In 1865, a wealthy doctor turned banker, George Witt,
offered his collection of more than 400 objects from all over the world
to the British Museum.
They were, he said, symbols of the early worship of mankind.
I don't exactly know how much they had to do with religion,
not even of the fertility cult variety.
They looked more like what we would call a collection of soft porn.
It was an awkward moment for the museum management,
but in the end they decided to accept the gift.
There was absolutely no way, though, that it was going to go
on public display.
Their solution was to make sure
the collection was carefully catalogued
and then to put it away in a secret museum within the museum
as a whole or, as they disguised in Latin, a Secretum.
You only got to see the stuff if you were posh or a professor -
a male one, that is.
Today, the Secretum no longer exists, or not literally,
but there's still plenty of art that most of us, for all sorts
of reasons, don't get to see,
whether because we're not allowed to,
or maybe because we decide not to.
And that's been true as long as people have been making art.
Some of it has always been off limits to someone.
There's always been a virtual Secretum.
In this series, I'm exploring how what is and is not
forbidden has changed.
I'm not thinking here about the extreme hardcore...
..but ideas of what should or should not be on show have altered
over the centuries,
and I'm wondering why.
I think, the more we encounter death head on, the less frightening it is.
So it's something we should be looking at?
Yes.
Is it actually one point of art to show the unshowable?
If I go through hell, I'll make paintings about hell.
But I don't look for that hell. I'll be considering what,
if anything, really does go too far.
VOMITING Oh!
You're not supposed to show people vomiting,
so that's a good reason to do it!
I'm not assessing quality, or at least I won't be arguing
that a work's more acceptable if we judge it
good rather than bad art.
This is about what art gets forbidden, why and how,
who gets to see what and who decides.
And I don't just mean outright bans.
I also mean that, if we think harder about what we can't look at or
what we choose not to,
maybe we'll learn a bit more about the nature of art itself
and about ourselves.
The human body.
Its pleasures, pains and the business of living in it
has inspired some of the most controversial works of art.
And that's what I'm exploring in this programme.
I want to start with a little-known story of old-fashioned
censorship from the 1960s.
This was the decade Britain let its hair down, loosened its morals
and generally lightened up.
Or so the cliche goes.
It wasn't actually like that for quite a lot of us.
And there was definitely another side to it.
That's nicely captured in a case of obscenity that came before
the local court in Leeds in 1966.
In the dock was artist and art teacher Stass Paraskos,
and the main object at issue was a painting he'd recently shown
in a local exhibition.
And the big problem was in the bottom left-hand corner
and with what exactly the woman was doing with her hand
on the man's penis.
The case provoked a whole range of arguments. The magistrates wondered
about its tendency to deprave.
Meanwhile, a galaxy of art experts were bussed in to argue
that it was the artist's privilege, even his right,
to challenge us like this.
None of it convinced the magistrates. Paraskos was found
guilty and fined £10 plus £21 costs.
But maybe times really were changing because this was the last occasion
in Britain that a painter was successfully
prosecuted for obscenity.
Nearly 60 years on, viewers don't exactly find it much
of a problem.
OK.
That man on the right, is he naked?
Yeah, I think everyone's naked. Everyone's naked.
Some sort of sex party,
it looks like. Yeah, kind of.
Maybe it's an orgy.
An orgy?
It doesn't look obscene.
I would say softcore at the most.
I think we're very used to seeing nudity and things like that.
It seems fairly innocent. In this day and age,
nothing like that would shock anybody, to be honest with you.
And I just don't think it's that obscene, really,
especially with today's standards.
If a jigsaw was on sale with that as the main picture,
I think I'd buy it.
But have we simply become more tolerant of art since 1966?
I'm not so sure.
We have to be careful before we imagine the triumph of some
"anything goes" kind of culture because the fact is
anything does not go.
The focus of our anxieties about art may have changed,
but the anxieties remain.
And even though the role of the law has become more limited,
we have other ways of regulating what is seen and not seen.
