Eadweard Muybridge Photos Censored at American Art Museum 1991

IN 1964 I WAS 13, and spent a lot of classroom time sneaking conversations with similarly disengaged students well-nigh sex. In Algebra, the most boring of all classes, the new girl from Amarillo tried to explain to those of us girls in earshot what an orgasm was. Afterward several days of unsuccessful explanations, I changed the discipline: what was homosexuality? The boy in forepart of me, whose closely buzzed hair had both fascinated and repelled me for months, piped up with a partially right and disappointingly minimal answer: information technology ways when boys exercise it. For me, this was a revelation. Merely how did he come by his information? He met my stare and informed me that he himself was not a homosexual. But this I had already figured—information technology had something to do with the haircut.

In that same year of 1964 I too finally felt freed, courtesy of the British Invasion, from the fashion fascism of the '50s. I bought tight corduroy pants and the sexy pride I took in my torso was distortedly reflected dorsum in my favorite uncle's angry comments to my mother that you could run into the outline of my crotch. It was the commencement year I remember significant girls having to leave school in shame and the outset fourth dimension I remember being terrified and sickened by stories virtually botched abortions. It was the year I forbade my parents from speaking anything but English to me in public because being Greek embarrassed me. It was the year I decided to become an artist, afterwards i of many summer trips to a large-metropolis museum, because I wanted to be different.

Also in 1964, Sol LeWitt made Muybridge I, the piece that Elizabeth Broun, manager of the Smithsonian'south National Museum of American Art, in Washington, D.C., removed this past summer from a traveling exhibition on the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge and on gimmicky fine art related to him. In the catalogue for the exhibition—"Motion and Document—Sequence and Fourth dimension," curated past Jock Reynolds and James Sheldon of the Addison Gallery of American Art, in Andover, Mass.—Reynolds describes LeWitt's slice every bit ten identical boxes lit from inside, each with its own aperture. Inside each box is an image that the viewer sees past peering "voyeur-like" through the "peep holes"—a photograph of a young nude white woman advancing from box to box toward the viewer then that "only her omphalus is visible at the center of the [last] photograph."^ane When Broun saw the work during installation, she experienced information technology as "degrading and offensive to women" and ordered it removed. In a letter to Reynolds she explained, "For me peering through successive peepholes and focusing increasingly on the pubic region invokes unequivocal references to a degrading pornographic feel."^two The organizers responded that unless LeWitt's work was reinstated they would close the bear witness entirely. A few days later on, afterward discussions with friends and colleagues, Broun had the piece reinstalled, but with the provisions that information technology be framed by warning signs and that a blank book be placed nearby for viewer comments—terms to which the curators eventually agreed.³

Interestingly, at no indicate did Broun allow that her removal of Muybridge I was censorship.⁴ Rather, given that 51 other works originally in the exhibition had been excluded because of space limitations, she described the removal every bit part of an editing process in which the criterion was whether the piece enhanced or detracted from the focus of the show.^v

But Broun's decision was an human action of censorship, and it was ideologically rooted in the decade-sometime rhetoric of antipornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. MacKinnon, a legal scholar who was one of the early architects of sexual-harassment law, and Dworkin, author of several books on pornography and feminism, accept built on Robin Morgan'southward exclamation that "pornography is the theory, and rape the practise." Positing an essentialist dichotomy betwixt male sexuality (characterized as fierce and genitally oriented) and female sexuality (supposedly nurturant and nongenitally centered), they fence that a solution to the ubiquitous threat of violence in women's lives would exist to limit pornography by law. In 1983, legislation proposed past MacKinnon and Dworkin, the Civil Rights Anti-Pornography Ordinance, was passed twice by the Minneapolis City Quango and was vetoed twice past the city'due south mayor. In an attempt to deflect civil-libertarian arguments against obscenity laws, the MacKinnon/Dworkin ordinance recasts the issue every bit one of sex discrimination rather than censorship: if pornographic images, like those that depict the "sexual subordination of women," crusade harm to women, they constitute a violation of women's civil rights.⁶

