Nudists join the show as Saatchi's carnival reopens

Art controversy: Tierney Gearon's photographs of her naked children back on display as Crown Prosecution Service decides not to prosecute

By Thomas Sutcliffe
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.

Surprise, surprise

Friday, 16 March 2001

There's a surprise: the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, "after carefully reviewing the evidence", not to take legal action against the Saatchi Gallery over the photographs of naked children on show there (in a show sponsored by our sister newspaper, The Independent on Sunday).

There's a surprise: the Crown Prosecution Service has decided, "after carefully reviewing the evidence", not to take legal action against the Saatchi Gallery over the photographs of naked children on show there (in a show sponsored by our sister newspaper, The Independent on Sunday).

Plain-clothes police officers can now be recalled from investigating reports of cherubs in statuary at sundry locations around Britain, or depictions of them in paintings by Renaissance artists in public places.

The artificial panic over representations of children's naked bodies risked making worse the fearfulness for our children that so distorts our society.

Even amid our present, overheated paranoia about paedophilia, though, it was never remotely plausible that a jury would have convicted either the Saatchi Gallery or the artist, Tierney Gearon. It could not have been seriously argued that displaying the pictures put children at risk, even if some people found them disturbing.

Fortunately, common sense prevailed before this nonsense went that far.

Saatchi photographs are not obscene, says CPS

By Jason Bennetto, Crime Correspondent
Friday, 16 March 2001

Photographs of nude children featured in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London are not obscene and do not break the law, the Crown Prosecution Service ruled yesterday.

Photographs of nude children featured in an exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London are not obscene and do not break the law, the Crown Prosecution Service ruled yesterday.

Scotland Yard had threatened to seize the photographs after three complaints that the pictures, taken by two photographers, were indecent and would encourage paedophiles.

The case, which won the backing of Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, provoked an outcry over censorship of the arts and freedom of expression. The CPS said no action would be taken against the north London gallery - which is owned by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi - and the Metropolitan Police said the matter was closed.

A spokeswoman for the CPS, which was sent a file of evidence by the Metropolitan Police's clubs and vice unit, said: "We do not consider that the photographs are indecent." The images, which are part of the exhibition called I Am A Camera, are mainly taken by Tierney Gearon, an artist from the US who lives in London. They feature her two children, Emily, six, and Michael, four. The exhibition is sponsored by the Independent on Sunday.

In one photograph the children are wearing theatrical masks and are standing naked on a beach; in another, Michael is urinating in the snow with his sister in the background.

Ms Gearon said: "My children are my entire life ... and these are beautiful, innocent pictures. You have to understand the context ... which is that I was documenting my family for two years."

A spokesman for the gallery said: "Everyone at the Saatchi Gallery is very relieved as are all the artists in the show. It's been a very worrying time for the two artists involved and their families. We are extremely grateful to the public and press who have supported the artists and the gallery."

The exhibitors were facing prosecution under the 1978 Protection of Children Act, but the crown prosecutors said that the photographs were not considered indecent and that the Saatchi Gallery could successfully use the defence that it had a legitimate reason to show the images because they are considered works of art.

The Act makes it a crime, punishable by up to three years' imprisonment and a fine of up to £10,000, to make indecent photographs of children (anyone under 16) for possession, distribution or show.

A CPS statement said: "In reaching this decision, the CPS considered whether the photographs in question were indecent, and the likely defence of the gallery, ie whether they had a legitimate reason for showing them." Under the current law the definition of indecency is anything that "is likely to offend right-minded people".

The photographs will remain on display until the end of the exhibition on 15 April.

Prosecution ruled out over naked children photos

Thursday, 15 March 2001

The Saatchi Gallery will not be prosecuted for displaying controversial photographs of naked children despite claims the exhibition was obscene, the Crown Prosecution Service said today.

The Saatchi Gallery will not be prosecuted for displaying controversial photographs of naked children despite claims the exhibition was obscene, the Crown Prosecution Service said today.

Police were called to the gallery in north London last week after complaints that the pictures - taken by American photographers Tierney Gearon and Nan Goldin - were indecent and would appeal to paedophiles.

But a CPS spokesman said that after careful consideration there was no realistic prospect of any conviction under the Protection of Children Act 1978.