Back in the British Museum,
we can get a glimpse of how tastes and boundaries can change
radically over the centuries.
And I've picked out a couple of objects showing a scene
once popular in the art of the ancient Romans.
SHE CHUCKLES
Thank you.
These are two sculptures showing the mythical creature Pan
having sex with a she-goat,
in different positions, you might say.
They are both versions or variations on an even more striking sculpture
dug up from a luxury Roman villa near Naples.
It became one of the most notoriously forbidden objects
in the 17- and 1800s.
Well, this is a little terracotta copy of it
made in the 18th century.
And you can see that the goat is resting her feet, or her hooves,
perhaps we should say, on Pan's shoulder.
And Pan is almost, kind of, tickling her little goatee beard.
And here is an original Roman piece.
And this was probably the prized possession of
some rather posh Roman.
Now, I think that the very idea
that a larger marble version of this could be the centrepiece in
the decor of a very rich Roman house
marks the difference between Roman ideas of acceptability
and our own.
I mean, we may not be quite as shocked by this image as people
were just after it was discovered,
but I still don't imagine that many people would choose this theme
to plunk in the middle of their living room.
That said, it's not quite clear what it really meant for Romans.
I mean, was it just a bit of raunchy erotica?
Or maybe it was a kind of joke.
Pan, we mustn't forget, was himself half-man and half-goat.
So, this is a half-goat having sex with a whole goat, if you like.
For decades after their discovery, the ancient statues were kept away
from the public gaze in the Secretum,
whether in Italy or Britain.
You had to apply formally to see them, and stood no chance at all
if you were a woman or, in Italy, a Catholic priest.
Even the miniature copy ended up under the same restrictions.
Today, those have gone - or almost.
When the Naples version came here about ten years ago,
it was put in its own room with a content warning at the entrance.
Why is it we find it still somewhat uncomfortable?
I mean, I think it's more than just the bestiality.
I mean, for me, what's difficult about this one is the way that
the goat has been humanised,
that Pan is making love to the goat in a human way.
It's as if this is a sculpture which doesn't just break the rules,
but it breaks the boundaries between what we expect of animals,
and what we expect of human beings.
To put that another way, it disturbs because it mixes
basic categories, violating the rightful order.
It's easy to assume, though, that it's scenes of sex in particular -
illicit, subversive, graphic, unregulated -
that moralists have been keenest to keep from our sights.
Henri Gervex's 1878 work Rolla was excluded from the Paris Salon
for so overtly depicting a prostitute.
In 1917, a Paris gallery full of Modigliani's nudes
was closed down on account of their obscene pubic hair.
And in 1973, this take on male anatomy
by Austrian Renate Bertlmann was banned from a show of feminist art.
But there's more to it than that.
It's not just genitalia and copulation that makes
an image problematic.
And something doesn't have to be explicitly banned for us somehow
to cease to look at it.
Today, I've asked York Art Gallery to bring out of their storeroom
one painting that's really disconcerting -
and, in this case, more so now than a couple of hundred years ago.
There's an elderly man here in shackles,
suckling at a young woman's breast.
It's based on a classical story which explains she's doing this
because he's in prison and starving.
It's an allegory of human kindness.
But there's a killer fact.
The woman is the old man's daughter.
There is more than a hint here of an erotic relationship.
It's as if we're looking at what's almost a scene of incest.
And you might want to say,
"Well, look, we only see the eroticism here because we've lost
"that kind of sense of the allegorical symbol."
It was treated at the time as, in a sense, the classic example
of how devoted a daughter could and should be to her father.
That said...
..the painter has clearly more than hinted that this is
a dangerously erotic scene.
She's anxious, her breasts and shoulders are highlit.
And it also turns out that we're not the only voyeurs at this scene,
because up in that corner,
there's someone peering at it through the window.
This painting is by a little-known Dutch artist,
but it isn't a one-off.
You may be surprised to learn that
there are more than 300 versions of this subject,
commonly known as Roman Charity,
in collections around the world.