It seems to be this kind of thinking that immune Broun to perceive herself not as censoring art but as protecting women. Notwithstanding the various feminist responses against censorship since the early-to-mid '80s accept demonstrated clearly that censoring pornography is more likely to chemical compound women's issues than solve them. Pointing, for example, to the historical uses of obscenity laws to forbid the broadcasting of literature on abortion and reproductive rights, some feminists have questioned the political viability of appealing to the land, which already institutionalizes sexism, homophobia, and racism, to legislate images of women'due south sexuality. Moreover, women like the members of f.a.c.t. (the feminist anticensorship chore force) accept warned that the vagueness of the MacKinnon/Dworkin ordinance's diction could result in correct-wing groups championing versions of the same legislation every bit a way to farther entrench antifeminist agendas.^vii Indeed, the year after the Minneapolis ordinance failed, MacKinnon was recruited by conservative Republicans in Indianapolis to consult on similar legislation there. (This time the ordinance was signed into law past Indianapolis Mayor Richard Hudnut 3, a Republican and Presbyterian minister, simply a grouping of publishers and booksellers subsequently challenged the police force, and in February 1986 the Supreme Courtroom ruled it unconstitutional.) Equally information technology turned out, one of the legacies of the feminist antiporn campaigns was the appropriation of its language by the Reagan-appointed Meese Committee on Pornography. In an incisive written report, anthropologist Carole Vance analyzes how the Meese Committee report of 1986 used the linguistic communication of feminism in identify of traditional terms like "immorality" and "sin" as a ways of garnering greater public legitimacy for its "findings."⁸

What was well-nigh disturbing about the discourse surrounding the Muybridge exhibition was that most all vestiges of the feminist anticensorship stances were neatly swept from the field. Absent-minded were not just the feminist sex debates of the '80s but also any recognition of the fact that the antiporn line has dramatically lost credibility among feminist and queer activists, artists, and scholars engaged with battling issues like the Supreme Court gag rule on abortion, the AIDS health-care crunch, and the right-wing assaults on civilization and academia. Despite academic and activist talk near "feminisms," we are left with a monolithic crush of antiporn feminism representing all feminists. Continuing in place of complication and disharmonize is a stripped-downward audio byte in which centre-class white women are represented as the moral guardians of social club. This construction of maternal womanhood is equally much a product of industrialization as Muybridge's photographic camera bodies.

This comfortably familiar, mainstream media image of a maternalist feminism is more than a decade old. What's new is the electronic trash bin that manifestations of progressive politics, whether as reductivist as this one or more flexible and complex, are tossed into earlier our eyes: the political correctness dumpster. The term "politically correct" originated with progressives as a means of parodying and critiquing the lure and trap of political purity. Recently information technology's been appropriated by the right as a way to forbid any and all discussion of progressive agendas. Updating its McCarthyite tactics for a more than sophisticated media generation, the right is substituting terms like "political definiteness" and "radical homosexuals" for retro verbal bludgeons like "communism" and "homosexuality." This silencing is accomplished by denying the complication and depth of gimmicky debates on sexism, racism, and homophobia. Thus when a critic like Camille Paglia stands upwardly to "defend" pornography and to inform feminists, equally if they didn't know, that power is a factor in sex (the simplicity of her arguments left intact by her flippant refusal to grapple with feminist and queer scholarship), Rolling Stone magazine votes her hot critic of 1991. When I look at Paglia's writing, which lately seems to stare dorsum at me from every journal I run into, I see instead the set-to-become look of someone only woken up from a xx-year experiment in cryonics.