An attempt to make sense of our fractured lives

But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland (Oxford University Press, £11.99)

By Sue Hubbard
Wednesday, 14 March 2001

So now it seems that, among their other duties, the officers of the Metropolitan Police have become art critics. When they paid a visit to the Saatchi Gallery to denounce the work of the photographer Tierney Gearon, who had taken nude photographs of her children, it would have been interesting to hear what arguments the police used, and with which critical theory they substantiated their case.

So now it seems that, among their other duties, the officers of the Metropolitan Police have become art critics. When they paid a visit to the Saatchi Gallery to denounce the work of the photographer Tierney Gearon, who had taken nude photographs of her children, it would have been interesting to hear what arguments the police used, and with which critical theory they substantiated their case.

Contemporary art, more than any other creative form, seems to invoke the ire of the middlebrow. There appears to be a brooding anxiety that those clever-dick artists are pulling the wool over their eyes. Dripped paint, elephant dung, unmade beds - a child could do that!

In But Is It Art?, Cynthia Freeland, professor of philosophy at the University of Houston, has written a book of simplicity and clarity that may well come to rival John Berger's Ways of Seeing as a reader's digest of the rubric of theories that make up contemporary art criticism. What becomes manifest is that, so often, the wrong question is asked. The pertinent query would be: "But is it good art?"

In concise language, mercifully free of art-speak, Freeland challenges the sacred cow of obfuscation so prevalent in art writing: "A theory should help things make sense rather than create obscurity through jargon and weighty words." She cavorts with aplomb through theories about blood, ritual, beauty and sexual politics. She moves with consummate skill, ducking and weaving through readings of Greek tragedy, Chartres cathedral, African sculpture and Native American dance to the relevance of Walter Benjamin's theories on reproduction to digital media and MTV.

Freeland reminds us that, for most tribal people, art and artefact are not distinguishable; that the notion of the individualistic artist is a modern, Western construct. Medieval European Christians did not make "art" as we understand it, but saw themselves as skilled craftsmen who tried to imitate God's divine beauty. She starts in myth and ritual to show how art gave cohesion to older societies, pointing out that modern artists cannot take this consensus of shared beliefs for granted, and that meaning is therefore mutable. This, she suggests, can lead to a sense of shock and abandonment, so that art may be perceived as something alien. Symbols used in religious art, such as blood, become shocking when employed by artists such as Andres Serrano in his infamous Piss Christ (1987).

Kant is named as the predecessor to the scientific psychologists who judge concepts of beauty by studying viewers' eye movements. His influential definition of beauty is explained as "purposiveness without a purpose". This sense of an art work's "rightness", manifest largely through form rather than meaning, developed into the modernist theories of "significant form" expounded by Roger Fry.

Wagner, Kant's notion of the Sublime, and Andy Warhol are all discussed. Freeland illustrates that it is now impossible to separate art theories from practice, so interdependent have they become. The "primitive", the "exotic" and the feminine are all rapidly explored. While Freeland is careful not to give one philosophical stance privilege over another, one senses that her own view probably accords with the critic John Dewey, who claimed that art "expresses the life of a community".

This is a valuable book for anyone perplexed by the arcane theorising of contemporary art. It is, in the end, optimistic, displaying the respectable degree of scepticism illustrated in a quote from the environmental artist Robert Irwin - that art "has come to mean so many things that it doesn't mean anything any more". None the less, Freeland endorses his view that art is perhaps best described as "a continuous expansion of our awareness of the world around us".

Art can enhance an awareness of ourselves, as well as challenge and expand our perceptual relationship to our surroundings. For this reason - dead sheep or no - we will continue to create it, and look at it, in an attempt to make sense of our fractured modern lives.

Galleries face new guidelines over child photos row

By Louise Jury and Jade Garrett
Wednesday, 14 March 2001

The museum world's leading body said yesterday that last week's police raid on the Saatchi Gallery in London had serious implications for art collections throughout Britain.

The museum world's leading body said yesterday that last week's police raid on the Saatchi Gallery in London had serious implications for art collections throughout Britain.

As other galleries monitored the case, police said they would take no further action against the gallery until the Crown Prosecution Service decided whether it would prosecute. Mark Taylor, the director of the Museums Association, which represents nearly all museums and their staff, said it may have to issue advice to members for the first time if the Saatchi case ended in court.