I have to say, I find it very hard not to see
a kind of dark reading here,
that the painter is suggesting to us that the line between
the love of a daughter for her father and erotic incest
is actually much finer than we would like to think it was.
One of the reasons that this is an unfamiliar scene to us is that most,
not all, but most of these paintings are actually hidden away,
well looked after in museum stores and basements,
so we don't see them.
Forbidden art isn't all forbidden because somebody has said,
"You're not going to look at this".
It's not all controversial.
Some of it is just what we have
all agreed, sort of, collusively
that would be better off out of sight.
I'm not sure that these images were ever entirely innocent,
whatever the moral story behind them.
But now that allegory is little known...
Well, that's interesting.
..modern viewers struggle to make sense of what
they might be looking at.
OK.
We can be shocked at the forbidden subject,
but still try to justify it, or at least to process it.
I think he's sucking on her nipple?
OFF CAMERA: He is a prisoner.
He's starving.
And that's actually his daughter.
Oh, God! That's gross. SHE LAUGHS
Erm...OK.
I mean, now that you've said that, it's just grim.
Wow.
Was not expecting that at all.
The concept itself, yeah, makes me feel uncomfortable, for sure.
If I were a father, I wouldn't want to be doing that.
When you understand what that is,
you might feel a little bit, erm, troubled by it.
But then, thinking of the story and what it's about,
it's practical, it's clever.
I don't think it's anything sexual.
Even though some people will be like, "Oh, this is incestuous,"
she's doing everything that she can to keep her dad alive.
If you are starving, would you do that?
Like, probably? Yeah.
And if it was commonly done at the time, then...
Sign you up? SHE LAUGHS
Roman Charity might well disquiet us,
but our virtual Secretum is no longer dominated by sexual images.
Their place has been taken by other themes and subjects.
One of those is the art that dares to show us what
the end of life might look like.
ALL PRAYING
Hundreds of years ago, people in Britain would have been far less
estranged from death and the moment of dying.
Most of us would have died at home.
We'd have been used to open coffins,
and might even have had death masks made of our relatives.
And, though often milked for all the sentimentality you could
wring from it, the deathbed scene
was popular with artists.
Now, it's not just that death itself has become more medicalized,
behind curtains, in private,
but the representation of death has also become forbidden territory.
We have put it into the private realm, not to be looked at.
One of the few artists who have confronted this is Daphne Todd.
In 2010, she won the National Portrait Gallery
Annual Portrait Award for a painting
of a 100-year-old woman half-naked
and recently deceased.
Right.
The thing to know here is that it is her own mother.
How did you go about it?
And what was the practicality of it?
I wept, grabbed the nurse, erm, and said, erm,
"Actually, I do want to paint my mother.
"How am I going to go about it?"
And she recommended a funeral director who'd been very, very
understanding about various people's requests.
And so, he made a chapel of rest available.
And so, in the chapel of rest, you propped her up?
I asked them to prop her up like that.
In fact, actually, I mean, I first thought I might, sort of,
have her laid out as though she was on the slab.
And they did that for me, and I thought,
"I can't cope with this".
The, sort of, nether ends I didn't really want to be dealing with.
And how many days altogether? Three.
It'd just about be comfortable if I had one more.
But I was getting uncomfortable myself because she was
beginning to change colour,
and the fluid was flowing down into these parts of her arm.
It was dripping out a little bit down here, too.
And her hand changed.
I mean, because I was painting it, you know, I could see this gap,
because the hand was gradually turning towards me,
and I didn't want it to get to a point where...
..where there was a smell, I suppose. Yeah.
I mean, this might seem a stupid question,
but why did you want to do it?
I just thought I might.
I don't know why I thought that, particularly.
I just thought it would be, er, a new experience.
I don't think she'd have liked this painting, actually,
obviously, I mean, who would?
But she had said, "Yes, you can do what you like."
But there's a magnificence about death.
Somebody once asked me to explain that, and I can't.