Considering Broun reversed her conclusion so speedily, the charges of political correctness were only just offset to announced. According to the Washington Post, for example, Reynolds charged that Broun's decision "was a 'very dangerous' imposition of political correctness."^ix In the New York Times, Michael Kimmelman quite properly asked "why shouldn't a work of art that perhaps raises the subject of pornography be appropriate for a museum?"^ten But having raised the point (without, of class, acknowledging feminist anticensorship arguments) that public debates well-nigh sexual images cannot be constructive unless people can run into what'southward being talked near, he then leaped into the pit of political correctness with a swipe at the outgoing evidence at the museum, a evidence curated by Broun.

"Interpretive bullying," wrote Kimmelman, "likewise characterizes the strategy of the 'West equally America' exhibition at Ms. Broun'southward establishment, for which simplistic, preachy wall texts narrowly interpret, as racist and imperialistic, images of the westward expansion of the United States." Kimmelman'south accuse in upshot conflates 2 carve up kinds of political act on Broun's part. The LeWitt incident was a closing off of dialogue, prohibiting consideration of the kinds of questions about sexuality to which the work gives ascent. The exhibition "The W as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier 1820–90," however, reflected a curatorial endeavor to open up dialogue by incorporating revisionist histories of the American expansion as it was seen from perspectives other than those of the conquerors. One could argue, equally David Deitcher has, that "The West equally America" would have been more than politically sophisticated had it relied on the interpretative ways of a "reflexive social history" rather than the "scientific pretensions of traditional fine art history."^xi Just as Deitcher also points out, this should not diminish our appreciation of Broun's courage in incurring the wrath of the Republican right (gearing up for a quincentennial celebration of the "discovery" of America) by arguing that the American history housed at the Smithsonian is not an ideologically neutral but a contested terrain.

Portraying Broun as a dupe of political correctness effectively eliminates consideration of how issues of gender and sexuality were actually handled in the Muybridge exhibition. This is unfortunate, since Sheldon's and Reynolds' catalogue essays indicate no endeavour to go across a neutral patina of formalist description and biographical anecdote. For example, there are no references to poststructural feminist critiques of representation, despite the immense impact these ideas have had on contempo photographic production. Also missing are references to the influential writings on documentary photography of Martha Rosier and Allan Sekula, which contest the notion of an ideologically neutral photographic practice. Glaringly absent is whatsoever sizable showing of work past women artists or artists of color—out of 46 artists, only 8 are women. Another pregnant absenteeism is work past contemporary artists dealing specifically with the social construction of gender, sexuality, and race, despite the perfect forum provided by work like Muybridge'southward, which is explicitly engaged in the structure of scientific "truth." Here many artists come to mind whose piece of work would have provided a much richer context for looking at Muybridge'south images than the determinedly deadpan environment fashioned by Reynolds and Sheldon. A few diverse suggestions: Connie Hatch, Kaucyila Brooke, Pat Ward Williams, Roster, Catherine Opie, Kerr + Malley, Millie Wilson, and Carolee Schneeman.

Sheldon gives a detailed account of Muybridge's technical achievement but never contextualizes his work in the larger historical scheme of things. A number of scholars, including Sekula and John Tagg, accept written on the development of photography equally a tool of social control during the period in which Muybridge worked. Like modern medicine, photography was both a product of industrialization and a ways to control and contain 1 of industrialization's past-products—social unrest. Given the nature of intellectual discourse today, it's difficult to imagine looking at the "animals in locomotion," many of them human being, that Muybridge photographed without wondering nigh things similar physiognomy, Taylorism, who these people are, why all of them are white, why a human may run or wrestle and a woman may "flirt" with a fan, or even why a Victorian would take off her or his dress and be photographed in the first place.¹²

Reynolds' essay similarly lacks political analysis and self-reflexiveness, which is all the more disappointing in light of the risks he has taken as a curator. When the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., refused to show the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition "The Perfect Moment" in 1989, information technology was Reynolds who arranged for it to appear at the Washington Project for the Arts, which he then ran. As director of the Addison Gallery, which is role of the Phillips Academy, a boys' prep school, Reynolds has refused to back down from exhibitions with gay content or graphic sexual images—an important stance given the right's rhetoric around the protection of young people's sexuality. Yet it seems from Reynolds' catalogue essay that he chose none of the contemporary art for its potential to address the political, sexual, or racial questions Muybridge's piece of work raises—all pertinent questions given the current political climate and Muybridge'southward historical circumstance. Instead, most of the work is discussed in the blandest of terms, without any questioning of photography as something other than the neutral tracings of visual perception.

