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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Fascinating story in the Globe yesterday about the Canadian art magazine Blackflash. The next issue has a story by Kyla and James Legard called "The Last Taboo: Childhood Sexuality and Censorship." After what sounds like quite a bit of contention, Backflash has decided to print the story with blank spots & urls in place of the intended illustrations. The "self-censored" images include Mapplethorpe as well as a cutsie painting of a little girl on a park bench by Millais called Cherry Ripe, which the Globe did reproduce online. Globe writer James Adams describes the painting as, "one of the most popular images of the late Victorian era, with prints displayed in millions of homes throughout the British Empire. In the last 25 years, however, some have argued its popularity 'bespeaks the existence of widespread covert pedophilia in Victorian society.'"
I just read a very good essay, "The Folly of Defining 'Serious' Art," by Amy Adler in a book about the complexities of censorship called The New Gatekeepers. Adler says...
"...even in this most justified area of censorship law, the legal solution has proved problematic in two ways. First, in our rush to protect children, we have expanded the definition of child pornography dramatically. It has become so broad that at its borders it endangers speech that almost all of us would agree ought to be protected. For example, the definition is so broad that now something can be 'child pornography' even if the child depicted is wearing clothes. In this way, child pornography law has come to threaten ordinary family pictures as well as important art that depicts children."Hey teacher! Leave those kids alone.
[...]
"Even as it combats the sexualization of children, I believe that child pornography law has also contributed to a world in which we scrutinize children for sexuality in a way that we never did before. In this way it inadvertently fosters the sexualization of children."
Note: I feel a strong affinity to the last statement, above, by Adler. I have decided not to repost the Millais painting, nor to make links to contemporary artists who I feel have unjustly come under this particular legal lens. I don't like the inevitable scrutiny that this context would impose, and I don't want any part of it. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Blackflash took the action that they did...if so, I think I understand the decision.
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Tom Moody has been making digital pogs to add to Michael Bell-Smith's online collection, so I decided to make some too.
Screen images from PLACED curated by Patrick Macaulay
at The Harbourfront York Quay Centre until Dec. 31, 2006
Panorama (2006) Lyla Rye
Doubleswan (2001) Jennifer McMackon
Patriotic (2005)
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Pascal Lievre
Crossing the Bridge (2005)
Vessna Perunovich
Mary in the Promised Lands (2004)
Michael Davey and Brad Harley
Intersection (2006) Dean Baldwin
Discopedia (2004) Ho Tam
The Road to Hell is Paved with
Squished Frogs (2006) Lorna Mills
More cultural loss in Canada. Bad news that Parachute is closing down.
The new issue of Edge is still flogging the science vs. religion horse. Seems like it's still a pretty lively horse, though.
This little precise by Steve Farrar about the Edge origins is interesting. I wasn't aware of the art influence!
...Back in the 1960s, when Brockman was working alongside the likes of Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol and Hunter S Thompson as an avant-garde arts promoter, he was invited regularly to dine and debate with John Cage, the composer and philosopher, and a small group of fiercely bright young artists and scientists. The experience had a profound impact on him." Out of that I got an appreciation for almost the purity of ideas and the excitement of rubbing shoulders with people that could challenge you," he says.
When his friend, the late conceptual artist James Lee Byars, proposed getting together 100 of the world's greatest thinkers to debate with one another in a single room, Brockman shared his excitement at the prospect of an explosion of ideas. And although the project — the World Question Centre — never got off the ground, the concept lived on. Working with Heinz Pagels, the physicist, Brockman later founded the Reality Club so that top thinkers could spar with and inspire one another over dinner. In 1997 he took this informal conversation into cyberspace with the online magazine Edge. It is here that the intellectual elite that he has gathered now thrash out their often contrary views. And it is here that each year on January 1, Brockman posts the group's answers to a different, deceptively simple question. In 2005 it was: "What do you believe to be true, but cannot prove?" Last year it was: "What is your dangerous idea?"