The Saatchi Gallery, which is owned by the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, has been told it faces prosecution under the 1978 Protection of Children Act because of images of naked children in its current exhibition, I Am a Camera.

A file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service by Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit and is being considered. Mr Taylor said his organisation had no existing guidelines on such issues but would have to consider issuing advice if the Saatchi display was found guilty of offences.

He said: "You have to say, if those pictures are obscene, it doesn't say much for some of the naked bodies in the National Gallery. This potential threat is very odd and, if it is followed through, then it would mean a lot of pictures being taken off the wall, which is presumably not what the authorities want."

Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, said it would not remove the pictures. Mr Saatchi refused to comment yesterday.

The Saatchi Gallery's I Am a Camera exhibition

The photographer Tierney Gearon contributed to the Saatchi Gallery's I Am a Camera exhibition. The show is now the subject of a police investigation and the News of the World has branded the pictures 'grotesque' and 'child porn' masquerading as art. Here, the artist expresses her shock and dismay at the way in which her accusers have 'polluted' the innocent images of her family and friends

Tuesday, 13 March 2001

It came as such a complete shock, when I turned up at the Saatchi Gallery in London on Thursday morning, to find that the police were already there - and that the reason they were there was because of the pictures of my family that are included in the exhibition I Am a Camera. That shock turned to disbelief when they explained to me that, because of my photographs, I might even be prosecuted for obscenity.

It came as such a complete shock, when I turned up at the Saatchi Gallery in London on Thursday morning, to find that the police were already there - and that the reason they were there was because of the pictures of my family that are included in the exhibition I Am a Camera. That shock turned to disbelief when they explained to me that, because of my photographs, I might even be prosecuted for obscenity.

Among my first thoughts were, "Why now?" After all, the I Am a Camera show had opened as long ago as January, and it got some great reviews back then; "brilliant" and "stunning" were among some of the words used to praise it. All my family were there for the opening, including the children, and they were so proud. I look back on all that now as a very happy time - though after the excitement of the opening, I was glad when things naturally calmed down. I thought that I could get back to normal life. And then, seven weeks later, this bombshell - a threat that I could be arrested. I was so shocked that I felt numb.

Even now, I find it difficult to understand. One of the pictures that the police complained about is one I took on a ski holiday, of my son Michael peeing - he was four at the time. To me, it's just a really comical image: as any parent knows, when little boys need to pee, they really need to go. I never thought it was anything other than funny and cute. So I was doubly shocked on Sunday when the News of the World decided they were "lurid" and "grotesque" instead. To me, it was a simple case of "when a boy's got to go, a boy's got to go..."

The picture on the beach, of Michael and his sister Emilee wearing masks, was taken when we were on holiday. We were waiting for a plane. I just saw the colours on the sea, and I thought it looked beautiful. I had been carrying round a bag of masks, we'd been playing with them, and I asked the children if they wanted to put two of the masks on. They liked the idea. Sometimes they want to, sometimes they don't. I didn't tell them: "You stand here, you stand there." They just ran around, and they stood the way they wanted to. There was nothing more sinister to it than that.

Now, reading the hysterical criticism of the News of the World and its attack on the publisher of this newspaper for sponsoring the exhibition, I'm left with a strange feeling. Indeed, until last week, it never even entered my head that there could be something seedy about these photographs. They're my family and friends, after all. Now I see my pictures described as child pornography, which is sad for so many reasons - but mainly because the accusers have polluted my images. If people go to an exhibition without being told what to think, they will just see whatever they see. But now a seed has been planted in people's heads, that seed will grow, at least among those who only read the tabloids. It horrifies me to think that people who may otherwise have seen the images and thought they were beautiful, might now see something different - because others have planted those ideas there.

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. So many artists these days want to portray the dark side that it's difficult to make everyday life seem interesting - the things that make us laugh and feel good, the simple things in life. That's what I was trying to show.

