Elizabeth Brown – the pro and con of sexual depictions

In 2001, Elizabeth Brown (senior curator at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery) wrote a catalog essay for an exhibit in Dallas titled, Henry Moore: Sculpting the 20th Century. She took the artist to task for the sexism in his work, which earned her a rebuke from The Wall Street Journal, unfortunately not online.

Brown:

No matter how deeply he observed, empathized with, and enthused about his female subjects, Moore had a decidedly phallocratic perspective that he never came close to shedding. Both women and landscape represented territory to be explored and appropriated to bolster the strength of the nation. In fact, the biggest obstacle to recuperating Moore’s reputation is his objectification of women. Intrinsic to his iconography and a product of his time, this male chauvinism needs to be reexamined, recontextualized, and read critically and deeply before we will be able to see Moore clearly once again.

It pains me to agree with The Wall Street Journal on anything. However, it is precisely the obsessively sexualized aspect of Moore’s production that keeps it in the game.

Adrian Searle made a similar point last month in the Guardian:

So used are we to Henry Moore, we hardly give him the time his art ­deserves. This aim of this exhibition, which takes us from the 1920s up to the 1970s, is to show us his morbid and ­sexual undertones. (more)

In art if not at a dinner table, morbid sexual undertones can be a good thing. Brown dislikes what she calls the phallocratic, but women whose work demonstrates an obsession with female bodies are A-OK.

Hence, her excellent exhibit currently on view at the Henry: I Myself Have Seen it: Photography and Kiki Smith. If there’s any objectifying to be done, women artists like Smith are the ones with permission to do it. Male artists can keep their objectionable desires to themselves, or, better, check into a feminist reeducation camp to become more enlightened citizens of the human community.

Does it need to be said that good people don’t necessarily make the best art, and that art awash in objectifying desire should not be censured for that quality? On the other hand, almost everybody has limitations beyond which subject matter is unendurable, popping him or her out of the art context and back into the world. At that point, the viewer doesn’t care about how, because what has become an insurmountable barrier.

Those who make a living looking at art need to be certain their barriers are low ones. If Henry Moore is a hurdle, the problem is with the looker, not the looked at. Let’s save the moral objections for those who earn them. Very few are artists.

Related: Review of I Myself Have Seen It here. (Where are the other reviews? Wake up, Seattle. This exhibit deserves attention.)