Artworks produce meaning as well as possibilities of different meanings by different audiences. Audiences produce a complex set of diverse responses dependent on the subjectivity, the individual interpretations and the interactions taking place in the exhibiting spaces. Specifically, the audiences’ responses are shaped by the exchanges of multiple discussions about and commentaries on the artworks, the exhibition’s physical and socio-political space, the temporality of the event, the dynamics of the participating artists, the context of the exhibition itself as it is defined by the curators, institutions and other mediators, the politics involved in the exhibition and so many other factors.
I would like to contribute to Adelheid Mers’ call “reports on art audiences” by reporting three incidents of censorship that occurred during the OUTLOOK international exhibition in Athens, in 2003. The acts of censorship came from two different sources. The first one was initiated by the leader of an extreme Greek right wing party (LAOS) and resulted in the withdrawal of an artwork as well as the curator Joachimides’ trial in the First Single-Member Misdemeanors Court of Athens because of his having selected the painting for the exhibition. The other two acts of censorship, which came from individuals and followed immediately afterwards, concerned two Greek religious women. The women, who seemed to have already been informed about the first case of censorship and the removal of the painting, expressed their strong dissent against two other artworks by almost destroying them. I am particularly interested in the above three cases, since they raise critical questions regarding the audience participation, the ‘public taste’, as it is described by the dominant institutions, the diverse representations of the audience and the “freedom of art”.
On October 25, 2003 the international exhibition of Contemporary Art OUTLOOK inaugurated in Athens, Greece. The exhibition was organized by the Cultural Olympiad for the Olympic Games in Athens 2004, an initiative organization of the Greek Ministry of Culture. The show featured the work of eighty-five international artists (1) and ran from October 25 through January 25, 2003 in three venues of the city of Athens: the "Technopolis", the former Athenian gasworks of the mid 19th century industrial complex, the Benaki Museum and “The Factory" exhibiting space of the Athens School of Fine Arts. According to the curator, Christos M. Joachimides, OUTLOOK would place “Athens on the international art scene” by presenting artworks within the context of the contemporary art scene and “allow Greeks to see some very significant art, up close, for the very first time”. Indeed, more than 22,000 Greeks including many school groups visited the three exhibition venues and according to many journalists OUTLOOK became the biggest ever cultural event of its kind in Greece.
On December 8, 2003, that is forty-five days after the exhibition opening and while the show was going on successfully, the leader of an extreme right wing party, Yiorgos Karatzaferis, on his private TV channel attacked both the painting “Asperges me (Dry Sin)” made by the Belgian artist, Thierry de Cordier and the organizers of the event. The painting depicted a cross against a wall, an erect penis and semen dripping from the crucifix. By pronouncing the work “the most obscene, immoral, shameless painting”, Karatzaferis generated more critiques. Considering that the painting attacks the Greek Orthodox religion, the following day, the representative of the Greek Orthodox Church Epiphanios Economou in an official letter to the Greek Minister of Culture requested the withdrawal of the painting from the exhibition. Additionally, the former leader of the present governing party, New Democracy, Miltiadis Evert demanded in public, through TV, the deposition of the work declaring, “if the work is not taken down by the organizers, I will take it down myself”. Finally, The Board of the Cultural Olympiad, the curator of the exhibition and the socialist Minister of Culture Evangelos Venizelos, decided to withdraw the painting and replace it with the following announcement: “The work of Thierry de Cordier ASPERGES ME was considered as an image insulting of the Cross e.g. of the symbol of Christian Religion. The intense discourse that was initiated because of that, tends to overshadow the essence of the exhibition and obstruct the contact of the public with contemporary art. However, the aim of OUTLOOK is to present to the public the full range of the artistic tendencies and create a genuine interest of the public for contemporary art. Considering all the above the Board of the Cultural Olympiad and the director of the exhibition decide to withdraw this specific work and post the present announcement explaining the reasons for the withdrawal.”
