CENSORSHIP: For Shame

Speech by Bailey Doogan at the College Art Association Conference, Toronto, 1998

 

I want to speak to you today about censorship in a very specific and fundamental way. I know the range of human material that censorship feeds on is considerable, but what I am considering here is the form I know best: censorship of images of the body in art, which I can’t separate from art censorship that is the product of racism, sexism, homophobia, jingoism, and all forms of egregious classism. Why did I take this on? Beyond a concern for both federal and corporate support of the arts in the United States dwindling to a trickle, the number of exhibition venues greatly reduced, and worst of all, “the chilling effect” on art production, my reasons were personal. My own art has been censored more times than I would have ever imagined—both in my state of Arizona (not surprising you could say), and in other supposedly more enlightened arenas—New York, for instance.

 

I remember every one of those censorship experiences vividly. Each time I found out that work had not been shown (or if shown, hidden in the back room behind a pylon with a warning label on it), removed during the exhibit (I actually had one piece ripped off the wall), or not purchased—because it was obscene; grotesque; too angry; too tough; insulting to women; insulting to men; harmful to children—my first feeling was shame. I had done something wrong. Artist friends would congratulate me. I had graduated to that higher circle of “tough art,” “difficult art”—this was good. In fact, I was advised to publicize my censorship, of course to keep the perniciousness of censorship in the public eye, but also to further my career. I assumed that mantle of pride in my “difficult,” “tough” work, but the shame remained a potent memory and reasserted itself each time one of these incidents happened. I began to think a great deal about shame. Without explaining why, I asked my friend, Lillian, how she defined shame. She immediately said, “Guilt is what you yourself feel when you have done something wrong. Shame is what others make you feel.” Good answer. I looked up shame in my Random House College Dictionary. I was particularly interested in the word’s etymology and synonyms—they’re often more telling than the definitions. Usually, the majority of words I look up have a Latin-derived Romance language source, so I was surprised to find the origins of the word shame were Middle English, Old English, German and Icelandic—cold northern European countries. The synonyms for shame were listed by degree of intensity: embarrassment, chagrin, humiliation, and mortification. Mortification, which literally means “to make dead,” as in gangrene, necrosis.

 

I’ve always experienced shame very physically. There is a blush, a flush, and a fluster. The definition of blush is “to redden, especially in the face,” and “to make red; to flush.” Flush is defined as “a blush or rosy glow; a sudden rise of excitement or emotion; the hot stage of a fever; to animate or excite; inflame; full of vigor; lusty . . .” And fluster’s definition: “to put into a state of nervous agitation.”

 

“Yeah,” I thought, “that’s what it feels like.”

 

There’s a palpable feeling of heat rising from my groin up through my stomach and chest, to my face, which becomes engorged with blood. My heart beats faster, my hands tremble and sweat. Sometimes my ears ring.

 

Sound familiar?

 

I paint the human body. I’m what is classified as a figurative painter. In the vernacular of art, there’s a paucity of language that identifies the body.

 

What follows are the words that are de rigueur in the modern through contemporary art canons: The Body (a recent acquisition), The Figure, The Human Form, The Draped Form, The Nude, The Torso, The Subject, The Subject Matter—words that you can really warm up to.

 

Of course, I’m talking art talk; there is another school of body-description language that’s less formal. While art language poses the whole body as an objectified form, this second group objectifies the body parts so we can section off our insults: Lardass, Asshole, Cocksucker, Dickhead, Douchebag, Pussy, Weenie—to name a few.

 

Since I need to talk about my work, I’m always on the lookout for a few new good words. Language tells us volumes.

 

There are three synonyms for body in my dictionary: carcass, corpse, and cadaver. Those are the synonyms—not the antonyms. There is no synonym for the live body except figure, which is an art and fashion term.

 

Figure’s definition: “the form or shape of something; outline; the bodily form or frame,” as in (this was actually my dictionary’s example), “She has a graceful figure.”

 

So, in trying to talk about the body, we’re left with an identifying language that intellectualizes or abstracts it, degrades it, or associates it with death. If we can’t even deal with the words that define the body, how the hell can we deal with the pictures?

 

So, here is the human body—it is ours. In fact, it is us, and we have all these problems talking about it and picturing it, and yet, for many of us, there is a great need to do that very thing.

 

The late artist David Wojnarowicz said, “Sexuality defined in images gives me comfort in a hostile world . . . To make the private into something public is an action that has great repercussions in the preinvented world.”

 

What is that preinvented world?

 

Images of the body in art, down through the march of history, have stylistically been tied to their culture. Because we did our best to squash Indigenous peoples, like it or not, America remains the stepchild of the western world; that is, European and European-derived cultures that have historically been white, Christian, patriarchal and ethnocentric.

 

Despite the occasional hedonistic hiatus, western Christian culture has mistrusted the erotic. We have inherited a deeply imprinted fear and loathing of the functions and very presence of our own bodies.