The trouble with LeWitt's piece of work is not that it'due south in the testify, information technology's that it's anomalous there. Muybridge I in i respect, is a witty acknowledgment of the potential of any image of nudity to be subjected to an erotic gaze regardless of the conscious intentions of its makers. (Muybridge may accept rendered the nakedness of his Victorian models asexual in the name of truth and science, only the foreshortened angle he takes on a adult female getting into a hammock suggests other possibilities besides a neutral investigation of creature locomotion.) In another respect, LeWitt'due south work likewise symbolizes the frustrating reality that women's nudity is rarely read in whatsoever style other than sexually. Nonetheless whenever there is an opportunity to hash out gender or sexuality, as with LeWitt'south piece of work, Reynolds betrays his utter inability and lack of interest in thinking in feminist terms. Of the last prototype in LeWitt'southward sequence, for example, he concludes, "The woman's body has become centered on her womb, at that place backside her navel, the homo mechanism for bringing life into time." Belly buttons and apertures, fetuses and latent images, women's bodies and photographic camera bodies—empty vessels waiting to firm the glint in the male person photographer's eye.

AFTER THE WAR in the Persian Gulf "ended" in early spring, President Bush filled in some of the media time betwixt "victory" parades by giving a voice communication on political correctness to the University of Michigan's 1991 graduating class. Bush cautioned the assembled students to beware of "political extremists [who] roam the country, abusing the privilege of gratuitous speech, setting citizens against ane another on the basis of their class or race. . . . Such bullying is outrageous." It is quite a linguistic feat to silence dialogue in the proper name of political correctness while at the same time justifying government censorship in the proper noun of patriotism, protecting children, and safeguarding taxpayer dollars.¹³

An essay published in The Wall Street Journal at the acme of the Gulf State of war epitomizes the tactics of the media equally they support the authorities in its domestic war confronting dissent. The subject area is Discontinuity magazine's Fall 1990 consequence on photography and censorship, "The Torso in Question," which includes a number of photographs that have been the targets of attack from the right, and in full general represents a variety of approaches to sexuality, nudity, and the production of art. Wall Street Journal writer Raymond Sokolov comfortably slips on the mantle of moral authorisation, showtime advocating censorship in sure instances, and then, by bold an illusory consensus of opinion, declaring that this isn't censorship later on all merely simply the right thing to practice.¹⁴ For visual illustration, Sokolov takes the cover image from "The Body in Question"—a photograph past Sally Mann of her nude young girl—and obscenifies it with censoring black confined. Assuming that the only proper public response to immature people'southward nudity is shame, he chides artists to "stop crying censorship" when the regime refuses to fund their "degenerate" piece of work. Curiously, he seems to find it more than urgent to protect children from artists than to probe, say, the media blackout in the Gulf State of war. Perhaps the deaths of Iraqi children constitute an obscenity that should be kept "private" as well.

Sokolov's transparent universalizing of bourgeois rhetoric is, in many ways, easier to identify than the issues raised by the Muybridge controversy. I reason is that the complexities of progressive stances take rarely been fare for the mainstream media, even before the correct struck gold with its political-definiteness media blitz. Another reason, rooted, in part, in the romantic construct of the alienated artist, is the misconception that people who work in art share some sort of liberal consensus. Yet at the trial of Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center director Dennis Barrie for his exhibition of the Mapplethorpe show, the first prosecution of an art museum on obscenity charges in American history, a defence lawyer turned over moral high ground to the right by gratuitously remarking of practitioners of sadomasochism, "[theirs is] a world that existed in a period of American history that we may never, never have once more and maybe should never have once more."¹⁵ Not only is this remark inaccurate, it is appalling in its homophobic, admitting veiled, references to AIDS and in its complete dismissal and silencing of a sexual minority. It also plays directly into conservative designs: equally anthropologist Gayle Rubin warned more than a decade ago, information technology is on the sexual margins that the right virtually hands begins its assail, since those are the areas of greatest invisibility.¹⁶

