Explicit artwork deserves place in public buildings
OTTAWA — An art gallery in one of the provincial government’s downtown Toronto office buildings is hanging a piece made up of tiny images of naked women, which the provincial Tories’ women’s-issues critic says objectifies women.
It’s the John B. Aird Gallery, an independent non- profit, though it’s named for a former lieutenant- governor and is physically inside the Macdonald Block at 900 Bay St., near the legislature. Aside from being a major office building, it’s where the government does lockups and whatnot. It’s very much part of the government’s Queen’s Park campus.
The piece, part of an exhibition of works by young artists, is called “Sacred Circle VI” and it’s by Rosalie H. Maheux of Toronto. It’s a mandala, the geometric art form popular in Hinduism and Buddhism, though it could almost be a design for a stained-glass rose window, too. It’s a sort of collage of tiny images, repeated over and over again, that look as though they were clipped from pornographic magazines.
Maheux has many in this series, as the title implies, with the component images ranging from PG-13 to X. There’s one that seems to be made up of pictures of liquor bottles, but mainly they’re of undressed women. Sometimes with close friends, or at least people they’re getting to know well.
City TV in Toronto did a story on it Wednesday. “I think we have to see it as more of an intellectual piece. I don’t think it’s pornographic,” she told the station. “It’s more like a statement about opposition, about beautiful, ugly. It’s a duality.”
Laurie Scott, the Progressive Conservatives’ critic on women’s issues, sent out a statement Thursday.
“After watching a news report on CityNews last night, the PC Caucus is disappointed to see an art gallery, located inside a publicly owned government building, has chosen to display graphic and sexually explicit images of women,” the statement said. “Regardless of the aims or intent of the artist, Ontarians expect their government to lead by example in combating the sexual objectifi- cation of women. The fact that a publicly housed gallery has been allowed to not only display but to sell images of this nature is very worrisome.”
This … seems like a stretch. Does the aim or intent of the artist not matter here? There’s obviously an eye-of-the-beholder judgment to be made about how well Maheux has achieved it, but couldn’t reasonable people agree that titillation is neither the purpose nor the effect of the piece? It doesn’t even seem meant to scandalize.
To say that Maheux’s piece promotes the objectification of women is like saying that Edward Burtynsky glorifies the degradation of the environment with his beautiful, disturbing photographs of industrial devastation, or that Hieronymus Bosch promoted sin. Or, on the other hand, that Georgia O’Keeffe just really liked flowers. If that’s all you’re getting out of them, you’re not paying attention.
There’s an important subtlety here. Maheux is definitely using images that objectify women. But for the purpose of commenting on the objectification of women. Saying that you mustn’t use nudity or sexual imagery in art that makes a statement about the treatment of those things in our culture is problematic.
Particularly just now, when the government itself is actively working on how our culture handles sexuality and the dynamics of power especially between men and women.
“Our work on the Select Committee on Sexual Violence and Harassment has highlighted that women in Ontario still face immense barriers at home, at work and in broader society. The recent public outcry over sexual violence against women and crimes like human trafficking shows that Ontarians want a safer, more inclusive province for women and girls,” Scott’s statement said.
That committee on sexual violence and harassment, which Scott helped push the Liberals into creating, has travelled the province hearing stories of abuse. The committee’s work includes a lot of discussions of sexual behaviour but it isn’t remotely erotic, any more than Maheux’s mandala is. “Sacred Circle VI” is fairly nice from a distance; the closer you get to it, the grosser it gets. In fact, in her trying to turn the ugliness of pornography against itself, it seems pretty clear that Maheux is on the same side as Scott.