censorship of the visual arts

This page considers the censorship of painting, sculpture and other visual arts.

It covers -

• the visual arts
• iconoclasm

It is supplemented by the discussion of the print elsewhere on this site.

     visual arts

Censorship of the visual arts has a long and inglorious history, from defacement of stelae under the pharoahs through imposition of breech-cloths on naked figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement to airbrushing of Stalin or Mao's enemies, Rockefeller's defacement of the Diego Rivera mural in New York and angst in Australia and Sweden about provocations by Serrano and Davila.

Elizabeth Childs's Suspended License: Censorship & the Visual Arts (Seattle: Uni of Washington Press 1998), Steven Dubin's Arresting Images: Impolite Art & Uncivil Actions (New York: Routledge 1992), Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (New York: Knopf 2006) by Michael Kammen and Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (Albany: New York Uni Press 2000) edited by Julie Ault & Philip Yenawine are academic studies of the US 'culture wars'. Censorship & Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art & the Humanities 1998) is a po-mo collection edited by Robert Post.

For some readers there is more meat in Outlaw Representation: Censorship & Homosexuality in 20th-Century American Art (New York: Oxford Uni Press 2002) by Richard Meyer and The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity & Sexuality (London: Routledge 1992) by Lynda Nead.

Among the literature for Australia consult Alison Carroll's A History of Moral Censorship & the Visual Arts in Australia (Melbourne: ACCA 1989).

     iconoclasm

Destruction by the state or individual enthusiasts of 'iconic' paintings, sketches, engravings and sculptures has been common throughout history and is not restricted to the Taliban's 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha sculptures and works in the Kabul museum.

It seeks to -

• destroy or defile objects that are believed to have power independent of the viewer's belief
• purify the environment by purging artefacts that lead people astray or that merely represent a belief-system and adherence to authority that the iconoclast wishes to displace
• demoralise those who respect the artefact as an artistically/historically significant object or possess the means to collect such an artefact and by extension to remove the identity of those people ("you are what you own or revere").

It has thus encompassed protestant vandalism in early modern Europe (the flip side of 'bonfires of the vanities' under the auspices of Savonarola in renaissance Florence and anti-image campaigns in the Byzantine empire c726-843). It shares values with the Red Guards' destruction of "bourgeois evils" such as pianos, books, tabby cats and pre-1949 bronzes during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Among the literature on iconoclasm see Dario Gamboni's The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm & Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion 1997), 'Between cult and culture: Bamiyan, Islamic iconoclasm, and the museum' by Finbarr Flood in 84(4) The Art Bulletin (2002) 641-659, Alain Besancon's The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 2001), Negating the Image: Case Studies of Past Iconoclasms (Aldershot: Ashgate 2005) edited by Anne McClanan & Jeffrey Johnson and Iconoclasm: Contested Objects, Contested Terms (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007) edited by Stacy Boldrick & Richard Clay.

Studies on specific periods include Julie Spraggon's Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell 2003) and Patrick Collinson's From Iconoclasm to iconophobia: the cultural importance of the Second English Reformation (Reading: Reading Uni Press 1986), Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1992), Charles Barber's Figure & Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2002) and Jaroslav Pelikan's Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (Washington: National Gallery of Art 1990), Marc Blecher's China, politics, economics, and society: iconoclasm and innovation in a revolutionary socialist country (Boulder: Rienner 1986), 'Monkey kings make havoc: iconoclasm and murder in the chinese cultural revolution' by Eric Reinders in 34(3) Religion (2004) 191-209 and Anthony Julius' Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (New York: Thames & Hudson 2001).

(Section 80B(5) of the Defence Act 1903 (Cth) provides that unauthorised defacement or destruction, "by melting or otherwise", of a service decoration - ie a military medal - attracts a penalty of 60 penalty units or imprisonment for 12 months. The Section does not appear to have been used in the past 50 years.)

   next page  (censorship of photography)