censorship of photography and the visual arts

This page provides a perspective on online censorship by looking at the censorship of photography and the visual arts. 

It covers -

• the visual arts
• iconoclasm
• the rectification of history
• photography
• incidents

     visual arts

Censorship of the visual arts has a long and inglorious history, from defacement of stelae under the pharoahs through imposition of breach-cloths on naked figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement to airbrushing of Stalin or Mao's enemies, Rockefeller's defacement of the Diego Rivera mural in New York and angst in Australia about provocations by Serrano and Davila. We've highlighted particular incidents at the end of this page.

Elizabeth Childs's Suspended License: Censorship & the Visual Arts (Seattle: Uni of Washington Press 1998), Steven Dubin's Arresting Images: Impolite Art & Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge 1992) and Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (Albany: New York Uni Press 2000) edited by by Julie Ault & Philip Yenawine are academic studies of the US 'culture wars'. Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art & the Humanities 1998) is a po-mo collection edited by Robert Post.

For some readers there's more meat in Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in 20th-Century American Art (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2002) by Richard Meyer and The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge 1992) by Lynda Nead.

Among the literature for Australia consult Alison Carroll's A History of Moral Censorship & the Visual Arts in Australia (Melbourne: ACCA 1989).

     iconoclasm

For iconoclasm see Dario Gamboni's The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm & Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion 1997) and Alain Besancon's The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2001).

     the rectification of history

There's been no comprehensive longitudinal study of the political airbrush: doctoring paintings and photographs to remove evidence of past alliances or former colleagues.

David King's The Commisar Vanishes: the Falsification of Photographs & Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Holt 1997) is one of the more eloquent demonstrations of the rectification of history.

     photography

Anxieties about mass access to erotic images are older than the internet.

Liza Sigel in 'Filth in the Wrong People's Hands: Postcards & the Expansion of Pornography in the Britain & the Atlantic World, 1880-1914 (in Journal of Social History 33.2 (2000) for example that argues that new technologies and distribution mechanisms at the end of the nineteenth century resulted in a democratisation of erotica and an associated anxiety among government agencies and advocacy groups about suppression of the improper. During the 1880s visual images in the form of cheap ephemera such as postcards outstripped older - and more expensive - text-based forms of pornography -

Class specific patterns of distribution and state repression placed early forms of pornography out of the hand of the working classes. High prices, low literacy rates, class-specific cultural referents, unequal patterns of state repression, production, and distribution patterns restricted the dispersal of pornography

New printing and photographic technologies allowed the working classes to become consumers rather than just objects of pornography. Sigel's analysis is consistent with broader conclusions in Mitchell Stephens' feisty The rise of the image the fall of the word (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1998), highlighted here.

Statistics on demand for improper images and responses by government agencies and nongovernment crusaders are problematical. Ronald Hyam's Empire & Sexuality (Manchester: Manchester Uni Press 1990) claims that around 250,000 'indecent' photographs were seized between 1863 - when the London Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad was established - and 1880. Other sources suggest that around 130,000 'obscene' photographs and 5,000 lantern slides were seized by police in an 1874 raid on the London premises of photographer Henry Hayler, whose journal has been edited by Bill Jay as 61 Pimlico (Tucson: Nazraeli Press 2000). Across the Atlantic around 194,000 "bad pictures and photographs" (along with 5,500 indecent playing cards) were seized by Anthony Comstock as Special Agent of the US Post Office in 1873-74 alone.

A century later the publishers of UK periodical Gay News were charged with obscenity over a cover photograph of two men kissing. Two decades on in Australia Helen Vnuk's Snatched: Sex & Censorship in Australia (Milsons Point: Random 2003) noted digital 'cosmetic surgery' on nudes in Australian magazines. A cause celebre of 2000 was the South Australian police seizure of a book of Mapplethorpe photos. In 1974 it was but won the court case

Anxiety about images that pose questions about childhood is illustrated in works such as Victorian Erotic Photography (New York: St Martins Press 1973) edited by Peter Mendes & Graham Ovenden and Elisabeth Stoney's 1995 paper Alice Does: The Erotic Child Of Photography

     incidents

Selected incidents include -

1497 - Savonarola promotes 'bonfire of vanities' in Florence

1558 - 'fig leaves' added to Michelangelo's Last Judgement

1573 - Veronese ordered to 'correct' his Last Supper

1832 - Daumier punished for caricature of Louis-Philippe by six months in prison

1873 Comstock Act in US

1898 - Klimt's Vienna Sezession 'Minotaur' poster emasculated

1918 - UK ban on reproduction of CR Nevinson's Paths of Glory

1933 - Rockefeller Center mural by Diego Rivera destroyed after featuring image of Lenin

1934 - Cadmus' The Fleet's In! withdrawn from PWAP exhibition at Corcoran Gallery in Washington

1938 Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich and further purging of official collections in Germany

1961 - suppression of Siqueiros murals in Mexico City

1964 - Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men mural at New York World's Fair painted over

1989 - Corcoran Gallery cancels Mapplethorpe exhibition

1997 - 'Piss Christ' controversy at National Gallery of Victoria

2001 Taliban destroys Bamiyan sculptures in Afghanistan

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