Friday, 16 March 2001
Just inside the inner entrance of the Saatchi Gallery there is an easy way to take the measure of its owner's attitude to media controversy. Some 15 feet of the wall is covered with a dense mosaic of framed newspaper articles bearing headlines such as "Art too hot to show" and "Art or outrage?"
Just inside the inner entrance of the Saatchi Gallery there is an easy way to take the measure of its owner's attitude to media controversy. Some 15 feet of the wall is covered with a dense mosaic of framed newspaper articles bearing headlines such as "Art too hot to show" and "Art or outrage?"
And after yesterday's opening, the first time the public could get in since the row over Tierney Gearon's photographs of her naked children erupted, it is clear that this memorial to moral consternation will soon stretch even further.
Journalists hoping to report on the seizure of the pictures may have been disappointed - the police stayed away pending a Crown Prosecution Service decision on whether there was a case. The CPS finally rang to say no action would be taken.
But there were plenty of consolations in the modest carnival of art lovers, students and protesters who arrived for the midday opening, not least the presence of Vincent Bethell and supporters of the Freedom To Be Yourself campaign.
For Mr Bethell, "being yourself" seems to be a matter of taking all your clothes off in public and - outraged by the assumption that nakedness might be crudely equated with indecency - he had come to do just that, stripping off with several colleagues just before noon.
The gesture prompted a stampede of astounded workmen from Jack's Café, across the road, and a clatter of camera shutters from the press photographers.
But it also demonstrated the curious terror that the human body can produce when exposed in unconventional ways. "I've got three children," yelled one incensed man. "If any one saw you mugs I'd slap the lot of you." Another, beside himself with rage at this eccentric defence of liberty, shrieked: "You fucking nonces."
"Hiding Obsesses, Revealing Heals" read the poster carried by one naked protester and for a moment it seemed all too likely that he would be able to apply this unconventional form of medicine in practice. Then the gates opened and the crowd surged down the ramp to queue for admission, clothed and unclothed united in decorous English patience.
Inside, Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, welcomed the naked protesters to the show and calmly fielded questions from journalists. Before the exhibition's opening, there had been no discussion of the pictures' potential to cause trouble, she claimed. In hindsight, she conceded, this might have been a little naïve, but she insisted she could still look at the pictures "with an open mind".
Joanna Needham and Catherine McCormack weren't quite so sure. In Jack's Café, before the opening, the two art history students from University College London, had reflected on John Berger's distinction between the naked and the nude. ("To be naked is to be yourself, to be nude is to be seen by others and not recognised as yourself" was how one of them recalled it.) And they had mused over what other art works might arouse the News of the World's moral outrage; Bronzino's Allegory of Cupid and Venus, in which a young boy tongue-wrestles with the goddess of love while tweaking her nipple, was elected as the prime candidate for a modern resuscitation of Victorian sexual terror.
In front of Gearon's images they were more hesitant about dismissing the fuss as mere philistinism. "We're slightly changing our minds about a couple of them," said Joanna, noting that in more than one picture there was a troubling ambiguity about the exact nature of the relationships. Kristina Henschen, whose child lay sleeping in the buggy she was pushing round the gallery, was unperturbed though. She could see no real problems with the pictures "but then I'm Swedish", she added, before turning away to attend to some journalists seeking to add a maternal viewpoint to those of obsessional nudists.
Outside a bereted figure who gave his name as Leon was stuffing copies of a manifesto for a free revolutionary art into the Saatchi Gallery postbox, a manifesto which called for "complete freedom for art". If he really wanted to take the battle directly to the forces of reaction all he had to do was cross the road, where Filippo Sardo, manning the counter at Jack's, was putting the case for censorship. If he were to display images of naked children, he declared, he'd be arrested. Call it art and stick it on the walls across the road though and you could get away with it.
In Mr Sardo's view the double standard was unacceptable and when it came to kids "nudidity" was out of order. The naked glamour models pinned to the wall suggested that, when it came to public display of nudity at least, he had a few double standards of his own.
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