Nudity and Nonconsensual Viewing
The question of whether an artwork is offensive is now determined by the least generous interpretation of the most sensitive viewer.
If the human body’s obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me.
~Larry Flynt
A lifetime ago, Gore Vidal published two searing essays about sexual morality in the respective contexts of law and politics. Vidal lobbed his critical grenades from publications whose very existence was a testament to the efficacy of the First Amendment. In 1965, “Sex and the Law” appeared in the Partisan Review, a journal started by the Communist Party USA-affiliated John Reed Club. The hedonistic Playboy magazine, which printed “Sex is Politics” in 1979, aimed to undo mainstream mores. In these two essays, Vidal argued that sex, including pornography, was the “hottest of buttons” in politics, and that the prudery of “dead-letter laws,” then still on the books, was rooted in outdated religious prejudice. “When the Cromwells fell,” he wrote, “the disgruntled Puritans left England for Holland (not because they were persecuted for their religious beliefs but because they were forbidden to persecute others for their beliefs).” Once in North America, the Puritans fulfilled their goal of creating a “quasi-theocratic society,” the morality of which had distinctly Old Testament origins.
We are nearly a quarter of the way into the 21st century, but despite most people’s tolerant self-image, moral censorship of the visual arts remains a problem. Neither the conservative Right nor the progressive Left are ready to embrace Playboy’s proposition that morality is a matter for the individual conscience. Across the political spectrum, accusations of indecency provoked by the alleged overexposure of human flesh can still lead to furious controversy and even suppression of the offending material. In a 1996 Vanity Fair essay about The People vs. Larry Flynt, Christopher Hitchens correctly observed that “the ‘righteous and violent’ American culture war is for real.” But two recent instances of moral uproar (from the Right on one occasion, and from the Left on another) confirm that the opposing sides can at least concur on the topic of risqué art. Both want it hidden from view to avoid traumatizing the audience and wider society.
In late January 2023, the Law Warschaw Gallery at St. Paul, Minnesota’s elite Macalester College, mounted an exhibition titled TARAVAT by the Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand. In the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, TARAVAT was an openly political protest against the rules enforced by Iran’s morality police. Two of the drawings in the Blasphemy series showed hijab-clad women provocatively exposing themselves by lifting their modest coverings. Also on display were bronze and ceramic sculptures that look like Bakunyū figurines (Bakunyū is a subgenre within hentai anime that literally translates as “exploding breasts”). Talepasand’s exploration of the tension between her Iranian and American identities is central to her work, and the images of “exploding breasts” are intended as a comment on the proliferation of body modification in Iran. Even a cursory look at her exhibition history confirms that the artist does not shy away from controversy, sometimes courting it as she mocks the mullahs, separated from her Portland, Oregon, home by the safe distance of approximately 6,800 miles.
But in this case, the attack on Talepasand’s subversive artworks came not from reactionary clerics but from within Macalester’s supposedly openminded student body. A group of Muslim students filed a petition in which they complained about the “harm” and “deep pain” caused by their exposure to “overtly sexualized” images. Ikran Noor, a junior American Studies major who started the petition, was one of five people who also started another petition on Change.org in the aftermath George Floyd’s death. “Introducing a Police Accountability Bill” collected only 83 signatures, but it provided solid proof of Noor’s progressive credentials. The anti-TARAVAT petition claimed that some of the work in the show was “DISGUSTING, DEHUMANIZING and DEGRADING.” Noor attached a flyer to the gallery door, encouraging students to protest the show by signing her petition (now removed) in which she condemned the “objectification and fetishization of Hijabi Muslim Women.” Again, only 80 or so people signed it, but this was enough to prompt what Talepasand called the “violation” and “censorship” of her work by the college administrators.
After the opening of the exhibition, the gallery was closed for the weekend. When it reopened, floor-length black curtains covered the entirety of the glass entryway. The irony of using black fabric to conceal images of the female body was not lost on the artist, who saw it as a “whole new level of censorship” visually reminiscent of Iranian dress codes. Of course, the students who passed by the gallery and wanted to look in helped themselves to the view by simply moving the curtain to one side. To avoid the impression of forcibly “robing” the glass, the black curtains were soon replaced with purple construction paper, covering enough surface to prevent what the administration’s letter to the community called “unintentional non-consensual viewing of certain works.” But this evoked another uncomfortable visual parallel, since papering the glass left Talepasand’s work resembling the peep-proof sleeves around pornographic magazines. Art was now being treated like smut because it happened to offend a handful of Muslim women on campus.
