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Censorship on Stylistic Grounds Author(s): Philip Pearlstein Source: Art Journal, Vol. 50, No.

4, Censorship II (Winter, 1991), pp. 65-70 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777325 . Accessed: 28/12/2010 11:18
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on Censorship Grounds Stylistic


PHILIP PEARLSTEIN

Thisarticlewas originallygiven as a talk at MessiahCollege, Grantham,Pennsylvania,April4, 1991 .-eds. ne aspect of censorship of the visual arts in the UnitedStates nowis the public, as witnessed by the for attack on the NationalEndowment the Arts and the ensuing debates, as well as the adventuresof individual artwoksthat run afoul of public attitudes in various situations. A second aspect is the fateof individualartists'careers in relationto the communityof artists. It is this aspect that I find most upsetting. Familyrelationshipsare farmoresubtle and emotionalthan the historyof nations. Everyartist deliberatelychooses a wayof working;that is, his style. As soon as the work achieves exposure in the professionalart worldthe artist is aligned with a particular branchof the communityof artists and its extendedfamilyof critics, editors, curators, dealers, and collectors, some of whom may exhibit occasional crossovers in stylistic interests. It is within the art community itself that artists' early are reputations made or broken,and generallyit is withinthe echelonsthat the most passionatedebates aboutthe younger value of fellowartists'worktake place. Missingat the present time are the Dons, the kingpins whose opinionsdominateall others, as did the writingsof ClementGreenbergand Harold Rosenberg in the 1950s. They started a series of stylistic wavesthathavesweptoverus in the past fortyyears:Abstract Expressionism, ColorField, Minimalism, Pop, Super Realism, Concept, Neoexpressionism, New Figuration, Appropriation,etc. The careers of individualartists maybe predicated on the biases of the particularwriters,in the particular publicationsthat are aligned or unaligned with the momentumof stylistic waves. If the artisthas madethe wrongchoice of style to workin, he is out, at least for the durationof the latest wave. Speaking as a realist artist, I feel that realism is out now, as is traditionalabstraction,flounderingin the wake of the wave-of-the-moment I will referto as "politicallyaware that conceptualist art." At the end of the twentieth century all Europeantraditionalart formsmust fight fortheir existence. art, Indeed, in the historyof twentieth-century each modern-

has ist stylistic movement aimed to annihilatethe traditional forms of Western European art that are derived from fifteenth-centuryRenaissance art and have formedthe core of Europeanculture. art One of the great ironiesof twentieth-century is thatthe Soviet Unionin the 1930s banned modernistart frompublic display, as did the GermanNazis. In the UnitedStates, while not officially banned, modernistartists were thoughtof as leftist, Communist, and generally suspect, and had diffiWarII, in a reversalof culty getting exhibited. After World fortune, the modernists were triumphant and effectively art pushed aside representational everywhere. it In ourpresentpoliticalclimate, however, is the representationalworksof art, especially the realistic, that attractthe pointing fingers of offendedmoralists. Modernistscan get away with almost anything, using double meanings, puns, and other word games, linked with visual punning. The "naughty" aspect of sex can be joked about if presentedby inferenceratherthanby realistic description,verbalorpictorial. It must be noted that what gets pointed at is what is presentedas art in museums or privategalleries open to the public. The content of magazines sold on newsstands, programs seen on cable TV, and videos in peep shows are protectedby the Constitution.Only seriousrealist paintings and photographs attackedon moralisticgrounds. get own paintings have been described in lurid sexual My terms. They have been defaced by graffitti, slashed, had fromthe cigaretteholes burnedinto them, and been removed walls of museums and university exhibitionspaces. I have been called a seducer of the minds of children and unAmerican. A retrospectiveexhibitionof my workin Philadelphia caused a parentalwarningto be printedin the local newspaper stating that both male and female nudity was the being shown.Yetmy art simply portrays humanfigure at rest, as a kind of complexstill-life object, functioningas a primaryelement in paintings whose basic assumptionsare founded on the aesthetic relationshipof the compositional elements. I tookon the basic assumptionsof abstractart and made them the basis for my observation depictionof the and human body with all parts intact, in measurablespace. My use of the nude humanfigure in painting is anchoredin five thousand years of naturalistic representationin the art of
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Male,SittingFemale Standing Nudes,1969, oil on canvas, Allan 74 x 62 inches.Courtesy NewYork. Frumkin Gallery,

