Image and Culture: November 2011

Monday, 7 November 2011

Censorship Task

Task:
Read Amy Adler's essay 'The Folly of Defining 'Serious Art'', and taking into consideration things discussed in the Seminar, write at least 500 words on the role of censorship in the arts/media. Use quotations to justify ideas and opinions raised, refer to specific examples and write in the third person.

The Role of Censorship in the Arts/Media.

The role of censorship, particularly that of obscenity laws, is one of the main arguments ruling art out of today’s culture. Amy Adler’s essay on ‘The Folly of Defining “Serious” Art’ tries to explain what is happening between art and what is classified as obscenity. Adler points out that the ‘Miller Test’, which sets out the guidelines of what is deemed offensive, is full of loop holes which ‘serious artistic value’ can pass through, protected. Adler believes that the Miller Test asks the question of ‘what is art?’ and what constitutes as being ‘serious art’. Clement Greenberg, an influential art critic, wrote in 1955, ‘There is good and bad in contemporary painting, and the difference owes its realisation to a severer discipline…Art in its ‘purity’ would find the guarantee of its standards of quality’. Adler believes that although this was true in Greenberg’s era, the postmodernism movement made art, at times, indistinguishable from obscenity. Todd Gitlin also asks the question of who decides what is appropriate or not. He writes, ‘who has the right to hang that painting? And at least as significantly, should it have the right? And who should decide? Is it the business of law? Of artists themselves? Or is it the business of consumers?’

Amy Adler’s essay questions the obscenity laws by saying ‘we cannot ban obscenity and protect art. It won’t work. We’ve got to choose one or other’. In the case of Tierney Gearon’s photographs showing her naked children, tabloids condemned it as ‘a revolting exhibition of perversion under the guise of art’. Gearon replied by saying that she would never exploit her children but realised that it was a difficult subject which many people would have mixed feelings over. She said, ‘this is all a question of perception…this is art…I don’t understand how you can see anything but the purity of childhood.’

In Polly Yoynbee’s article titled ‘The voyeurs have won’ she depicts the censor as an ‘obedient by necessary slave to society’. Art is all about taking risks and creating taboos and the only question the tabloids raised in the Tierney Gearon case is ‘whether any portrayal of a naked child is now officially indecent, or breaching infant privacy’. Yoynbee makes an argument that ‘the current obsession with child sex forces everyone to view the world through paedophile eyes. The abhorrent aberrant has won, making us all dirty voyeurs by proxy’. Her article also brings up the issue that as a culture, we constantly have graphic images of naked adults in our midst, but children are shrouded as if they ‘are indeed sexual’. So a ‘ban on all child nudity powerfully suggests the very vileness it seeks to prevent’.

In Jonathan Jones’ piece ‘Goldin’s art is not porn’, he states that society should either ‘believe in the freedom of art galleries to exhibit modern art, which is provocative by nature, or don’t’. He writes that paintings involving nude children like Caravaggio’s Cupid are withheld from the tarnished brush of ‘obscenity’ by being paintings. Nan Goldin’s photography, however, which was banned from the Baltic gallery, was not allowed the same freedom.

Justice O’Connor wrote, ‘The audiences’ appreciation of the depiction is simply irrelevant to the government’s asserted interest in protecting children’. Adler writes on the subject, ‘the struggles over serious artistic value in obscenity law do not apply to child pornography. Even as (the law) combats the sexualisation of children, I believe that child pornography law has also contributed to a world in which we scrutinize children in a way that we never did before. In this way it inadvertently fosters the sexualisation of children.’

Adler also writes about the issues of a ‘mom’ being more accepted by society taking pictures of her naked children, than a professional (male) photographer. One could be an accident, the other, deliberate. Alder ends by stating that censorship is as imprecise and impure as the expression itself but to question the meaning of ‘art context’ still requires a definition of ‘art’, which is, as Adler puts it, impossible.

Friday, 4 November 2011

Censorship

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time- Agnolo Bronzio

Thursday, 3 November 2011

Authors and Authenticity Task

Task:

Authors and Authenticity

Persuasion and Proof

“Advertising doesn’t sell things; all advertising does is change the way people think or feel”

- (Jeremy Bullmore, Behind the scenes in advertising, 1998).

‘At that time [World War II], I fervently believed just about everything I was exposed to in school and in the media. For example, I knew that all Germans were evil and that all Japanese were sneaky and treacherous, while all white Americans were clean-cut, honest, fair-minded, and trusting’

- Elliot Aronson in Pratkanis and Aronson, (1992), Age of

Propaganda, p. xii

Persuasion - ‘a deliberate and successful attempt by one person to get another person by appeals to reason to freely accept beliefs, attitudes, values, intentions, or actions’.

