Charged Image Vs. A University In Retreat
October 3, 2004
By STEVEN HOLMES
"As a gallery connected to an art school and university, we are eager to address issues and engage in a dialogue and open discussion with students and the public." That is what University of Hartford Joseloff Gallery Director Zina Davis said in a press release preceding the opening of the exhibition "The Charged Image: Work from the Collection of Douglas Cramer."
She was referring to what she must have thought was going to be provocative subject matter for some members of her community.
But then a different controversy erupted, one that nobody could have anticipated.
Citing copyright infringement, the university pulls a painting from the wall, copies of the exhibition catalog containing images of the painting are locked up, and the university that had just a week earlier called for "open discussion" retreats into silence.
Why won't the curator of the exhibition, the dean of the Hartford Art School or anyone else at the University of Hartford discuss the copyright issue? Whose copyright might have been violated? Whose decision was it to remove the painting - the university's or the painting's owner, Douglas S. Cramer? The painting is 5 years old - why is this becoming an issue now?
Damian Loeb, the artist at the center of the controversy, has run into similar legal troubles over copyright before - something that Zina Davis surely knew before hanging the work, because Loeb's troubles are common knowledge in the art world.
The painting in question, Loeb's "Blow Job (Three Little Boys)" shows three young boys dressed in blue blazers and, in the background, a teenage girl performing oral sex on a boy. The images are taken from two different sources and merged into the painting, a method of appropriation which many artists employ, but one that has caused Loeb trouble in the past. It turns out that it's not the quasi-explicit depiction of oral sex that has led to the painting's removal, but the image of the boys, appropriated from a photograph by photographer Tina Barney. The Courant has reported that the three boys are the sons of Scott Harrison Smith, a prominent Litchfield County resident, arts patron, a past member of the board of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and an incorporator of the Hartford Art School.
As someone who works in the same profession as Zina Davis, I can imagine myself in her shoes, horrified at such a bizarre coincidence. As a new father, I imagine myself likewise horrified to see an image of my child used this way and exhibited in the community in which I live. I would almost certainly ask the university to remove the image.
But as a curator, I can't support the university's refusing to answer questions - a decision that, paradoxically, encourages more questions.
The University of Hartford has failed in one of the most important responsibilities any university is charged with: to provide a forum for the dialogue that Davis herself promised before the show opened. If the real reason for the removal for the painting was to protect the privacy of a family, why not say so? Most people would get that. The university could explain why that was the right thing to do but could also invite an examination of what happened here, of the relationship between appropriated and "original" imagery, of the rights of subjects and other issues that the 380 art students training at the school should be thinking about.
"The Charged Image" promised to be a show in which provocative artwork would be exhibited in an atmosphere of openness and intellectual engagement. Instead, the university has shown disregard for the intelligence of its academic and cultural community.
The organization I work for, Real Art Ways, has a record of supporting artists who have been denied a forum, taking artworks censored by city, state and national agencies, showing them in our galleries and hosting public forums, so that all sides of a controversy can be aired. Similarly, the Wadsworth Atheneum displayed work by Robert Mapplethorpe just after an exhibition of his work at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington was canceled under pressure from Sen. Jesse Helms in 1989.
The removal of an artwork from any exhibition is a serious matter. Taking it seriously means being prepared to talk about it. I suggest an open, public dialogue.
Steven Holmes is director of visual arts at Real Art Ways in Hartford.