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© Jon Horne 2001 from Touch Nottingham (internet magazine and What's On guide)
If Gearon's pictures were on show as part of an exhibition at, for example, your local library, then they would still have caused a degree of interest, and possibly a little consternation too. Of the pictures on display, some are quite beautiful, in an awkward, disturbing sort of way. The one with the little boy carrying a fishing net, looking sad as he is kept waiting by his grandfather (busy with adult matters, speaking on a mobile phone) is undoubtedly poignant. Others - particularly the one which keeps cropping up in the media (and which I've ripped off in order to illustrate this article), of the two kids on the beach, wearing masks, under an artificially-blue sky, are an unpleasant mixture of family-album blandness and fashion-mag detachment. In such an environment, many of the questions that have been raised by this controversy would still have arisen: whether it is right to show children naked and vulnerable in a public context; whether it is more or less acceptable to show ones own children in this way (as opposed to using some other children who could have more easily kept their anonymity); whether in fact the children were made to do this, or whether the situations just happened. We might even have asked whether or not a family snapshot counts as Art. Whatever the reaction, the pictures could have been viewed and judged on their merits, and according to the audience's tastes. People could have enjoyed them, or been disgusted by them, or they could have found them dull and not given them a second thought. As it is, the photographs are on display at the Saatchi Gallery - home of Damien Hirst's dead animals in formaldehyde, Chris Ofili's shitty Virgin, Tracey Emin's shag 'n' tell tent, and more recently Sarah Lucas' fag-smoking plaster vagina (her own, apparently). Funded by the millions accrued from the morally-blank business of advertising, the Saatchi Gallery is where élite High-Concept low-execution Art is paraded for bourgeois-bating shock-value. We gasp; they snigger. And that is as much as any of it has to do with us. If Charles Saatchi's art collection has an overall theme, then that theme is... Art. Intertextuality is the game; art about Art. Or should I have put one of those 'art's in inverted commas? Either way, by exhibiting in an environment where post-modernism is the norm, an artist's work is immediately shielded from the tastes and opinions of the general public. The idea that we may look at a piece in that context and 'like' it, or 'not like' it, becomes a virtual absurdity. This is not to dismiss all or any of the above-mentioned works. However much elephant crap went into its creation, Chris Ofili's prize-winning effort is a rather moving (and beautiful) piece. For all I know, it may be genuinely devotional. Certainly it can be read as an inquiry into the artist's complicated relationship with religion, and more grandly as part of an ongoing (real world) discourse between aspects of Africa and Europe (and for that matter, between spirituality and materialism on either continent). Even in the Po-Mo sense, the work 'foregrounds' a rarely-discussed European artistic archetype, the Black Madonna - which makes it a comment on culture, history and human relations, as well as a comment about Art. And as for Tracey Emin, I love the fact that Wild Billy Childish (for whom I've always had a soft spot) got top billing in the bonks-of-my-life tent. But there I go, giving my bourgeois opinions, and that won't do at all. In the millieu of trained intellectual deconstructionists, to give consideration to the aesthetics of a work of art, in anything but an intertextual sense, is to Miss The Point. We know this, because every time a conceptual work has been dragged up in front of the media for vilification, the Art crowd have leapt up as one body to tell us that we've Missed The Point. The world of human relations and human feelings can go stick a Silk Cut up its fanny, because it has no place in Saatchi's Realm Of Ironic Cool. Most people (me included), if asked to make a comment on post-modernism, would flap around for a bit, get embarassed or annoyed, and then mumble something about Quentin Tarantino. So let's do just that. The sequence in 'Pulp Fiction', where Uma Thurman and John Travolta go dancing in the restaurant, is a fine illustration of post-modernist art. Firstly, the scene itself is lifted wholesale from 'Bande à Part'. Secondly, the comedy of the sequence is based upon the fact that this is John Travolta, rather than his character, doing a bad impression of 'Saturday Night Fever' in a restaurant whose theme is 'Grease' and 'American Graffiti'. So, it's