Olivares, Rosa
Don’t look at that, don’t touch this, don’t say that

SPENCER TUNICK, 23rt Street, Tenth Ave. NYC 1, 1999

One of the characteristics of contemporary art is that almost everything is permitted. In other words, subverting, scandalizing or altering the status quo is practically impossible. It is not that artists do not try, but nowadays nothing fazes us. Reality has far surpassed any bad dream, any figment of the imagination. The justification of murder, individual or collective, is a subject of television programs with mass audiences; sex with children crosses all borders, without clear legal restrictions, by way of Internet; there is a flourishing tourism business based on offering cheap sex in exotic countries to bourgeois intellectuals and middle class customers from that other world that does not seem quite so exotic, although its customs are truly bizarre; high risk -to players and non-players- games and sports are becoming increasingly popular; the slaughter of innocents is broadcast on live television... In short, I am talking about the midday news, not Sodom and Gomorrah. For an artist, it is difficult to compete with all this. Nevertheless, artists continue to choose controversial subjects and provocative ways of dealing with them. From sex to death, from surreal exaggeration to the most scatological reality, in photographs as well as paintings or site-specific performances. From the use of blood, semen or dung in their works to a more subtle provocation involving the treatment of complicated social themes such as racism, violence or pornography.

Meanwhile, that terrible reality seems to be inevitable, art is still seen as a provocation more dangerous than the very reality motivating it. Censorship, control by the state and other realms of power, thus emerges to make things clear and to tell us exactly what we are to say, what we are to see, what we are to applaud. Based on a somewhat exaggerated instinct of protection, censors eliminate everything that, in their view, is detrimental to public morality: from a Warhol, Haacke or Mapplethorpe exhibition to the confiscation of materials from a photographer’s lab, the interrogation of his models... In recent decades, silently, because it does not seem appropriate to give this type of situation publicity, specific works have been forbidden, awards supporting creativity cancelled and the exhibitions of dozens of artists in our advanced Western world shut down. We are almost always unaware of what is happening in Asian and Arabian countries, although we can only imagine the worst. There are well known artists who have lost their jobs, been thrown in jail or out of their own countries because of their artwork. But all this madness has been perpetrated in the name of a common good, when it is merely one more method of repression and a tactic for power to protect itself from any criticism, the authentic stronghold of Puritan morality.

JOCK STURGES, Christina; Northern California, 1998

What can be the reasoning behind the fact that in the 21st century, in a society that has seen wars and massacres of all kinds, that regularly schedules pornography in its daily routine as if it were afternoon tea, that knows that injustice is one of its sustaining pillars, censorship, prohibition, confiscation and destruction of something apparently as harmless as the work of an artist continues to occur? Censorship does still exist, appearing sporadically in some places, as a chronic malady in others and an all pervasive shadow in almost every advanced society. For certainly, this is also true in the societies we deem advanced.

This is not a weapon used exclusively by tyrannies and dictatorships, as we have been told. Fascist states, the Nazis, all the authoritarian regimes have used it as far back as our memory of humanity can reach, but there is also censorship in democratic countries, in places where hours and hours are devoted to political speeches declaring exemplary leadership in freedom, while, at the same time, censoring the press, the media and, of course, creativity. This is no cause for shock; censorship is as old as power and is justified, to a certain extent, by the very existence of that power. Censorship is simply denying someone’s access to free expression and communication of ideas, images, criticism or different ways of seeing, of seeing and describing the world we live in. The Church has quite habitually censored images created by the best artists throughout the history of art, the sexual organs of the figures of the Sistine Chapel -and many other paintings and sculptures- were covered during certain periods following their creation; not only the works of art considered ‘degenerate’ by Hitler, but also many others equally innocent have been prohibited and destroyed throughout history... and yet perhaps neither the genitals painted by Michelangelo nor Kirchner’s expressionist figures or Mondrian’s grids are innocent. Because art is not decoration, but rather a tool of knowledge; that is the reason for the fear it arouses in spheres of power, and that is the reason why one artist is censored, while another, with very similar work, is never censored at all. Some artwork is loaded and other artwork uses only blank cartridges. Perhaps art is definitively guilty and that is why it is censored and prohibited, and also, perhaps for this reason, it is imperative.

With the development of civilization, not only has computer technology become more advanced and new methods of traceless torture been made possible -such as enabling torture without death- but language has also been enhanced. Terms such as ‘censorship’ have gradually disappeared from the motives for prohibiting or hindering the creation and exhibition of artwork. Especially at present, when almost nobody dares, from political arenas, to censor anything for ideological reasons when they can do so for moral ones. First sexual prudishness, then good manners have become the means for putting the brakes on the trajectory of many artists, but economic aspects have been employed as well. Nowadays, it is worse for an artist to lack funding than to be censored for any reason. And if there is no money, what can we do? There is hardly ever any money for anything that deviates from what is politically correct, in other words, for that art that does not wish to be beautiful alone.

TRACEY EMIN, I've got it all, 2000. Ink-jet print framed. Print size: 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm)

From there to the last reason for censorship, there is but one small step: that of ignorance. This is when the censor believes he can dictate aesthetic taste, define and redefine the concept of art at whim and out of necessity. It is then when an exhibition is rejected, a project is annulled, a show is closed... because that stuff is not considered art. It is then when, for example, the Guggenheim Museum of New York cancels an exhibition by Hans Haacke, prepared over a period of several years, commissioned by the museum itself, because it decides that "that is not art". The criticism of speculation, abuse of power, social fraud... that is not art. Art is only a pretty sunset, a lyrical abstraction and some work by those wild youngsters who are determined to make us nauseous with animals hacked to pieces, bloody photos... which, interestingly, bring in high prices.

On the following pages, we shall see some examples and recall some stories about censored works and artists. But there are many more that cannot be discussed. Some because they have been so perfectly censored that they are unknown, others because the artists themselves refuse to admit they have been censored - "It ‘s just that my photos were not shown in my country for a long time" or "I’ve never really been censored; the fact that my studio was searched, my work confiscated... that can’t be considered censorship". Other artists practice survival tactics through self-censorship, begging us not to publish any of their work. In short, between the difficulties and the fear, after the preliminary censorship, the excessive caution, the lack of public funding for certain things, the weakness of the definition of art... there is hardly any room left for real censorship. There will soon come a time when censorship will be unnecessary, for we will cover our own mouths and cut off our own hands. Then, we will not need anyone to tell us what is good, what is correct or what art is. We may all be dead.

Translation: Dena Ellen Cowan