{"id":1952,"date":"2018-02-10T18:15:57","date_gmt":"2018-02-10T18:15:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1952"},"modified":"2021-01-13T14:55:00","modified_gmt":"2021-01-13T14:55:00","slug":"laura-gascoigne-no-offence-but-may-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/?p=1952","title":{"rendered":"Laura Gascoigne: No Offence But\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 &#8211; May 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Laura Gascoigne <br><em>May\/June 2018<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Was Stone Age society more open-minded than ours? In December, just before Instagram was flooded with pictures of Kim Kardashian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 37-year-old butt crack, Facebook decreed that an image featuring the front bottom of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dangerously pornographic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and removed it, until forced to apologise two months later to the statue\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s owner, the Naturistorisches Museum in Vienna. In France, meanwhile, Paris schoolteacher Fr\u00c3\u00a9d\u00c3\u00a9ric Durand-Ba\u00c3\u00afssas is pursuing the social media giant through the courts for closing his account in 2011 after he posted a photograph of Courbet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Origin of the World.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Expect more of the same from the Pussy Police if the British Museum includes Rodin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Iris, likened by Germaine Greer to a Sheela-na-Gig, in its summer exhibition. Modern women must be protected at all costs from references to their sexuality by men. In the #MeToo era, offence is the new righteousness and failure to take it is a sin. No woman is exempt from this obligation: when French female film stars d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122une certaine \u00c3\u00a2ge lined up to protest that unwanted male attention was no big deal (and, in Brigitte Bardot\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case, that they sometimes enjoyed being complimented on their \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nice little backside\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), they were effectively told by their sisters to shut up and get back in the kitchen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The latest offender, surprisingly, is Maria Balshaw, who triggered the resignation of Tate artist-in-residence Liv Wynter with a comment in The Times in February that she has never had any trouble from men, having been \u00e2\u20ac\u0153raised to be a confident woman who, when I encountered harassment, would say: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcPlease don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 or something rather more direct.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Wynter described Balshaw\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s comment as a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153huge slap in the face\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an interesting metaphor, given that a slap in the face is what women once administered to men who harassed them. The former victim of domestic abuse accused the Tate of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153simultaneously profiting off my \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcsurvivorness\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and the work I dare to make about it\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It may be time to launch an antisocial media campaign, #NotI, celebrating the survivorness of a generation of women who learned to deflect unwanted male attention without taking offence. Not much chance of the next generation learning. In March the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, Melanie Onn, called in Parliament for catcalling and wolf whistling to be classed as hate crimes, praising Nottinghamshire Police for a pilot scheme that defines misogynistic acts as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153incidents against women that are motivated by an attitude of a man towards a woman and includes behaviour targeted towards a woman by men because they are a woman.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Apparently \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcupskirting\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdownblousing\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 are already illegal in Scotland. No mention of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcupkilting\u00e2\u20ac\u2122, though. Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t boys\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 sensitivities need protecting, or is it just that girls aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t interested?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Which brings me to Manchester Art Gallery. Apologies for dredging up Hylas and the Nymphs again, but the swamp needs draining. For the benefit of anyone who missed the hoo-hah, on 29 January Sonya Boyce, the subject of a retrospective at MAG, staged the removal of John William Waterhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painting of semi-naked nubiles as part of an evening \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctakeover\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of the 19th century galleries. All hell broke loose: accusations of censorship rained down and Boyce found herself in the eye of a storm of vitriol. Within a week, the picture was back in place. A week is a long time in sexual politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The decision, Boyce insisted, had been consensual. She had canvassed female opinion among museum staff, from curators to attendants and cleaners, and found \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a discomfort\u00e2\u20ac\u009d about the presentation of the idealised female form as \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcfemme fatale\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 and the misrepresentation of Hercules\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Argonaut toy boy as heterosexual. Her conclusion was that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we need to not be binary about how we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re thinking around questions of gender and masculinity and femininity, that we need to complicate some of those questions.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d As if they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t already complicated enough, she invited a troupe of local drag queens, The Family Gorgeous, to wade into the muddied waters by camping it up in front of various Victorian pictures.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By now the Curator of Contemporary Art, Clare Gannaway, felt compelled to apologise on the gallery\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s behalf for having \u00e2\u20ac\u0153collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Had they looked they might have noticed, as David Lee pointed out in the last issue, that between Etty\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Ulysses and the Sirens and Mengin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Sappho they were in deeper trouble than Waterhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lily pond, and boarded up the entire 19th century gallery. Funny how people who claim art should challenging always seem to be the first to complain. Boyce herself admitted that her film SIX ACTS incorporating footage of her camp takeover team was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153very troublesome\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s obviously better to give than to receive, where offence is concerned. Or is it only contemporary art that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s allowed to offend, just as it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s only non-normative-male sensitivities that need protecting?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2002 I was involved with the Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun in touring the Tate exhibition The Victorian Nude around Japan. God knows what the Japanese made of it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c my own jaw dropped in front of Waterhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s St Eulalia, the picture that got him elected to the RA. The show was curated by Alison Smith, then newly arrived at Tate Britain and now Lead Curator, British Art to 1900. Could it ever have been staged today? Not without reams of exculpatory wall texts. But while contemporary curators agonise over collective forgetfulness, public taste goes on its merry way. Gallery attendants reported to Boyce that young girls often took selfies in front of Hylas and the Nymphs and middle-aged men liked to linger over it. Not just middle-aged men, but middle-aged women #MeToo. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve always found the picture riveting, it gives me goose bumps: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not the nudity so much as the viscousness of the paint and the way it conveys the water\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s surface tension. Monet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nymph\u00c3\u00a9as are merely colourful; Waterhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s are clammy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I disagree with Anthony Daniels\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 verdict in the last issue that the painting is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the most abominable kitsch\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure I even agree that kitsch is abominable. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Taste,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Sickert, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153is the death of a painter\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and Waterhouse was a painter to his bones: the child of two painters, the nephew of two more, the husband of another. Born in Rome, he imbibed Classical mythology with his mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s milk and understood the pantheistic background to the word \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcnymph\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. What about religious tolerance for animists?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In a debate on censorship in the Spring issue of RA magazine, Mark Hudson imagines himself enjoying a tour of a Museum of Art by Bad People and argues that art should be celebrated not just \u00e2\u20ac\u0153for its beautiful life-enhancing qualities but for the way it illuminates the irreconcilable contradictions and complexities of the world around us\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I doubt John William Waterhouse was a bad person. He was simply an artist to whom painting came as naturally as breathing; when his subjects went out of fashion, so did he. In 1978, when the Mappin Art Gallery Sheffield tried to revive his reputation with a solo show, John Russell Taylor wrote in The Times: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Waterhouse is not really a forgotten painter; it is just that no one remembers him\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. If Boyce\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s action was a publicity stunt, which she denies, it backfired badly. Waterhouse\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s painting has been splashed all over the papers, while Boyce\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s SIX ACTS has been politely ignored. No one remembered Waterhouse? They do now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Laura Gascoigne May\/June 2018 Was Stone Age society more open-minded than ours? In December, just before Instagram was flooded with pictures of Kim Kardashian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 37-year-old butt crack, Facebook decreed that an image featuring the front bottom of the 30,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153dangerously pornographic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and removed it, until forced to apologise two months later [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[742,75],"class_list":["post-1952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","tag-comment","tag-laura-gascoigne"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1953,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions\/1953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejackdaw.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}