I hope I've got a bit of it in there, but there's
something really compelling.
I mean, you wouldn't be able to walk past a dead body, would you?
No. I'm not sure I've seen a dead body.
Not ever? Not ever?
I suppose I saw my parents,
but both well-covered in a hospital bed. Not...
Yes. ..you know, almost unrecognisable.
I mean, it's fascinating in itself...
But isn't it distressing for you?
Once I was painting, no. Right.
Funnily enough - that's odd, isn't it?
But, no.
It's now here in your studio.
It's not on public display.
What plans have you got for it?
I've tried to give it away twice.
The first time, to Girton College, Cambridge,
but they were quite concerned that this particular painting
would upset the students.
And it was understandable, in a way.
But also, slightly odd that academics, all of whom are adults,
are going to be hurt by it.
Anyway, a year or two later, I asked if my local church would like it.
But sadly, they turned it down.
So, I cannot give it away. THEY CHUCKLE
I think the more we encounter death head-on,
the less frightening it is,
and that means we can live our lives.
So, it's something we should be looking at? Yes.
I mean, it is distressing, but I think it's...
It makes me feel that I want to look at it.
And if that means that that's uncomfortable, then I think
you should be looking at things that are uncomfortable.
Yes, as long as they're beautiful, as well,
because the truth is beautiful.
I'm not quite so sure that the truth is necessarily beautiful,
or that it offers such a simple solution to the problem
of forbidden art.
But Daphne's extraordinary painting certainly exposes the forbiddenness
of death in modern Western cultures.
It's not always the same elsewhere.
I've come to the Wellcome Collection, in London,
to confront some Eastern art that looks forensically at the breakdown
of the body when life ends -
testing Daphne's belief in the beauty of truth to the limit.
This is a rather shocking sight.
It's a series of watercolours
belonging to a Japanese Buddhist tradition of image-making
going back to the 13th century.
This is just one example out of many.
What they show is the stages in the decomposition of the human body.
The series starts when the dead woman is still alive,
but most of the rest of the series shows what happens to her body next.
Here, the colour's beginning to change.
It's distending.
It starts to go horribly blotchy and to ooze blood.
And basically, this is putrefaction in action.
And at this point, the birds and the animals have come to eat
the flesh that remains.
And now, all she is, really, is bones.
And here, just a little pile of bones,
which end up in her last resting place here
under the sign of the Buddha.
Images like this, still with a place in Japanese culture,
were originally made to remind contemplative Buddhist monks of
the impermanence of the human body,
and the foulness of female flesh in particular.
Well, I suppose I manage to take them on board
in a religious context.
But what happens when we take them out of that religious context?
I think there'll be a lot of people,
me included, who really would not want to look at them.
There would be quite a lot of people who'd say,
"These should not be on show".
However much they would prefer not to look at images of
dead and oozing bodies,
I don't think many people would see them as unethical,
morally out-of-bounds.
Works that show the living body in pain take these issues
a whole step further.
Since the 1960s especially,
various artists have traded in images of violence and distress.
Austrian Herrmann Nitsch has spent years leading ritualised actions,
disembowelling animal carcasses,
and dousing naked performers in blood, urine, and more.
In 1974, American Chris Burden
had himself crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle.
And in 2000, Israeli artist Sigalit Landau filmed herself
performing a naked hula dance with a ring of barbed wire.
But debates about the ethics of looking at scenes of suffering
are far older.
They were kick-started by reactions to a single ancient Roman statue.
A much later bronze copy of it, installed in the 18th century,
stands in pride of place at Houghton Hall, in Norfolk.
One of the most admired works in the Renaissance,
it now seems like a standard set piece of classical sculpture.
It shows the Trojan priest Laocoon, who warned his comrades
that the great wooden horse the Greeks had left them was a trick.
He was right, but his foresight was punished by the gods,
who sent two vile serpents to kill not only Laocoon himself,
but his two sons.
And that's the moment we are witnessing.
