One step forward, two steps back

Seems like just when you think things are looking up, it's time for another look.

Choice: Accept or Reject by Yu Chang

The "obscene" statue that isn't
I recently was pleased to see that the grand jury convened to decide whether an Overland Park Arboretum statue (subject of one of my previous posts) was obscene or not, had taken very little time to decide it is NOT.

Choice: Accept or Reject, by Yu Chang, had been the subject of hot controversy earlier this year, when a group of local fundamentalists aligned with the American Family Association circulated a petition to have it removed. They said it was obscene because the female subject was only partially clothed.

From the beginning, Overland Park officials denied that there was anything "obscene" about this work, and resisted the idea of removing it. The AFA group, however, was able to collect enough signatures to require that a grand jury be convened.

Thank goodness the grand jury had the excellent sense to deal quickly with this nuisance complaint. The group was demanding that the sculpture be removed, but certainly not doing any fundraising to support such a large public expense. I'm sure they aren't planning to pay for the cost of empaneling the grand jury, either.

Cement saws left obscene scars in the looters' wake.

A horrifying case of theft and vandalism in a sacred place
Not all the recent news about art in public life has been good, however, I was horrified to learn of the recent theft of four ancient petroglyphs from a site near Bishop, CA.

Stealing a petroglyph is no easy feat--and in this case it was done with all the finesse of a smash-and-grab, by a well-organized gang of looters who left ugly gashes, saw cuts and hammer marks--as well as one broken and abandoned petroglyph--in their wake.

The 3500-year-old petroglyphs were part of a site on the National Register of Historic Places, in the Volcanic Tableland area. Greg Haverstock, a Bureau of Land Management archaeologist described it as "the worst act of vandalism ever seen" at the BLM site, in a story posted by the LA Times.

All they left here was an ugly scar.

The site is a sacred place to the Paiute-Shoshone tribal members in the area, so it is as if the thieves had looted an ancient temple or cathedral. While not quite on the scale of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, this senseless act--priceless treasures hacked to pieces for a potential market value of maybe $500 to $1500--leaves me feeling angry and violated. I can only imagine how the Paiutes and Shoshones must feel.

I don't normally like to use profanity on this blog, but fellow blogger Marina Galperina got it just right when she described these looters as "assholes with chainsaws." I hope the BLM catches up to them quickly, and nails them with every penalty possible.

Meanwhile, happy Thanksgiving.

PHOTO CREDITS: The Fred Blocher photo of Choose: Accept or Reject is from the Kansas City Star's Johnson County 913 magazine. The image of the petroglyph with saw marks is from the Bureau of Land Management, via the New York Daily News. Finally, the hacked-off rock photo came from Maria Galperina. Many thanks to all!

Nudity and Public Art

Yu Chang's sculpture recently
caused a furor in Kansas City (Photo by
Fred Blocher, for the KC Star).

“Being unclothed is not the equivalent of lewdness,” I wrote in a Letter to the Editor recently, but unfortunately many people persist in seeing it that way—and it has an impact on artists.

In Kansas City recently, we've been wading through yet another controversy about nudity in public art. As readers from outside KC may be aware, and as my home-turf readers can readily testify, both Kansas and Missouri are very socially conservative states.

This is not to say that people around here cannot be well educated or sophisticated. But the echoes of the 19th-century Holiness movement, with its cultural wariness about anything “worldly,” still reverberate loudly around here.

The focus in Kansas City at this moment is a sculpture in the Overland Park Arboretum. Chinese artist Yu Chang’s sculpture, Choice: Accept or Reject would not at first seem much of a candidate for a charge of immorality: the poor woman has lost her head, and is coming all to pieces over taking a photo of herself.

The work strikes me as being rather far from sexy or sensual. I think it would be more appropriate to see the nudity as expressing vulnerability to self-esteem issues.

The message of Pray Standing by Arden Ellen Nixon
has little to do with sexuality!

This episode has brought to mind another recent experience. I am the Art Show Director for the annual ConQuesT Art Show, held in Kansas City each Memorial Day Weekend.

One of our exhibitors, Arden Ellen Nixon, is unfortunately all too familiar with the heavy-handed censorship that can come from a misunderstanding of nudity in art. She queried me beforehand, about the acceptability of some of her images for the show. “Do I need to engineer some painter's tape pasties, or are [these] pieces acceptable as is?” she asked.

The pieces in question needed no “pasties,” as far as we were concerned. She sent them, we exhibited (and sold some of) them, and not a single word of complaint came to anyone on the Art Show staff. Compliments, yes—complaints, no.

To me, her work makes expressive use of nudity as a metaphor for spiritual concepts, as in Pray Standing, the work she gave me permission to share here. I really love this piece. It speaks to me of standing in complete openness before the Creator—a powerful message that we could not receive without the nudity of the central figure.

To get into a dither over exposed “boobies” is something most adults should hope to have moved beyond when they made it to high school . . . and yet, the petition to remove the sculpture still gathers signatures. 

How much better to simply confront the artwork, and let it speak to you with its own visual vocabulary!

IMAGE CREDITS: The photo of Yu Chang’s sculpture is by Fred Blocher, and was published through the Kansas City Star’s “Johnson County 913” magazine. Pray Standing is shown here courtesy of the artist, Arden Ellen Nixon. See more of her work on her website.