The other widely publicized row concerned a Florida charter school scandalized by Michelangelo’s David. Just two months after the Macalester controversy, the principal of the Tallahassee Classical School resigned under pressure from the board. Officially, he was dismissed for failing to issue a two-week advance notice alerting parents that students would be exposed to potentially objectionable material. In an interview with Slate, the Chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insisted that “[p]arents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida.” Three parents objected to a teacher telling his 6th grade class that the statue was “nonpornographic,” and asking them not to tell their parents they had been shown the image. Only one Tallahassee parent thought the statue was “pornographic,” but in the age of social media, that is enough to cause an avalanche of publicity.
Italians responded to this news with a collective eyeroll. The Mayor of Florence announced that it was absurd to call David pornographic. The director of the Accademia di Belle Arte in Florence (where the original resides) invited the school’s principal, parents, and students to visit the statue in person. “It’s not at all pornographic,” he explained. “You have to distinguish between nudity and pornography, but this is a nude.” Marge Simpson would agree—a 1990 episode of The Simpsons portrayed a similar row about Michelangelo’s David. Marge’s campaign against the violent children’s cat-and-mouse cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy, creates a moral panic about obscenity in Springfield that threatens the exhibition of David, a statue Marge admires. The episode ends with Marge renouncing her censorship campaign while Springfield’s schoolchildren are made to interrupt their cartoon-watching to go and look at the sculpture. Unfortunately, this was not the outcome in the Sunshine State. Instead of defending the Western art canon against censorship, the school board folded and threw their principal under the bus while a bemused civilized world mocked and sighed.
The international derision was a bit unfair because Americans are not especially prudish about nudity in art. There is a whole art-historical tradition of covering offending bits, and it resulted in some clever ways to “prevent unintentional nonconsensual viewing” (to use Macalester College’s odd locution). The most famous of these was the fig leaf, which became its own symbol and idiom. The Italians, who found the Tallahassee parents’ reaction to David so amusing, used it widely. In 1563, the Vatican launched the “Fig Leaf Campaign” to prevent “all lasciviousness” in religious imagery by camouflaging visible penises and pubic hair in sculpture and painting. Michelangelo was ordered to repaint the religious figures in the Sistine Chapel’s Last Judgement fresco. The old artist refused, but the job was dutifully completed after his death by Daniele Ricciarelli, who was nicknamed “Il Braghettone” (“The Breech-maker”) for the loincloths he added in compliance with the campaign. The fig leaf cover-up continued through the 17th and 18th centuries, creating ample work for future restorations. Naturally, there was a discussion about clothing Michelangelo’s David. And although that did not transpire, within months of being installed on the Piazza della Signoria in June 1504, David had his modesty covered with a garland of gilded fig leaves. The original location of the statue under the roof of the Loggia dei Lanzi did not work out for technical reasons, and those who decided the new location deemed it prudent to minimize its exposure with a tasteful fig girdle.
It was later removed, although a replica made in the mid-1850s for London’s newly built Victoria & Albert Museum had a special removable fig leaf to cover David’s genitalia (mounted on painful-looking hooks). The story that this arrangement resulted from Queen Victoria’s shock at the sight of David’s nudity seems to be apocryphal, given her penchant for buying overtly erotic artworks for her beloved Albert. These included paintings like William Edward Frost’s L’Allegro (purchased for the Prince’s birthday in 1848) and John Lawlor’s Bather. It also included sculptures—Julius Troschel’s La Filatrice Addormentata—and even photographs, such as Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s scandalous albumen print The Two Ways of Life, which depicted real-life models salaciously lounging across half-a-dozen combined negatives.