FIG. 1 Philip Pearlstein,

world.In that civilized man, particularlythatof the Western for "Western world,"lies a key problem today'sartist. phrase, The naturalistic, representational of the Westernworld art has been underfire for the past century.Modernist now art, well over one hundredyears old, has always had the overin throwof Western traditions mind. Artthatuses naturalistic has been a primary target of all modernist description movements. In the UnitedStateswe are fortunate to havethe kind of not censorshipthat punishes artists physically or by incarceration. No one is forbiddento create. In the public aspect of was censorship, the recent controversy overgrantsof money that by the NEA to institutions mountpublic exhibitions.The had to do with using public funds to exhibit the controversy The fundworkof RobertMapplethorpe AndresSerrano. and is in trouble,notthe artists. The works werecreatedat the ing has artists'own expense. One result of this controversy been
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that the commercialvalue of these artists' workis elevated and the name of SenatorJesse Helms is hyphenatedwith homoeroticism. The most blatant examples of the physical impositionof censorshiphave occurred in Fascist and Communistcountries. Manyproscribedartists did choose to go on working, but secretly and withoutpublic display. In Nazi Germany, Emil Nolde created magnificentexpressionistfloral watercolors in a basementroom, after having been forbiddento WarII ended. paint. Theywere exhibitedshortlyafterWorld In Russia, somefifteen orso yearsago, a groupof modernist artists finally got official permissionto havean exhibition that was to take place outdoors,with the paintings hung on clotheslines. But when the exhibition opened the officials changed their minds and sent in bulldozers to wreck the of show.Severalof the organizers the groupdied in accidents over the next couple of years. One died when his studio

accident. Someworks burned, anotherin an odd automobile fromthe show, or by the same artists, were later shownin a New Yorkgallery. I foundthem shocking in that they looked like second-rateimitationsof JasperJohns'sor RobertRauone schenberg'skind of imageryand structure.I remember in particular that had a windshield wiper attachedto it, with which the paint had been streaked on the canvas. It hardly looked like a painting worthgiving one's life for. However, when I was in Russia, about two and one-half years ago, I learned that windshieldwipers may be symbolic. They are desirable items, often stolen, and no one who owns a car keeps the windshieldwipers in place. As soon as it starts to rain all traffic comes to a standstill and everyonetakes out their wipers and attaches them. What was being censored by the state was modernistart. Modernist had flourishedin Russia in the earlypartof the art This is made abundantlyclear in the large exhibicentury. tion of the workof KazimirMalevichthat recently circulated in the UnitedStates. But mostof his workand thatof his peers had later been proscribed, not exhibited in Russia since the early 1930s. Malevich had led the modernist-artcoalition afterthe Leninistrevolution.His mostfamouspaintingwas of a white square on a white ground.The Bolshevikrevolution that followedrepresentedthe triumphof the lowerclasses, who rejected modernist art as elitist, and so it became forbidden. But many artists kept creating modernist art, keeping it secret. During my visit to Moscow I saw an exhibitionof modernistart of the twentiesnotpreviously seen the lifetime of most of the visitors, combined with a during showof the art that manyof those same artists had retreated to in the 1930s. Another huge exhibition, titled "Young Russian Artists," repeated the variety of workthat can be seen on a strollthroughNewYork galleries in SoHo.A further showwas of the workof an artist named PavelFilonov, large who had died in 1941. Filonov, well known as a theater designer, producedpaintings that can be described as very large, densely workedimages of people developedin a Cubist, Futurist, Expressionist mode. Filonov was one of the majorRussian artists who chose not to produceworkin the officially imposed Social Realist style that dominatedRussian art until recently. His workhad notbeen exhibitedfrom the mid-1930s until the late 1960s. It was one of the most impressive exhibitionsI have seen in recent years. Just as modernismin all its variationswas censoredin the second quarterof ourcentury,so nowit is difficultforRealist workto be given serious consideration manyof the larger by art institutions,in Europeas well as the UnitedStates. It has been decided that our culture should present itself through modernism, forward-looking,politically progressive, and seemingly inventive. Realism has been stigmatized as the oppositeof these things, the wayof the past, because Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin promotedit. In Italy it had been as promoted neoclassicism, a returnto the artof the classical era. After the end of WorldWarII all figurativeart in Italy

