Monday, 12 March 2001
Thomas Mann's short story Mario and the Magician, a fable on the rise of fascism in Italy, begins with a small episode that seems unconnected to the main theme but, on contemplation, is intimately linked to it.
Thomas Mann's short story Mario and the Magician, a fable on the rise of fascism in Italy, begins with a small episode that seems unconnected to the main theme but, on contemplation, is intimately linked to it.
It is directly taken from an episode from Mann's own life, when he took his family on holiday to an Italian beach resort. In the story, a liberal German family allows its eight-year-old daughter to take off her swimsuit, which is stiff with sand, to rinse it in the sea.
The Italians on the beach are outraged, and mount a public protest.
The narrator is puzzled.
"In the last decade our attitude towards the nude body and our feelings about it have undergone a fundamental change all over the world. There are things we 'never think about' any more, and among these is the freedom we had permitted to this by no means provocative little childish body. But in these parts it was taken as a challenge."
Not just, it seems, in the context of Mussolini's Italy.
Last week, the police mounted a raid on the Saatchi gallery in London, and there were suggestions that several works of art by Tierney Gearon, an American photographer, be removed. A number of complaints from members of the public had been received, and the police had come to the view that the display of Gearon's photographs of naked, masked children on a beach may contravene child-protection legislation.
This heavy-handed action roused, unsurprisingly, condemnation from across the board. Baroness Warnock said that she "couldn't imagine anything more terrible than police coming in and saying this photographer can't take pictures of their own children". Alan Yentob was "sure they are completely innocent pictures". Blake Morrison said, rightly, that our current touchstone for obscenity has become the photographing of a naked child, and that this would have baffled all previous ages.
It is certainly an extraordinary action to take, and, personally, I cannot see what rational person could view these pictures as obscene.
By the same standards, our galleries are absolutely full of works of art which might contravene the Children Acts; not just Mapplethorpe's deliberately sexual images of children, but Bronzino's National Gallery allegory, with some decidedly under-age and incestuous sexual contact going on.
And for heaven's sake, no one tell the Met about the Wallace Collection, stuffed as it is with French rococo putti, all intently observing the lewdest scenes. And there is, of course, some art of previous ages that no painter or photographer could possibly get away with now; there is a Fragonard in Munich, which depicts a barely pubescent girl masturbating with a dog.
Next to a fairly average Boucher, Ms Gearon's photographs seem statements of utter blamelessness. What's wrong with them, then, that they have aroused the ire of the coppers? Well, first, the items in the Saatchi gallery are photographs, and therefore, as Blake Morrison says, "real - in a way that a figurative painting could never be". But, second, there has been a shift in belief, one that is as evident in the defenders of the work of art as in its official detractors.
The only defence now available for a work of art of this sort is that it is "innocent"; that there is no conceivable sexual content in it that would be apparent to any serious investigator. I don't see it. Childhood sexuality is an insistent presence in these photographs, with their masks and their forward posing. The question ought to be not whether these photographs are innocent of sexual implication, but whether that is an improper subject for the investigation of serious art?
The innocence of children is the principal belief that paedophiles fervently share with their official prosecutors. Paedophiles need to believe that children are innocent; the great desire of sexual abusers is of initiation into knowledge. They are more unwilling than anyone to admit what everyone has always known - that children have some form of sexuality.
To say that is not to think that the potential for desire in children should on its own ever lead to sexual practice, but it is entirely proper to say that their sexuality is a reasonable subject for the investigation of artists, as well as scientists.
Of course, any photographer who corrupted his models should be prosecuted. But no one can possibly think that Ms Gearon, photographing her own children, did any such thing. And to say that artists should not be permitted, within these bounds, to talk about the subject with freedom is to sacrifice an important civil principle to a single dubious proposition.
What readings will be drawn from Ms Gearon's photographs, a Bronzino allegory, Lolita or, for that matter, Little Dorrit, by someone who is already deeply disturbed, no one can say. If these subjects cannot be talked about by artists, then we have begun to lose our belief in the value a civilised society should place on art altogether.
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