The Queen, whose name later became synonymous with prudery and suppressed sexuality, shared her delight in the joys of sex with the most unlikely of figurative bedfellows. In a 1974 interview with James Day on CUNY TV, Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner said:
Sex at best, even today, is a dirty word. As a matter of fact, there is that conflict that you talk about between sex and art, or pornography and art. If a picture is not too sexy and it’s well done, then it’s art. But even our definitions of obscenity … “if it appeals to prurient interest, then it’s obscene.” But what is “prurient interest”? We use it as if it means simply sexual arousal. What is this thing about sexual arousal that we are so ashamed of? It’s one of the most attractive things in life. It makes for a great many people a rather tedious existence more pleasurable.
Sometimes covering sexy art was employed as a means of heightening titillation. Borrowing from the sacred tradition of hinged shutters and curtains that concealed religious artwork to give an additional significance to the ritual of revelation (both physical and metaphorical), 18th-century erotic paintings were often hidden behind curtains. An example of such a painting—a nude on a bed, mostly obscured by a curtain—can be seen in the background of William Hogarth’s Marriage a la mode: The Tête à Tête.
In 1866, the Ottoman ambassador and collector of erotica, Khalil-Bey, commissioned a painting by Gustave Courbet. The resulting work, titled L'Origine du Monde, depicted what English poet James Fenton succinctly described as a “close-up of the female pudenda.” Khalil-Bey placed it in a lavatory, and concealed it, for maximum effect, with a green curtain so it could be revealed to select male guests after private dinner parties. The cover, in this case, was used for sexual emphasis, to maximize the drama of anticipated unveiling. L’Origine du Monde was later bought by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who opted for a different way of raising the temperature before the grand reveal. He asked his brother-in-law, the surrealist painter André Masson, to paint a panel which was then integrated into the frame. Fenton described his impression of Masson’s cover as follows:
Terre Érotique, showing the same view of a woman’s private parts but playing calligraphically on the idea of the body as a landscape, retained a sense of titillation. The terracotta-coloured panel was designed to slide back, so that Lacan’s visitors were treated to a drama of unveiling.
So covering up risqué art can go either way. Like Courbet’s libidinous canvas, it can be a way to aggravate what Hefner called “prurient interest,” or as with Talepasand’s provocations, it can be a way to prevent accidental “nonconsensual viewing.”
Accidental nonconsensual viewing is often linked to censorship on the grounds of immodesty. In 2016, the Western press erupted with condemnation of “cultural submission” when nude Roman statues were covered up during the visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to Rome’s Capitoline Museums. In an article titled, “Who’s Covering Up the Italian Statue Cover-Up?”, the Atlantic quoted the British-Egyptian doctor Nervana Mahmoud, who objected to the idea that a non-Muslim nation would “sacrifice its historical legacy to please foreign dignitaries” in a “shambolic appeasement of Islamism.” Mahmoud firmly opposed any such appeasement on the grounds that “Iran shares a basic common value with ISIS—the rejection of art and Western values.” Rouhani’s trip to Rome took place shortly before widely publicized ISIS atrocities, including the spectacularly barbaric destruction of Palmyra. The group’s stated goal was cultural cleansing, to eliminate non-Islamic history across Syria—an erasure of artifacts the theocratic regime condemned.
Compared to the violence of ISIS, practically any other suppression of art seems trivial. Still, the shrouding of Talepasand’s busty figurines on the grounds of offending Islamic modesty doctrines, and the row over Michelangelo’s iconic sculpture because it might be deemed pornographic, reveal a worrying trend. The question of whether an artwork is offensive is now determined by the least generous interpretation of the most sensitive viewer. This trend gets us closer to the “quasi-theocratic” society that Gore Vidal dreaded.
When Christopher Hitchens interviewed director Miloš Forman about The People vs. Larry Flynt, Forman revealed that his decision to work on the movie was motivated by the fact that the Nazis and the Soviets, who had both occupied his native Czechoslovakia, had insisted on “cleaning things up.” Supposedly pornographic art was low-hanging fruit and, as Forman recalled, the crackdown even won applause from the locals. What followed, under both occupations, was a steady ratcheting up of oppression, despotism, and “casual humiliation.” Having experienced firsthand the damage caused to freedom by the censorship of images, Forman knew the importance of resisting it. He did not have the luxury of taking the First Amendment for granted, which is why he strove to defend it in the country he had adopted as his own.