and Germanywas associated with fascism and was rejected by the youngerartists. In the UnitedStatesthe realistic style called AmericanRegionalismthat had dominatedthe 1930s was rejected as naive and jingoistic. I received a Fulbrightgrant to Italy in 1958, just when I was becoming interestedin realism. There I did a series of careful drawingsof Romanruins. Some of the youngItalian artists to whomI showedthese were appalled. They told me this was Fascist art, the kind of art Mussolinihad wanted. In 1971 a museum exhibitionof my lithographs,etchings, and drawingsopenedin WestBerlin. It was a large showof about one hundredworks.Oneof the articles writtenaboutmy work at the time expressed surprise and disappointmentthat, as an AmericanJew, I was exhibiting in Germanythe kind of workthat Hitler had supported.Wherewas my modernism? At that time I was thoughtof as a Photorealist(whichI never was), and drawingsand prints of motorcycles,gasoline stathanthe tions, and luncheonetteswereexpected of me, rather nudes I showed. The American cultural attach6 in West Berlin set up a meeting for me with a numberof youngGermanartists who were thought to be interested in the revival of realism. Throughtranslators,I gave a talk, at the end of which the artists told me they didn'tlike what I had had to say. I had talked aboutformalissues, because at thattime therewas an active revival of interest in workingwith the figure among painters in New York. A discussion group had been organized to meet everyFridaynight at a settlementhouse called the EducationalAlliance on the LowerEast Side (incidentally, it is still meeting, some twenty years later). It was originally organized by students of the New York Studio School, who were focusing on Paul C6zanne and Alberto Giacometti,workingfrom live models in varioustraditional modes. They called for a conventionof artists interested in workingfrom the figure. About two hundredartists showed up at the first meeting. After that the groupmet regularly, with panel discussions on variousrelatedtopics. An average of two or three hundredpeople attended. There was tremendousexcitement among these artists. Discussions of world politics were squelched; only topics relatedto paintingper se were allowed. However, amongthe artists who spoke most often, it soon became apparentthat there were many ways of thinking about the figure. An argumentdevelopedbetween those who felt it was a vehicle for emotionalexpression, who were called the "guts," and otherswho saw it as a returnto Renaissance tradition,who werecalled the "heads,"fortheirintellectualapproach; was I includedamongthe latter.This schism developedinto quitea nasty battle. Both sides dismissed the artists who worked from photographs, although Chuck Close was invited to speak; after listening, the audience showered him with abuse. Another abused guest was the distinguishedarthistorian RobertRosenblum, one of the organizers a showfrom of the Louvre then at the Metropolitan Museum that took a
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revisionist look at nineteenth-century Frenchacademic art. The audience, after listening to him quietly, launched the most vicious kind of personalattack against him duringthe discussion period; the loudest questioned his purpose in supporting"all that fag art." But I thought the passion expressed in those weekly meetings was interesting, so I described them to the young artistsat this meetingin Germany. Theyrespondedthattheir realism had everythingto do with politics and thatthe formal issues I spoke about no longer mattered. The next day a couple of them took me aroundto their galleries to showme theirwork,which was realist enough,but usually the images were fragmentedcollages of realist pieces, mostlyhavingto do with surgery.Theydepicteddetails of operations, surgical implements,and hospital installations. I didn't understand the imagery.LaterI was enlightened.The culturalheroof the momentin WestGermany one-uppingvan Gogh:he was was slicing awayhis penis, a slice at a time, operatingon himself and photographing operationsand the bandaging. His the name was Schwarzkogler. had recently died. He ThenI wentto see "Documenta" Kassel, a largeinternain tional showthatwas centeredon the idea of humanrepresentation. It was of special interest to me, since my workhad originally been selected for inclusion and later dropped. I neverfound out why, but I suspected it was because I had announcedthat I did not workfromphotographs. Therefore, fromthe organizers' point of view, I was nota modernist.The centerspace