 

This fear was used early on by princes of church and state alike as a form of shame-based control of the general public (especially the lower classes), and as an effective diversion from real issues of social and economic inequity.

 

It’s still being used that way today. It still works.

 

This bodily shame and mistrust of the erotic was ennobled in hagiography and fairy tales alike and raised to a level of great literature and intellectual rigor by the usual early Christian suspects: Aquinas, Paul, Augustine, etc. They were joined by some strange bedfellows along the way, particularly certain twentieth century French writers and philosophers. Although this second wave’s style was more transgressive than repressive, they shared much of the same thinking. Compare Aquinas’s “There is no virtue in the body, but only in the soul” with Bataille’s “The body is a thing. It is vile.” It was these French writers—Apollinaire, Paulhan, Bataille, Foucault and Barthes, the fathers of post-modernism—who elevated the Marquis de Sade to the level of a god. Paulhan said of him, “His books remind one of the sacred books of the great religions.”

 

Obviously, Sade is a mixed erotic bag, but you would think that the legacy of all that brilliant analytical writing referencing the Marquis would amount to more than elaborate theories of transgression. In his book, Forbidden Knowledge, from Prometheus to Pornography, Roger Shattuck describes Bataille’s theory of transgression as “a refurbished secular form of sin to keep life interesting for select intellectuals with kinky taste.” Post-modernism’s bequest to the body: the more it is “represented,” coded and decoded, constructed and deconstructed, and explained by linguistic structures that we call “text,” the more we like it. Nobody wants to touch the body with a ten-foot pole.

 

We have made those body parts, better known as “the private parts,” the locus of attention and shame. They are too obviously functional, too out of control, too florid, too loaded. In April of 1990, the photographer Jock Sturges was investigated by the Feds for child pornography. The federal agents claimed that they seized “hundreds of photos of prepubescent girls with their genitals vividly displayed.” That is, they were standing frontal shots, and because they were young girls, they hadn’t developed pubic hair—hence, the “vivid display.” It’s often photographers and realist painters of the physical body that incur the wrath of the religious right censors and may cause a dis-ease in the ideologically determined art world. For both, there’s not enough layering (of clothing or theory).

 

Let me tell two stories—both are incidents that happened recently, one to me and one to a good friend. A major museum said they wanted to purchase a large painting of mine. They had the painting shipped to the museum where it sat undisplayed for six months, during which time there were three meetings of their board of directors trying to decide whether to buy it. During a conversation with the director, I asked him what the problem was. His reply consisted mostly of er, ah, hmm, hmmp. Finally, I said, “So, is it the penis?” He couldn’t quite get that word out. He did say that the docents were afraid of “exposing” schoolchildren to the painting. I could have taken the high ground of “It’s an illusion, it’s a representation, it’s a painting, for chrissake!” Instead, I said “Don’t those schoolboys have penises, and don’t you think the schoolgirls have seen at least a few of them?” That seemed to seal my fate. The painting was shipped back in a week.

 

My other story is about my friend John, an artist who supplements his income by painting murals for people who live in the wealthy foothills area of Tucson. Because John is a middle-aged gay man who’s experienced his share of homophobia, he is always very private and guarded when working these jobs. About three months ago, he was painting a large mural of (you guessed it) Batman [and] Robin, the parents’ request for their son’s room. While he was painting, the little boy came in and asked John, “What color are you painting his penis?” John immediately said, “Well I don’t have to worry about that because he'll be wearing tights and they’re blue.” He found the little boy’s innocent curiosity so charming, that he repeated the story to one of the other workers there. The next morning when John arrived at the job, he was greeted at the door by the boy’s mother looking very solemn, her arms folded across her chest. The little boy was standing by her red faced, eyes cast down. She said to him “Don’t you have something to say to John?” The boy spoke in a barely audible whisper, “I’m sorry I said the word penis to you.”

 

This is the real shame in this censorship debate: the children.

 

If we can’t deal with our own bodies, what do we teach them? In most cases, nothing, or that sex, [meaning] their genitals, are dirty and shameful. And as these children grow into adults, they learn to fetishize, hate, hurt, destroy or just plain ignore those nasty body parts. The more this poisonous pedagogy persists, the more pornography will be necessary to reproduce the body of shame. That’s at one end. Paradoxically, pornography’s range also includes the unashamed body of pleasure.

 

I have been talking about shame and its effects on art theory, practice and the market. How the ideologically correct art world and the censoring, self-righteous religious right both use shame as an effective form of control and exclusion or taboo. Taboo is a Tongan word that means, “separated or set apart as sacred or profane.” Sir James George Frazer said of taboo that it was “holiness and pollution not yet differentiated.”

 

I feel an increasing urgency to make images of my own body, of other people’s bodies—to make them as specific as I can, marked with their own experiences, both hallowed and polluted.