- Tom L. Beauchamp, Manipulative Advertising, 1984

‘Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich, and reconstruct the world around him – to introduce into an otherwise harsh or bland existence some sort of purposeful and distorting alleviation’

- Theodore Levitt, The Morality (?) of Advertising, 1970

“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership one might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence”

- Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), in Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (eds.) (2003), Art in Theory 1900 - 2000, Oxford, Blackwell, page 521

‘I didn’t like Europe as much as I liked Disney World. At Disney World all the countries are much closer together, and they just show you the best of each country. Europe is more boring. People talk strange languages and things are dirty. Sometimes you don’t see anything interesting in

Europe for days, but at Disney World something different happens all the time, and people are happy. It’s much more fun. It’s well designed!’

- A college graduate just back from her first trip to Europe.

- Papanek, V. (1995), The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, page 139

‘The claim that the Gulf War of 1990 would not take place (1991), followed by the assertion that it did not take place, seems to defy all logic. Such statements are anticipated by the earlier claim (1983) that the only future war would be a hyperreal and dissuasive war in which no events would take place because there was no more space for actual warfare. The underlying argument is that the Gulf War was a simulated war or a reproduction of a war. Whatever its human consequences, this was, for Baudrillard, a war which consisted largely of its self-representation in the real time of media coverage’

- Macey, D. (2000), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, London, Penguin, page 34

‘I don't recall seeing many television images of the human consequences of this scene, or for that matter many photographs published. A day later, I came across another scene on an obscure road further north and to the east where, in the middle of the desert, I found a convoy of lorries transporting Iraqi soldiers back to Baghdad, where clearly massive fire power had been dropped and everyone in sight had been carbonized. Most of the photographs I made of this scene have never been published anywhere and this has always troubled me’.

Peter Turnley, The Unseen Gulf War, December 2002, at http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html

The "Mile of Death". During the night of the 25th of February and the day of the 26th of February, 1991, Allied aircraft strafed and bombed a stretch of the Jahra Highway. A large convoy of Iraqis were trying to make a haste retreat back to Baghdad, as the Allied Forces retook Kuwait City. Many Iraqis were killed on this highway. Estimates vary on the precise number of Iraqis killed during the Gulf War. Very few images of Iraqi dead have been previously published .

‘Most of the reporting that reached American audience and the west in general emanated from the Pentagon, hence severely lacking balance, as proven by the total blackout on the magnitude of the devastation and death on the Iraqi side. A quick statement of the number of dead (centred around 100,000 thousands soldiers and 15,000 civilians) sufficed for main-stream media audience. It is no wonder that this made-for-TV war started at 6:30pm EST on January 16, 1991, coinciding with National News. Alas, much of American audience today cannot distinguish between computer war games and real war, between news and entertainment’.

- http://www.radioislam.org/historia/zionism/index_iraq.html

Someone asked in class today if people used to believe a painting like they do a photograph. Reminded me of Richard III (just a bit geeky) so here's a Horrible Histories video I found about him :)

"With the Royal Collection portrait the matter is not quite straightforward because it appears that, at some time after the copy was first painted, some deliberate alterations were made to it. The king's right shoulder was made to look higher than his left by extending the gown and the jewelled collar on that side a little further upwards. With the passing of time the additional paintwork on the gown has become fainter, so that the original line of the shoulder is now quite clearly visible to the naked eye. An X-radiograph of the painting showed up this change very clearly, and also revealed that Richard's right eye was originally not as narrow as it now appears: the lower edge of the eye has been slightly raised and straightened. Also, judging from the paintwork itself, there is reason to think that the outline of the nose may have been enlarged a little and that the mouth has been tampered with in order to make the lips look thinner. Without doubt these alterations were made with the intention of 'improving' the portrait by bringing it more into line with the early Tudor view of Richard as a deformed villain. If, as seems likely, the copyist himself made the changes to his work, it is very doubtful whether such a lowly artisan would have dared to take the initiative in doing so; probably they were suggested, or dictated, by someone in a position of authority at the court."- The Portraiture of Richard III -by Frederick Hepburn

Wednesday, 2 November 2011

Task 1

What imagery/culture is used in your own discipline and contemporary society to persuade a consumer?
My main area of practice is illustration where you are the one creating an image- it isn't given to you like with advertising. As an Illustrator, I can draw someone to be prettier or more attractive than they actually are- almost as if i was Photoshopping them and giving a false sense of themselves. When a customer looks at an illustration, compared to a photograph for example, they are less likely to believe the illustration as its something drawn and taken away from real-life. There is no sense that the illustration is relating to the customer which a photograph sometimes has and therefore the ability to persuade is lessened
What extent is visual imagery/culture subject to censorship? Pros/cons for society?
When we looked at the examples of the war photography, I was sometimes shocked to see how far censorship could go. The censorship seemed more dramatic in this area because of its weighty subject matter. The public were being spoon fed this idealised war where everything seems black and white- but in reality, even the slightest change to a photograph changed its whole meaning. I think some censorship is good, however, with really disturbing images not being forced onto our TV screens. However, it is also important, in my opinion, to have the power to find 'disturbing' images, instead of waiting for them to appear and not having a 'staged' war put in front of you. I definitely believe that if society is subject to too much censorship, a sense of reality on how the world truly is will disappear.