of the exhibitionwas given to vast enlargements of Mr.Schwarzkogler's on of photographs his operations himof course, was the opposite of censorship.It was self. This, the elevationto officialdomof art that shouldhave remained hidden. I still do not understandthe politics of Schwarzkogler'sperformance. During this time I also had an exhibitionof paintings in to commercialgalleries thattraveledfromGermany Sweden, thento Switzerland.I wentto the openingin Zurich,bringing a couple of new paintingswith me. In Zurich, the exhibition and downthe blockfrommine received greatattention attendance. I gatheredfrom the write-up of my show that I was virtuallybeing invited neverto exhibit in Zurichagain. The exhibitiondown the block consisted of a blackboardin the galleryon which the artistwrotea newphraseeach day, after erasingthe previousday'sphrase. So I knewthata big change in art style was taking place. What particularlydisturbed the Swiss art lovers about my paintings were a couple of images of a black womanwho was skinny and lanky, with muscularshoulders,big bony knees, and flat breasts, all of which I had painted as exactly as I could. They couldn't understand why I wouldpick such a model. Mypaintings of nude men were not appreciatedeither. Myawarenessof conceptualartwas enhancedby those two art experiences. I realized that manykinds of nontraditional forms were coming to prominencethen, and have become dominantnow. Most of the worksupportedby the National
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Endowment the Arts, grants given directly to artists or for to museums for exhibitions,are for nontraditional art grants forms. The shortage of support given to traditionalforms amountsto a kind of censorship, that of exclusion. Typical of the new styles in the late 1960s was the work done by a group of artists whose foremostmemberwas Eva Hesse. They achieved prominenceafter they had decided that-just as a challenge-they wouldproduceworksof art thatwereintolerable, galleriescouldn't that deal withandthat no one wouldwantto buy. Theyused the worst-looking kinds of materialsthey could find. Oftenthe worklookedmucous, tookthem especially Hesse's work.But the artestablishment themwith respectability,and madethemmainin, showered stream. Soonthe normbecame thatset by youngartistsdoing the most unconventional kinds of things, looking forward to being coopted by the art establishment. The grandfather figure of all this is MarcelDuchamp,who I believe has nowsucceeded Picasso as a primaryinfluence. It is nothis earlywork,such as NudeDescendinga Staircase, but his late workthat is influential. Duchampspent his last yearsworkingon an installationcalled Etant donne's ("things given"),now in the PhiladelphiaMuseumof Art, which had earlier received the Arensbergcollection of modernistart. WalterArensbergwas one of the early supportersof such artistsas Duchampand FrancisPicabia andone of the first in this countryto build a big collectionof modernistart, starting with purchases from the 1913 ArmoryShow. He had of wantedto give his collection to his hometown Pittsburgh, but the city had rejected it. The PhiladelphiaMuseumof Art for accepted it, perhapsas an act of contrition havingmissed getting another great collection, that of Albert Barnes. (When Barnes wanted to give his paintings to the PhiladelphiaMuseumof Art, Philadelphiajournalistslampooned the work, whereuponhe withdrewhis offer and closed the collection to the public.) Duchamphad been an adviser to Arensberg on assembling this group of works, and when Duchamp'slast majorworkwas offeredto Philadelphia,the trustees accepted it gladly, althoughthey later found it an It embarrassment. consists of an old barn doorwith a knothole in it that is just a little too high for me to look through (The museumdoesn'tkeep a footstoolhandy,so comfortably. childrencan'tsee throughit.) Lookingthroughthe knothole, one sees a lifelike three-dimensional figure of a naked lady lying on her back with her legs parted, facing the viewer. Since she doesn't wear underpants, her private parts are visible. She lies in a naturalisticlandscapeon somebranches and leaves and holds a small gas lamp. As preliminarystudies forthis work,Duchampmadefour strange-lookingobjects. They were cast body parts; one is the impressionof a vagina, called FemaleFig Leaf, one is a backside, and so forth. Otherworksby Duchamphave exof erted a stronginfluenceon succeeding generations artists, works such as his famousretrospectiveexhibitionof his major in miniature that he built into briefcases he had made to

