By Don Nelson
As the old joke goes, some people ought to have their artistic license revoked. It’s a throwaway line that nevertheless reflects the subliminal tension between the broadly defined world of art and the often narrowly defined realm of personal taste.
We ought to be used to that by now, after a few thousand years of talking about it. Since human beings first started drawing, writing, singing, acting, playing music, sculpting, painting and generally creating things out of their imaginations, the lines defining art and obscenity, expression and offense, the enlightening and the culturally degenerative, have shifted and blurred depending on who was deciding and had the power to enforce their view.
There’s hardly been a time in history when the artistic community wasn’t being challenged by the notion that some forms of expression just go too far.
Shakespeare’s works were notoriously bawdy, so much so that his plays were later “Bowdlerized” into The Family Shakespeare by a critic who thought The Bard’s language needed to be cleaned up for wholesome consumption. Classic nude forms in art were eventually Puritanized into shameful displays of the human body. The emerging Hollywood film business pushed the moviemaking envelope so aggressively that the Production Code of 1930, popularly known as the Hays Code, was adopted and enforced (you should read it sometime — its prohibitions are so mind-boggling that almost no movie made today could ever be screened). It lives on today in the form of the Motion Picture Film Association of America’s film rating system.
Books have been banned and burned, artists vilified, songwriters pilloried and speakers censored in self-righteous attacks that, in retrospect (or even in the moment), seem like absolutely lunatic overreactions or pernicious oppression. Even so, the age-old question persists: In the creative arena, where do rights bump up against responsibilities?
You could get hundreds of different answers, depending on whom you ask. Yet it’s imperative that we keep asking, because eliciting a human response is the essence of expression — and the response can be as intensely personal as the created work. As the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once famously proclaimed about hard-core cinematic pornography, “I know it when I see it.” (He didn’t see it in the film in question, Louis Malle’s The Lovers.)
In its own way, the larger question of how a community defines and accepts artistic expression is sorted out even in our far-removed corner of the world. The Merc Playhouse stages productions in which eyebrow-raising language that some people find objectionable is integral to the play’s context and message. Across the street at Confluence Gallery & Art Center, exhibiting artists are invited to explore the farthest thematic reaches in their works.
All of which brings us to … I don’t even know what to call it. Contretemps? Dust-up? Principled assertion of artistic independence? It began when some patrons were offended by the explicit nature of some works on display at Confluence’s current “XX XY” exhibit and reportedly asked that they be removed. That engendered a concern in the local arts community that Confluence curators might be cautioned or even constrained when putting together future shows. A dozen members of the local arts community responded by conducting what they called a “friendly demonstration” in front of the gallery in support of the exhibit and the generous freedom of expression that Confluence has traditionally supported.
It appears that the Confluence staff and board aren’t about to change that approach. But it’s always good to have the discussion, however it is generated, about what artistic expression means. Part of the Methow Valley’s special character is that we can have the discussion and not lose site of creativity’s power and intent.
