Who’s afraid of modern art? Maybe it’s just the adults
Fears about children being exposed to some works at the Art Gallery of South Australia raise questions for David Washington about what’s really damaging and disturbing for our kids.
When I was about 11, my teacher in our small town took us across the road to the “institute” – a ubiquitous category of building in such small towns that hosted meetings, the occasional movie night, even rarer live performances and, on this occasion, an art exhibition.
It was an unusual treat to wander among colourful canvases during the school day, rather than staring at the blackboard and graph paper.
We were given questionnaires to prompt our engagement with the work and I found myself standing next to a girl in my class in front of a colourful portrait of Christ on the Cross.
“Who is that?” she asked, with an edge of horror in her voice.
I was stunned.
“It’s Jesus,” I answered, flummoxed.
“Who?” she responded.
In my insular world, I could not imagine someone not knowing this iconic image and the story behind it – an image and story I engaged with every week at the Methodist Church.
Looking back, it was the first moment I realised that the world wasn’t necessarily seen by others as I had been taught to see it.
Removed from cultural and religious context, a painting of a man being nailed to a heavy piece of wood – a particularly cruel form of Roman execution, reserved for the worst traitors and enemies of the state – could easily be an object of revulsion, rather than reverence.
This childhood revelation came to mind over the past week as another minor skirmish in the endless culture wars broke out in Adelaide.
The subject this time wasn’t cancelling Christmas or sex education, but two sculptures that have been sitting in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection for over a decade.
A constituent of One Nation MLC Sarah Game complained about two works: Marc Quinn’s Buck with Cigar (2009) and Patricia Piccinini’s Big Mother (2005).
The former is a bronze nude of transgender man Buck Angel; Big Mother is one of Piccinini’s hyperrealistic yet fantastical creatures – a genetically engineered animal feeding a human baby.
While neither created much of a public stir previously, both are challenging depending on your perspective.
"Ideas about childhood and the fight for control over the ideas that children are exposed to are key battlegrounds in the culture wars."
Game’s point is that both present “sexual imagery” and to display them openly is “taking away the right of parents to decide how they want to raise their kids and what they want to expose their kids to”.
She wants the gallery to put these works in a special adults-only room – a curatorial sealed section, if you will.
It’s her comment about the rights of parents that made me think back to my classmate all those years ago. I presume her mum and dad had made choices that kept their kids away from the image of Christ on the Cross; I wonder why they had made those decisions.
Australian artist Piccinini thinks deeply about her work. It’s easy to find out about the decisions and experiences that led her to create Big Mother – the sculpture might be disturbing to very young children, but the ideas behind it might also open up some very interesting discussions.
If you take the time to understand its context, you’ll see it’s a work of compassion.
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The idea that it’s offensive to be displayed near a painting of Mary and the baby Jesus ignores both intention and context: to me, the juxtaposition is poignant.
Buck with Cigar is a straightforward nude in gleaming bronze, almost in the classical style. It’s a frank portrayal, but no less frank than countless other nudes in the gallery.
The controversy in Game’s eyes must simply be that Buck is a transgender man.
The sculptor, British artist Marc Quinn, has long been interested in people who modify their bodies. Ten years ago, this sculpture that AGSA paid for with donations was relatively uncontroversial. The subject himself visited the work in 2014, celebrating it as a way to educate people not just about being a transexual person but about being a human being, as he put it.
In other words, he saw the gilded artwork as not being something that would confuse children or a ‘perversion’, as FamilyVoice described it, but as a life-affirming expression of acceptance. This might be confusing to some children, but it might also provide an opportunity for a parent to talk about gender issues in a way and at a time that suits the parent.
The great Australian cultural historian and critic Robert Hughes was famously dismissive of some modern art, particularly the avant-garde – “a plywood box or a row of bricks or a videotape of some twit from the University of Central Paranoia sticking pins in himself”, was not worthy of respect in his view.
In his epic series on modern art, The Shock of the New, he insisted that: “The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness not through argument, but through feeling. And then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way, to pass from feeling to meaning.”
For this transformation to occur, though, the viewer can’t just run away at the first feeling of discomfort or even shock.
Children, Hughes argued, have “the kind of direct, sensuous and complex relationship with the world around them that modernism in its declining years was trying to deny”.
Ideas about childhood and the fight for control over the ideas that children are exposed to are key battlegrounds in the culture wars.
It’s interesting, though, that the things children find most disturbing or challenging aren’t necessarily anything like a confronting statue in an art gallery or a same-sex parenting book.
In my childhood, the most genuinely terrifying fears were not prompted by watching a horror movie too young or seeing weird art, but by the prospect of apocalypse – reinforced by both religion and the daily news – and being separated from my parents.
The latter fear was common in my generation thanks to a G-rated Disney cartoon.
Thanks again Bambi – if only you had been cancelled.
Notes on Adelaide is a weekly column reflecting on the city, its strengths and its foibles. You can read more Notes on Adelaide in SALIFE’s print editions.