Once it had been rediscovered in 1506, there was hardly an artist
who didn't copy it and re-copy it,
and attempt to analyse the real power of this work of art.
They looked at the twisting torso, the tilt of the head,
these extraordinarily taut legs.
It was the emotional power of agony.
It was a template for how to show pain.
But, by the time it got to Houghton,
some other questions were being raised.
In the 18th century, the most pressing controversy became
how could we admire a scene of torture like this?
There wasn't even the religious justification here
that you might find for a particularly gory crucifixion.
So, what was the point?
What was the visual pleasure that you got out of looking at this scene
of agonising death and pain?
Well, some people tried to argue that this was the scene of a man
who was triumphing over his suffering with dignity.
And they particularly pointed to his mouth.
This man is just groaning.
That, for many, was the point - he had managed to control his pain.
But others still argued that the body in pain
was an ugly disfigurement.
Now, when we look at him, I think, for us, he's mostly lost
any of that kind of edginess.
He's retreated, really, into the category
of "famous classical masterpiece".
But I can't help thinking,
maybe we should try to bring back some of the controversy,
and to remember the edginess.
We have no idea if the original ancient artist considered any of
the issues that preoccupied critics all those centuries later.
But those debates point to the way other artists since have signalled
the difficulties of representing violence, pain, and suffering.
In the early 1800s, the Spaniard Francisco Goya was perhaps the first
artist to take, as his subject, the ugly reality of warfare
in a set of engravings now known as The Disasters of War.
They were never published by Goya himself and unseen by the public
until 35 years after his death.
They raise even bigger questions
about how and why you might represent suffering,
and what the responsibility of the artist is.
Goya produced more than 80 prints of scenes from the wars in Spain
in the early 19th century.
And I've picked out two from the series.
The first one shows a couple of men running away,
a mother scooping up her kids.
And we know that something is going on off to the right of the image,
but we can't see it.
And it's quite a nasty tease of this whole series that
we see the frightened people,
but we don't quite see what they're frightened of.
The other one is, perhaps, even starker.
There's a group of men, women, and children,
and they're cowering in a cave.
And there you do see just the tips of the bayonets
that are coming to get them.
And none of these people can really bear to look at
what's coming for them.
And, in fact, this person here has covered themselves up,
so they cannot see - not just turning away,
but shrouding their face.
But it's the captions that give them something extra, I think.
Goya's caption on this one, in Spanish, is, "I saw this".
And, on the other, it's "one can't look at this".
Now, in many ways, those captions together capture
the ethical dilemmas of looking at other people's pain.
The artist, in a sense, is saying that he is obliged to represent
what he sees in the world, however unpleasant.
For the viewer, well, they're caught, in a way.
It is almost wrong for us to get visual pleasure out of looking at
the pain of these poor people.
And yet, it would be irresponsible of us not to recognise that
that is going on in the world about us,
as shown to us by the artist.
For me, what is so important about these images is the way they make us
face up to what you or the artist can or can't look at.
These themes of looking, not looking, and, in a sense,
the dangers of looking have a history that again can be traced
indirectly, at least, back to the ancient world.
At London's National Gallery, there's a chilling cautionary tale
from Greek mythology,
painted by the Italian artist Luca Giordano, around 1616.
It shows a wedding reception that's going horribly wrong.
This here, in the blue outfit -
that's the groom, the hero Perseus.
But his festivities have been interrupted
by the bride's ex, over here,
Phineas, who's come with the boys to make trouble.
And you can see that everything is in disarray.
The table has been overturned, there are bodies all over the place.
And Perseus has got out his secret weapon,
which is the snaky-locked head of the Gorgon Medusa.
It's a weapon,
because the mere sight of Medusa will turn anybody to stone.
You see that Perseus is very, very carefully looking away
from Medusa's head.
But the intruders aren't being so careful.
And Phineas here, the ex,
is already turning into a marble statue.
And I think that, as we look at this,
I think it's hard not to say,
"So, where does that leave me, the viewer?