just art about art, right? Here is Richard Dorment, writing in the Telegraph in January of this year, when 'I am a Camera' opened: "One way to approach (the exhibition) is to think of it as a show about realism in contemporary art. Concentrating on photography, but containing work by a sculptor and two painters, it makes you think hard about the whisper-thin divide in contemporary culture between what is art and what is not." Well, at least he admitted that the Po-Mo interpretation is only "one way" to look at a work of art. There is a crucial difference between Tarantino's popular use of irony, and the High Art version: However much he intellectualises his work (and parodies his own intellectualising), however much his films refer back to other films, and however many ideas he steals and re-hashes, Tarantino still has to entertain a public which doesn't share his knowledge of cinema. Commercial pressures mean that he can't shield himself from the likes and dislikes of the rest of us, even if he wanted to. The self-conscious referencing and irony have a purpose: Tarantino makes funny thrillers. Let's get back to Tierney Gearon and 'I am a Camera'. Since all the trouble started, everyone with an axe to grind about art, motherhood and child-abuse has been spouting off in the press - just as I am doing now. The big guns of popular commentary, Germaine Greer and Blake Morrison (both of whom have used their families in their own work) defended Gearon's work, on the grounds that they didn't find the pictures obscene, and that anyone who does has a problem. Morrison: "What a sick mind could make of the photos is impossible to say. A sick mind can make anything of anything. But I don't think paedophiles will be rushing to the Saatchi Gallery. Nor should the police have rushed there." From the art world, Jake Chapman follows the party line: "Art criticism should not be based on the 'obscenity' laws, which are as melodramatic as the name implies." [both quotes from the Independent, 11.3.01] As I said at the start of this article, I'm inclined to agree with these comments. Gearon's own reaction has been of the 'hey, I'm a mom' variety: "I think of myself as a wholesome person. I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't do drugs. Things at home are simple. What I was trying to do here is to give people a taste of the innocence in life." [Independent on Sunday, 13.3.01] This is understandable, if a little disingenuous. Back when the exhibition opened, Gearon was busy covering herself against accusations of middle-class privilege by pointing out that her own mother "was sent away when I was 13 and she has a lot of mental problems. She does crazy things, ...she kissed loads of boys in my class." As for her father (who is in several of the pictures) Gearon became "almost like his wife" throughout her childhood. [Daily Telegraph,17.1.01] Make of that what you will. As far as I'm concerned, the issues raised by the police involvement in this case are real, and worth discussing. It is no small thing to exploit people for the sake of your art, but nor is it unusual. Alice (in Wonderland) and Christopher Robin (Milne) suffered throughout their lives for having been the subject of literature. Tierney Gearon's children won't have to go through that, but the danger is there, and has been recognised. It is easy to look at the world of High Art and simply dismiss it as irrelevant, but it would be a mistake to do so. These people are lauded, by academics in particular, as our cultural superiors - as much for their lack of interest in conventional morals as for the work they do. We might think that their amoral stance just means that they ingest some interesting chemicals, and that get to sleep around a lot more than the rest of us. But it is not just about sex and drugs and wearing sunglasses indoors. Amorality means what it says: no morals. Only last week, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir - the personification of where art and academia meet - were discovered to have signed, in the late sixties, a petition to legalise sex with children. I believe Tierney Gearon when she protests her own innocence. I also believe her when she claims to be searching for a certain kind of innocence in her art - and for that, she deserves neither prosecution nor persecution. It is the context which brings 'obscenity' to the work. High-Concept and amorality are entrenched in art as the orthodox, unchallenged view, and the only way for a work to break into the public domain - where it might cause someone like you or me to feel something - is for an incident like this to have happened. It's just a shame that it's happened to a person who appears to be as vulnerable as the subjects of her work. read more rants and raves |