I used to be a fashion photographer, doing work for glossy magazines such as Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire. I stopped for a while after I had my children, because I lost interest. Then, two years ago, I started to document my family. It was just an idea, which lit up in my head when a colleague said to me: "Nobody has been able to portray the kind of family you come from." The work of the acclaimed photographer Richard Billingham, one of the star exhibits at the Sensation show at the Royal Academy and now hanging alongside mine in the I Am a Camera show, documents his alcoholic father. It's so much more interesting - and disturbing - than my pictures. It's incredibly blistering. Whereas, when somebody looks at my family on holiday, it's: "Oh, boooring." There's no edge there. To take snapshots of a picture-perfect family - who wants to see those?

Of course, when I started photographing my family two years ago, I never dreamt any of this would happen. I was just focussing my camera and my attention on everyday moments that make us laugh, and - I hoped - touch us all. If I have succeeded, it is in taking little ordinary moments of life and making them look interesting. Now, if you're on the beach with children, then you get nudity, again as any parent knows. That's life - though in any case not all of the pictures include nudity. Of the 15 images, just six include nakedness. And I honestly can't understand the fuss.

I was born in the United States, but I've lived in London for 10 years. But though I feel at home here now, I don't know how to begin to understand the reaction in the media and elsewhere. To me, it's very unsettling, and very strange. When these people see Old Master paintings of naked Cupids - what do they see there? My pictures, by comparison, are very unsensual, very unsexual. They're humorous, if anything. My children were happy to be in the photographs. More than that, they were proud. Nor can I imagine that they will feel differently when they are older - I would not have done.

Before the nightmare of the last few days, my career as a photographer had felt more like a fairy tale. I'd never dreamed my pictures might end up on the walls of the prestigious Saatchi Gallery. I thought that if I was lucky I might publish a book in 20 years' time. But then, by chance, Charles Saatchi's wife Kay saw my photographs, liked them, and asked if she could have one to enter in Baby 2000, a charity art auction, raising money for people with pregnancy-related problems.

Then another charity - Together, a charity for the homeless - asked if I would donate an image. I gave them the picture of my son Michael on a pedestal and his grandmother looking up at him with a smile. Charles Saatchi located that image, and purchased it, too. I met other people who saw my images and loved them. Gradually, I came to believe in myself: these pictures are good. Then in March, Saatchi came to my studio, and said he wanted to buy a collection of the photographs. I thought it was a joke. "This isn't a joke," he replied. And on the basis of those photographs, he decided to do an exhibition relating photography and painting, showing the fine line between the two.

Even then, I didn't realise how big the show was going to be. I was just touched that somebody liked my pictures - until I came to the gallery at the end of last year, and saw the pictures hanging on the wall before the opening. That was when I realised that something important was happening. Everybody who saw the pictures loved them. Just one person found them a bit disturbing, and that worried me. The funny thing is, that person has in the meantime become a close friend. Now she knows my family, and loves the images, too.

As an artist and as a mother, I can only look at the images the way I see them - as wholesome. So I just hope the current furore gets diluted by time, and gets back under the shelf. After all, if these simple, innocent pictures really become a new standard for what is unacceptable, for what is pornographic, that is really frightening, and not just for me.

We have to fight it. If we don't, then something really is wrong. Personally, I haven't slept for four days. I toss and turn, I have migraines, I'm worried about my children. I've told my children: "Somebody doesn't like Mama's photos." They cannot believe it. My seven-year-old daughter Emilee asked: "Why wouldn't somebody like your pictures, Mama? What kind of person would say that? They're beautiful!"

For me, this has been a big family event. At the opening in January, the whole clan was there to support me -- and my children, when they walked in, were so proud to see their images on the wall. That night, any doubt in my mind, if I had had any, which I didn't - would have been settled. My children and their friends were so proud of themselves, and of me.

As for the reaction in the British press: who can say? I don't think it's really about British society, it's only about the media. I heard about the story of Julia Somerville, who was questioned a few years ago because of pictures of her children naked in the bath. Maybe it's because the papers don't have anything to write about any more. When I saw the pictures in the News of the World - "Child Porn They Call Art", the headline said - they put black bands across my children's genitals. The pictures looked dirty for the first time. You can't even see their genitals, and yet there's still something dirty about the way those pictures look in the News of the World, whereas on the wall, they look pure and clean. Those big black boxes succeed in making my pictures look dirty.

The police are trying for a court order to remove the photographs on Thursday. I just hope that they don't succeed. The world I've brought my children up in is a free, positive world. All I want is for that not to change.