"The art pleases by reminding, not by deceiving."

The quote by artist John Constable (1776-1837) stuck a chord in me when I found it in E.H. Gombrich's classic study Art & Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation (org. 1960) while preparing for a seminar earlier this autumn. Why? Partly because I am trying to dig deeper into possible perceptions of art in a medieval context. Images were to a large extent used in the Christian context as a way to both remember and experience (relive) the biblical scenes. Various techniques were used to fill images with a vividness that made them evidence of that the events in biblical stories were the truth.

In the book by Gombrich the above work by Constable, Wivenhoe Park, Essex (1816), is a recurrent example throughout the study of the perceptions of art. It is a landscape painting of a park with a grand house in the background. We can see some cows belonging to the estate in the foreground and a lake with men in a boat fishing close to a pair of swans. It is a sunny summer day, but clouds are gathering and it might start to rain in a while. Even if we probably never have been to the actual place we believe it is realistically depicted since it follows established conventions of landscape painting. But Constable needed to translate his experiences into the medium of paint and he had to make some negotiations with the truth to make the painting believable. It basically looked better with some minor adjustments.

It seems like one of the greatest fears of experiencing art today is to be deceived. Occasionally voices are raised that want art to stay close to the truth and not lie to the audience or it will automatically loose its credibility. But what would happen if we thought of art more as remembrance? What Constable was trying to explain was that art makes sense when we can understand it from our own experiences. If it is reminding we can more easily connect the experience to our own lives, as something from our history or as a point of reference to personal beliefs or moral values. It will not always work, because we do not want some experiences — but so what? Art can never please us all.

A local incident have put the spotlight on the (not so) noble art of censorship. Let's begin with the context. The above image is a film still from a video message from Håkan Juholt, former leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, to a local leading loud-mouth politician from the same party, Lennart Holmlund. It was shown at a big event as part of celebrating Holmlund as he is about to leave politics. It is very tongue-in-cheek and as you can see Juholt chose a statue of a naked women as background to his 30 second long film. And so, the controversy begun — and it is a very interesting and multilayered problem that presented itself. The local TV-channel contacted me to make a statement, but I want to dig a little bit deeper into this than what a 5 minute interview cut to 10 seconds on the air can afford. Situations like this one happens all the time, I just wish politicians or bureaucrats could call me first for some good advice.

So where to start? Let's start with the response from the organizer of the event when they saw the video. Their immediate reaction was that this film cannot be shown as it might come across as sexist, and Umeå has an ambition of being aware of issues of gender and also has a proud feminist tradition (soon a museum focussing on women's history will open). They were probably right, but instead of communicating this to Juholt it was decided that the sculpture of the naked woman should be blurred from the image. So  it looked like this...

When a local newspaper published the original film on its website, the controversy begun. Juholt was offended both because he had not been informed of the manipulation and because the sculpture of the woman was made by his maternal grandfather, Arvid Källström. He could not understand why an artwork depicting a naked woman in this day and age should offend anybody so much that it lead to censorship — especially in Umeå, The European City of Culture 2014. It was not even offensive in 1954 when it was made. His opinion was supported locally and the organizers apologized, said that Juholt should have been contacted and that they did not realize it was a piece of art... As if not art can be offensive ever?

I can fully understand why the organizers saw a potential discussion of sexism in this film. Naked women in art are common goods, especially in Swedish public art in the 1940s and 1950s. A beautiful female nude was considered as something that most people could understand and appreciate as good art. Today discussions of objectifications of the female body does however problematize this conception of the female nude, and Juholt also missed other aspects of his inclusion of his grandfather's work. We don't see the whole sculpture, just the parts of it that inevitably focus our gaze on the breasts and the curve of the hip. I would call it a sexualized fragmentation of the sculpture and together with Juholt's speech the whole staging with this naked body comes across as very "guy-ish". When it was first shown the audience it also lacked other information on the context such as where it is placed, who made it and when. It is not as familiar to us as it is to him. Of course I can understand his intention to celebrate Holmlund by including an art work as a "secret message" to the city of Umeå (and perhaps give himself some "cultural credibility" at the same time) but this gets lost in this presentation. If the organizers' had contacted Juholt this could easily have been clarified, but instead they acted on instinct (and I don't know how much time they had to make this decision) and created a new problem. The fact that if you try to hide something, you often turn the attention to it and your act will backfire completely.

Call me next time, because you clearly need some art historical competence! Art historians do not just know the names of numerous artists and the titles of various art works. We also know about the perception of art, visual culture, we can also explain historical contexts as well as contemporary readings and a whole lot more.