The myth of the politically unified, liberal art globe is a dangerous one: by not acknowledging difference, whether out of ignorance or to avert conflict, it plays directly into the right's agenda of silencing dissent. We do not all speak for each other, and since the right-wing attacks on culture give no evidence of subsiding, we must be careful that the right does not terminate upwards doing the talking for everyone.

Connie Samaras is an artist who lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Studio Fine art Department at the University of California, Irvine.

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NOTES

ane. Jock Reynolds, "Framing Fourth dimension," Motion and Document—Sequence and Time: Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography, Andover, Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1991, pp. 29–30.
ii. Elizabeth Broun, quoted in Barbara Gamarekian, "Show Closing Demanded at Washington Museum," The New York Times, thirteen July 1991, p. eleven.
3. See Allan Parachini, "Photo Bear witness Is Dorsum in Focus," The Los Angeles Times, 16 July 1991, p. F1.
4. See Kim Masters, "'Peep Testify' Artwork Back on View," The Washington Post, sixteen July 1991, p. B1.
5. Broun, news release, Washington, D.C.: the National Museum of American Fine art, fifteen July 1991.
6. For a detailed assay of this legislation, see Lisa Duggan, Nan Hunter, and Carole Southward. Vance, "False Promises: Feminist Antipornography Legislation," Defenseless Looking, New York: Defenseless Looking Inc, 1986.
vii. f.a.c.t. was formed in 1984 in response to hearings in Suffolk County, New York, where legislators were debating a version of the MacKinnon/Dworkin ordinance. The group disbanded a year or so after publishing Caught Looking.
8. Vance, "Porn in the U.s.A.: The Meese Commission on the Road," The Nation 243 no. three, 2/9 Baronial 1986, pp. 78, 77, 79.
9. Masters, p. B1.
x. Michael Kimmelman, "Peering into Peepholes and Finding Politic," The New York Times, 21 July 1991, p. 29.
11. David Deitcher, "A Newer Frontier: The Smithsonian Revises the Old W," The Village Voice, 25 June 1991, p. 39.
12. In The Muybridge Work at the University of Pennsylvania: The Method and The Result, 1888, the university's provost refers to his higher as an platonic setting for Muybridge'due south studies since information technology was able to supply the photographer with "typical animals of many kinds." Discussing Muybridge's study of "some Normal and Abnormal Movements," Francis Dercum, a doctor of nervous diseases, describes some of the subjects as victims of industrial accidents. The field of study of the studies in "artificially induced convulsions" was a professional artist's model—a 35-year-one-time woman "of indifferent and phlegmatic temperament."
13. On the field of study of child-pornography legislation and its implications for artists, come across Laura U. Marks, "Small Infractions: Child Pornography and the Legislation of Morality," Afterimage 18 no. iv, November 1990, pp. 12-14. For an analysis of the censoring of art in the proper name of taxpayer dollars, see Vance, "The War on Civilization," Fine art in America 77 no. 9, September 1989, pp. 39-45.
14. Raymond Sokolov, "Critique: Censoring Virginia," The Wall Street Journal, six Feb 1991, p. A10.
15. H. Lewis Sirkin, quoted in Eric Harrison, "Banish Pornography, Mapplethorpe Jury Told," The Los Angeles Times, 29 September 1990, p. A2.
16. Gayle Rubin, "Thinking Sex: Notes from Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 267–319.

I'd like to thank Joy Silverman, former executive director of the National Entrada for the Freedom of Expression, for sharing her files and numerous "back-contend" discussions on censorship; Nora Faires for historical references; and Alice Echols for productive discussion and suggestions.