasons for doing so were mixed, if I remember rightly, and had a great deal to do with the feeling that I had no right to be an observer of women being humiliated in that way. (These were photographs, and consequently staged willingly by their subjects, but even so I was shocked by the sense that I was volunteering to view the unviewable.) Nevertheless, I recognise that the artist was making a very important political point, not only at the level of a critique of the state in which she lived, but also about the “male gaze”, to use John Berger’s celebrated phrase.
The other illustration is the first chapter of Ivo Andric’s novel The Bridge on the Drina. This provides a lengthy and detailed account of the execution by impaling of a criminal by officials of the Ottoman Empire. I recognise that this account, in all its protracted horror, contributed too the author’s project of showing that the bridge in question had “seen it all” during its history. Nevertheless, I could not help but see another reading in it, namely the virulent and uncritical dismissal of everything Turkish that I encountered too often during my work in the Balkans. I’m afraid that I read it as sheer racism disguised as literature. It has not been possible to persuade myself to read it again in order to see if this spontaneous judgement is wrong. I would so as far as to say that I regret having read it, whereas I do not regret having seen the exhibition of Peruvian photography.
I am coming round to the view that in art, as in comedy, it is not enough simply to set out to “push the envelope”