"I'm not turning away like Perseus.
"Will I be turned to stone, too?"
The image of the deadly Gorgon's head, held up by Perseus,
has been represented thousands of times,
from ancient Greece to the present day.
And it always puts us on the spot,
sometimes joking or teasing us about getting a peek at
what we shouldn't see.
Sometimes challenging or frightening us with the consequences of looking
at what we should not look at.
To put that the other way round,
artists have always claimed the right to represent the forbidden.
It's what I call "the Medusa problem",
and it's the heart of the practice of art and the practice of looking.
Artists have repeatedly put before us sights that are,
in some sense, disturbing and even dangerous to us.
Sometimes we're seduced into gazing.
Other times, we are too disgusted or terrified to look.
You can see all this at work to harrowing effect
in a painting from the end of the 20th century.
In 1993, Scottish artist Peter Howson was commissioned by
the Times newspaper and the Imperial War Museum to go to Bosnia
as an official war artist.
Of all the works he produced, a scene of sexual assault was,
for me and many others, particularly troubling.
When I first saw this painting,
I found it almost impossible to look at.
It's a scene of a woman being raped,
with her head down the bowl of a lavatory.
What makes it, I think, more upsetting is the hints of
the domestic environment in which this is happening.
The guy at the top is supporting himself with his hand against
one of her family pictures.
But it's also voyeuristic.
You can just see above his arm...
..someone's looking in and watching,
either in pleasure or in horror, at what they're seeing.
This painting was exhibited,
but it was then, controversially, not chosen to enter the permanent
collection at the Imperial War Museum.
Some felt it had been judged just too much to look at.
But, when pressed, the museum's director argued,
echoing the Goya line, that it had been excluded because Howson
hadn't actually witnessed the scene.
Howson's response was to say, of course he hadn't witnessed this.
I mean, how could anyone have ethically witnessed that?
But he had drawn on his conversations with some of the
many women who'd been the victims of sexual violence in this war.
And he added that many of the most influential pieces of war art
were done by people who hadn't witnessed the scenes
that they were showing.
Picasso had not seen the disaster at Guernica.
I think for me, there's also a bigger issue here.
We now know that one of the most terrible defining features
of the Bosnian War was that it systematically weaponised
the rape of women.
If we start to apply the criterion of eyewitnessing what we're shown
in paintings too literally, we're going to end up not seeing
or not being shown images that we really should be
keeping in our sights.
There's a strong case to be made that it's the cultural job
of the artist to show us dangerous truths and make us confront
what we don't want to acknowledge.
One in particular has certainly done that extensively
and single-mindedly,
drawing so many usually private ordeals into public view
over 30 years of making art.
People say that my work's tediously narcissistic.
They don't like my attitude.
And guess what? I'm not making my work for them, anyway.
Tracey Emin's themes are not unique,
but few artists have created such a graphic body of work,
dealing with sexual assault, abortion, masturbation, grief, and,
most recently, her own cancer treatment.
I met Tracey at her London studio.
Tracey, do you think that you have helped the people
who look at what you do
think about things they perhaps don't want to think about,
see things that they would perhaps rather not see?
I actually don't think that.
I'd like that to happen, but I think what actually happens
is I reaffirm things for people who
maybe don't have, or don't feel they can express themselves.
They're already thinking like I'm thinking,
but they actually don't know how to express it.
So, like, with My Bed, for example, they say,
"Yeah, I've been there. I know how that feels."
And it's just a matter of fact.
So if I've been raped and I say, "I've been raped,"
I'm not admitting I've been raped. It's a fact that I was raped.
Or if I have an abortion, I'm not to be made to feel ashamed of this,
I'm not admitting something or confessing anything.
This is what I did and this is what happened.
Yeah, I mean, I suppose I think that in a slightly different way from,
in terms of writing, because, oh, it must be over 20 years ago
I wrote about being raped. It didn't seem a confession,
it just seemed that it was kind of important to say,
"This is what happened. This is telling it straight."