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Female Modelswith Circus Posterand Bambino, 1990, oil on canvas,84 x 60 inches.Courtesy and Hirschl Adler NewYork. Modern,

FIG. 2 Philip Pearlstein, Male and

order.In the central positionin these miniatureexhibitions was his paintingon brokenglass, TheBrideStripped Bare by HerBachelors,Even. GreenBox, published in an edition of of 320, is a box that containsfacsimile reproductions dozens of scraps of paperon which he had writtenfragmentary notes to the big painting on glass. relating Duchamp'sclose friend during the years just preceding and includingWorld I was Picabia, whois also comingto War be recognized as a primeinfluence on currentart. Together they became central figures of Dada, the great iconoclastic art movementwhose announcedaim was the destructionof European culture, which they believed had led to the destructivenessof the war.Theywantedto achievetheiraim by

lampooning Europeanculture in the terms of avant-garde art. They relied heavily on verbal and visual puns to relate the sexual adventuresof twofictitiousyoungwomen,producing many artifacts of their inventedworldsto lampoon the real world. Otherartists joined in the Dada movement and withPicabia, becamethe founders Surrealism. of later,along Picabia, in the 1920s, made a numberof worksthat predict muchartfamiliartoday.Theirkind of art helped to establish whatcan only be termedthe academicartof the late twentieth century. influenceon the currentgeneration of Beuys, an important of artists, has perhapsbeen the majorresuscitator Duchampian tactics. One of his better-known attemptsto tap new
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levels of communication, as he put it, was a week-long sojournwith a coyotein a NewYork galleryin 1974. He spent the time in a caged-off room, wrappedin felt, interacting with a live coyote. Perceivingthe coyote as a symbol of the American continent, he attemptedto communicatewith it and to makeamendsforman'spoortreatment the continent of that was its home. Recently I was invited to be a jurorof the finalists forthe Givernyawards,given by the Lila AchesonWallaceFoundationof the Reader's Digest. The winnersare givenresidencies at Giverny (Monet'shome and gardens), a large monthly stipend, and the use of an automobile.Three awards are given annually. Nine finalists were selected by a first jury that reviewedthe entire batch of slides submitted. I was on the second jury, one memberof which had also been on the firstjury. This jurorproudly announcedthatshe andthe other jurorsof the first roundhad eliminated all workthat "would be expected fromGivernyand the Reader's Digest." In other words,they had eliminatedeveryrepresentational piece that had been submitted, except forthe workof two video artists and a photographer. photographer The exposed films only in the blackness of night; his workswereeffective. Wewatched the better of the two videos for twenty minutes; in it, light faded from a boring sky with slow-movingclouds, photographed through a pane of glass on which a solid black had parallelogram been painted. Eventuallythe sky grewas dark as the parallelogram.Typifyingthe othersubmissions was a group of wax models of the human stomach with truncatedtubes sticking out; into these stomachshad been smashedactual old pots, thermosbottles, urine bottles, etc. Three other candidates were more traditionallyabstract. I had accepted the invitation to be a juror because I had thoughtI wouldbe helping some realist painters. About fifteen years ago I was on a jury at the National Endowment the Arts. Myfellowjurorswerethe directorof for the Museumof Contemporary in Chicago, a sculptorwho Art does installations with strings and modifies the light in architectural spaces, a Minimalist-Conceptualist painter whose worksthen consisted of variationson the