On the display of shocking art

Get a room

The Guardian reports that a gallery in the small Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye was investigated (though not prosecuted) by police after complaints of a painting placed in the gallery’s front window. At artsjournal.com, where I first found this story, the very knowing headline is “Some Welsh folks called the police on a gallery’s front window”, and so we know where this is all going: rural rubes can’t handle art.

With its literary festival and numerous bookshops, Hay-on-Wye may attract the biggest talents in the arts but, seemingly, not all artistic talent is appreciated by some residents.

The owner of the Chair gallery in the town has been warned by police that she could be committing a public order offence after exhibiting a painting of a naked woman in the front window of her high street shop.

Officers went to the gallery after complaints that the painting, which features a naked woman wearing cowboy boots, her legs splayed to reveal a black triangle with pink wool on top, is not art but pornography. …

[Poppy] Baynham, a third-year student at Central Saint Martins, part of the University of Arts London, said she was shocked by the reaction to her painting, which had been chosen for the window simply because it was the right proportion.

“They have said it’s pornography, which I can’t really wrap my head around,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of pornography they’ve been looking at, but it’s definitely not my painting.

“I’m a student in London and my art never gets any attention like this because London is obviously the hub of art,” Baynham added, musing that perhaps Hay-on-Wye, situated on the Powys-Herefordshire border, was less “open-minded”.

I have been to more BFA exhibitions than some people have had hot breakfasts, and I like to be encouraging - these are artists trying to gain a footing, still developing ideas and craft and expression, and the viewer has to be generous. So I am not writing here about the quality of the art - I haven’t seen it, The Guardian gives only a partial view, and, well, it is undergraduate work. In fact, nobody anywhere in the story tries to claim this is in any way really good art.

My question is a different one: what art do you place in the front window of your gallery?

The story gets off on the wrong foot by taking to task a complainant who suggested the work is pornography. It isn’t, but the fact that it isn’t is not enough to justify whether a crude painting of splayed legs is something to place where it is in the face, as it were, of any passers by.

I support freedom of expression. I have no time for those busybodies who would seek to remove anything they imagine might offend their own tastes from public and school libraries. I think museums and galleries have the right to exhibit works that shock, works that could cause offence to people of varied beliefs. It was deeply wrong to try to prosecute the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center over their exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment.

But public spaces take us into a different realm. The CAC didn’t hang a large banner on the outside of its building featuring one of Mapplethorpe’s more provocative works, and a good thing too. Because some people really do not want to face that as they go for a walk, or homeward plod their weary way from the office.

It doesn’t mean you cannot exhibit the art; it just means that you show some discretion as to what is appropriate, or not, in a public space.

A case I used to teach students was Piarowski v. Illinois Community College, in which the chair of the art department (not a student) decided to feature his own work (lol) in a very public space, and where the work was offensive to some staff and students. The college tried to get the chair to move the work to an enclosed exhibition space, but he contested that: somehow he needed exposure to the entire campus whether they wanted it or not. It is a classic Richard Posner opinion:

A decision as to where within a public forum to display sexually explicit art is less menacing to artistic freedom than a decision to exclude it altogether.

The concept of freedom of expression ought not be pushed to doctrinaire extremes. No museum or gallery, public or private, picks the most prominent place in the museum to display those works in its collection that are most likely to offend its patrons; and even though the consequence of its decision is to discourage — though very mildly we should think — the production of art calculated to shock, to outrage, to epater les bourgeois, we do not think the decision has constitutional significance.

That some “folks” in Hay-on-Wye do not like Ms Baynham’s art is not surprising; I have the strong sense that the gallery knew this, and was engaged in trolling the residents. But to what end?

The Guardian story ends:

The painting is due to be removed on Sunday, when the week-long exhibition ends. Baynham said the reaction to it would now form part of her dissertation. “We are going to do an experiment and get a gallery in London to do the exact same thing and see the reaction in London and what people say and feel.”

I’ll take a stab at it: some people in London won’t like it either, but complaints will be fewer because living in London rather numbs a person to this sort of display. It is not greater open-mindedness, just greater resignation.