The oops in Art

Each semester I try to pick a theme in art and use it as the backdrop for my presentations. Last semester my theme was the swinging pendulum between geometry and design, reason, and passion, sculptural form and painterly rendition. This semester I decided on Challenging preconceived notions, Identifying cultural biases and trying to look over them, or under them or around them or just throwing them out all together. Take for example the Venus of Willendorf, fertility idol, or prehistoric porn? We know nothing about the people that created this figure. Better minds than mind are working hard day and night, Gunga Din, to come and tell you exactly what this figurine is for. And so I try challenge the students to look at the context, and the evolution of this figure over the course of the subsequent five to ten thousand years. From four inch idols to the one and a half foot high Bas Relief carving of a woman holding a bison horn, from Laussel, Dordogne, France, to the three foot reclining woman, rock-cut relief, La Magdelaine cave, in Tarn, France. What do the stylistic similarities and differences tell us?

To call the figurine a Venus is so dangerous, because it assumes a series of cultural preconceptions, emotional baggage. Like I was commenting on another blog today, I think it is interesting to see how people will respond to the emotional content of a work of art, some much so, in fact that it is easy to appreciate the sublime in art and begin to ignore the context or the story.

I was talking to a colleague the other day about this very topic and he said that the editors of the first edition of Jansen's History of Art: The Western Tradition, while discussing Poussin’s “Abduction of the Sabine Women” talked about how the artist choose exemplary forms drawn from classical antiquity to depict the figures and went on to talk about the sheer beauty of the work, and neglected to mention the context. Rape.

Interestingly, We no longer refer to the "rape" of the Sabine women; instead it is the "abduction." Artists and art critics too often ignore the subtext in order to espouse the sublime beauty of the artwork. The most recent example of this? An artist proposed creating the largest bronze equestrian sculpture ever made for the city of El Paso depicting Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate. But Native Americans in El Paso and surrounding areas remember Onate as a man who nearly wiped out the Acoma Pueblo, enslaved their children and cut off one foot of any man considered to be of fighting age. The artist was forced to admit that he was so caught up in the creation and beauty of the work, that he ignored the text of Onate's life and deeds.

In 1606, Oñate was recalled to Mexico City for a hearing into his conduct. After finishing plans for the founding of the town of Santa Fé, he resigned his post and was tried and convicted of cruelty to both Indians and colonists, the modern equivalent: crimes against humanity. Today there is 34 ft statue of him in El Paso.

At what point do we say: How beautiful does it have to be? There are so many depictions of the story of the Sabine Women. Does the fact that they were abducted and raped have to play into the art? There are numerous depictions of Jesus not all to my liking, what about them? Does it have to be culturally sensitive to be great art? Do we run the risk of watering down the past to make it more palatable to the present? Alas, no one said picking these themes was going to be easy. Maybe next semester I just choose something like, the use of a river as a metaphor in art. I'll probably save myself a lot of trouble, but would the blog be as good? I wonder.