The announcement poses many questions about the definitions of the public / audience by dominant institutions. Who is the ‘public’ in this case? Does it represent the majority of the Greek population? Who was really offended by the painting? Did really the thousands of visitors were insulted by the painting? The ‘public’ fortunately is not a homogeneous team. It consists of multiple audiences who express plurality in many different acts and ways. There were certainly other audiences, a considerable maybe portion of the ‘public’ who wanted to visit the exhibition, see the particular painting and decide by themselves whether the artwork was significant or not. However, in the announcement of the excuse for the censorship, the ‘public’ seems to have been totally replaced by Greeks exclusively identical to Greek Orthodox Religion and Church. Within this context ‘public’ is represented as a homogeneous entity, while the diversity of the audiences is disregarded to support the dominant discourse in which the Orthodox religion identifies the Greek ethnic identity. Furthermore, the official act of censorship by the organizers, cancels the aim of the exhibition, which was to expose to the public “the full range of the artistic tendencies” since, one of the ‘artistic tendencies’ was dramatically removed. In addition, the concern over the intense religious reactions that “tend to overshadow the essence of the exhibition and obstruct the contact of the public with contemporary art”, presupposes that the audience is unable to decide and judge contemporary art by itself and needs to be protected. In this way, the problematic situation of religious fanatics is normalized while both the artwork and the public / audience become the most problematic.
Few days after the deposition of de Cordier’s painting many pious Greeks visited the exhibition to check out if there were any other cases of ‘blasphemy’. According to the curator of the show, Joachimides, there were many threatening phone calls from individuals who demanded to “take down the penises”, including one bomb threat which made the organizers close the exhibition building to the public for an entire day. The second case of censorship happened when the exhibition doors opened again. As it was reported a “37-year-old woman in conservative dress”, wearing a “large crucifix” and described as being “disturbed”, slashed one of the exhibiting photographs of Thanasis Totsikas’ in which the artist was copulating with a watermelon in a bucolic setting. Another woman later that day tried to ruin a sketch of a full frontal nude by the American artist Raymond Pettibon. Totsikas decided to withdraw his three fold photographs while Pettibon’s sketch was returned back to the collections of the Benaki Museum.
Finishing this discussion, I want to report that there were many Greek artists, academics, journalists and intellectuals who strongly protested against the censorship and the acts of violence. Because all the three incidents of censorship happened in the “Factory”, the exhibition space of the Athens School of Fine Arts, I would like to end this document with the comments of Chronis Botsoglou, Dean of ASFA: “Are there limits within which a work of art and the artist must operate? What are they and who decides if they have been exceeded? Censors exceed every limit.”
Maria Paschalidou
paschalmari (at) yahoo (dot) com
(1) Participating artists of the OUTLOOK: Franz Ackermann, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Mario Airò, Nikos Alexiou, Darren Almond, Francis Alÿs, Gustavo Artigas, Joep Van Lieshout, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bigert&Bergström, John Bock, Cosima von Bonin, Monica Bonvicini, Nikos Charalambidis, David Claerbout, Thierry De Cordier, Gregory Crewdson, Wim Delvoye, Thomas Demand, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jan Fabre, Helmut Federle, Günther Förg, Michel Francois, Yang Fudong, Gajin Fujita, Apostolos Georgiou, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Rodney Graham, Thomas Grünfeld, Gary Hill, Damien Hirst, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Jankowski, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Martin Kippenberger, Bernd Koberling, Panos Kokkinias, Dimitris Kozaris, Michael Krebber, Jim Lambie, George Lappas, Sarah Lucas, DeAnna Maganias, Teresa Margolles, Nikos Markou, Hiroyuki Masuyama, Julie Mehretu, Aernout Mik, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Christopher Muller, Olaf Nicolai, Albert Oehlen, Maria Papadimitriou, Jennifer Pastor, Hirsch Perlman, Manfred Pernice, Bruno Perramant, Raymond Pettibon, Alexandra Ranner, Neo Rauch, Tobias Rehberger, James Rielly, Jason Rhoades, Shirana Shahbazi, Simon Starling, Beat Streuli, Wolfgang Tillmans, Barthélémy Toguo Thanassis Totsikas, Luc Tuymans, Keith Tyson, Eulàlia Valldosera, Jeff Wall, Gillian Wearing, Franz West, Erwin Wurm. Early references: Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Ed Ruscha.