goldensection presentedas foldedpaper, and anothermuseumperson from, I believe, a universityin Arizona. Wespent three days in a black room, looking at slides, with discussions and arguments,some bad humorand somejoking. By the end of the first eight hoursit occurredto me thatnearlyall the slides we had looked at were of installations of things scattered throughrooms, some with sound; some were only sound on tape. Otherworkshad to do with light, such as that of James Turrell,whowas modifyingthe cone of a dead volcanoso that observerscould walk into it and have a transcendent experience of pure light, framedby the volcano'sopening. Wewerenotshownmanypaintingsthathadfoursides, and few sculptures that had a single axis. Nothing shown was representational; veryfew workswere traditionalin any way. When I commentedon this, it was explainedthat two of my
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fellowjurorshad come in a couple of days before, reviewed the slides, and eliminatedall those theythoughtthe rest of us would find uninteresting. So I then spent an hour going throughthe slides that had been culled, and put back in the running about one hundredartists, traditionalabstractionists as well as representational artists. In the end some of them were even amongthe awardrecipients. The awardsat the time were not high. Most were $2,500, a few were $5,000. The highest amountwas $8,000, givenonlyto twoor three artists. I remember one of ourarguments that concernedan elderly artist whose workI had returnedto the slide pool. Wethree artists knew him; his name was Kaldis. He was a very irritatingperson, but he stimulated the thinking of a lot of youngerartists; he had devoted his whole life to art. The sculptorsaid the fact thatKaldishad devotedhis wholelife to art simplymeantthathe had wastedhis life. The MinimalistConceptualistpaintersaid that Kaldis had pinched her once too often. Kaldiswas eliminated. Subsequently, argument an arose overthe workof a youngwomanwhohad strungtwisted silver ribbonacross an empty lot and put lights on it at night so thatit glittered.The sculptorsaid thatcomparedwithwhat Kaldishad donewith his life, this youngwomanwas showing in of greatbravery doing such workin the hostile atmosphere whateversmall townin the Midwestin which she lived. She got one of the awards. Recently I received the catalogueof the awardsgiven last A year by the Louis Comfort TiffanyFoundation. very large sum of moneyis given to twentyorthirtyartists, together with in reproductions a handsomecataloguethat is widelydistributed. In the 1989 cataloguethe worksare almost all accomplished, but of the twenty-sixartists awarded,only a couple do work that can be thoughtof as traditional. Most of the artists do installationsor sculpture in nontraditional forms. The paintings in the catalogue that might be called traditional derive fromfigurativeExpressionismor Cubism;one even recalls Picabia. Thereis some Surrealistfurnitureand some imaginativephotography, includingthe workof the now notoriousAndres Serrano,of plastic-Christ-in-pissfame. I a believe the choices made by the jury demonstrated strong bias. A decision was made to supportonly certain styles. This censorship by exclusion is also demonstratedby newspaperart critics. At least five highly recognizedrealist artists, in addition to myself, had exhibitionsin New York 1991. All have strongreputaduring the monthof February tions gained in an earlier era, when the art critics were less biased than the currentgroup.Notone of these realist shows Times. This becomes censorwas reviewedby the New York ship by omission.
PHILIP PEARLSTEIN is a realist painter who has been exhibiting regularly since 1954. From 1963 to 1987 he taught at Brooklyn College, where he is now distinguished professor emeritus.

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