Yeah, but it's a bit like falling over and then saying,
"Oh, I'm fine, I'm OK." Well, you're not.
You just fell over.
And when something awful has happened to you in your life,
you need to have a chance for reflection.
And often, society won't let you have that
because you're supposed to just pick yourself up and brush...
"Everything's OK."
But obviously, it's not OK. It's not all right.
I'm still not sure I can work out what's happening.
Erm... Does it look like...
..a person that's bleeding?
Yeah, it's quite shocking in its rawness.
Er...
It looks to me like she's having some sort of miscarriage.
Or she might have aborted a baby.
There's a lot of people, I guess, who have gone through that
and they see that and think,
"That's an experience I wouldn't want to live again."
Maybe a way for the artist to process
what she's been through as well.
I think it's a very honest depiction of how a woman might feel
if she's just miscarried, or a woman in pain.
This is the reality that women face.
It's not shocking, it just triggers a lot of emotion,
cos a lot of people bottle things inside.
It's quite a painful thing, and...
..I suppose it's a way to grieve.
Works of art that people would have just wanted to ignore,
you kind of made them un-ignorable, I think. Hm.
Would there be some things that you think you could or would
or should not ever represent?
Yeah, definitely, without doubt. Lots of things.
People think that dangerous images have to be violent
or they have to be frightening, or they have to be scary,
or they have to be, you know, whatever.
But one of the most frightening things I think at the moment
is Instagram, where people can morph their faces
because it's...creating this parallel world which people live in.
And then the real world is perceived as being ugly and not very nice.
Yeah. For me, art is like a real thing
because I feel the emotion come through it from the artist.
And so there would be no picture, let's say, no painting on display
in the National Gallery that you think,
"I really don't think we ought to be looking at this"?
No, absolutely not. No.
But I saw... It was years, years ago - about 20 years ago -
there was a film by Otto Muehl, and it was a performance work
where there's lots of people fucking and doing stuff.
And there was some women having a rolling pin pushed up their vaginas
and it was really over the top.
And then this chicken... TRACEY CLUCKS
Otto Muehl picks the chicken up.
And then I can't remember if he actually bites its head off
or breaks his neck. I might be exaggerating, but the point is, I...
When I saw this film, I screamed and ran all around the gallery floor,
screaming and hyperventilating. It was too much for me.
And now it's like if I curated a show now,
that's the number one work that I would put in.
It was so shocking. It was so terrible.
How many things in the world make you feel like that...
..that are inside a gallery?
And that's the kind of thing which, at one level,
I think was pretty amazing.
Another level, I think should never be seen and never been made
and never exist.
Your kind of dilemma, presumably, is that there was something
about the film with the chicken's head, that it was shocking,
but it was sort of real.
Yeah. If it's real, it's here, and we have to accept it
and we have to look at it.
It wasn't invented. It wasn't created. It is here.
Tracey's philosophy sounds easy to get behind,
and part of me really is behind it.
But is it too easy?
Are there some human experiences, even everyday ones,
that are arguably beyond - or possibly beneath - the realm of art?
I'm about to fulfil a bit of an ambition of mine,
getting a good look around what's, for me, forbidden territory.
For most of us nowadays, in Western culture and beyond,
some bodily functions are not for public show.
But going right back to the ancient world,
there have been paintings, sculptures and prints of people -
men in particular - peeing.
This is a pair of images, and we've blown them up really big,
because in the original, they're only about three inches tall.
And they're by the great Dutch artist Rembrandt,
done in the 1630s.
They're, in a way, part of a bit of a vogue
for pissing images at the time.
But Rembrandt's versions are actually beautifully drawn.
They're really top-of-the-range.
This figure, in some ways, is quite typical of the genre.
You can see the stream of pee's raising the dust from the ground,
and it's as if he's saying to you as you look at him,
"I don't care if you look at me peeing," or even, almost,
"I'm pissing on you, mate."
But that looks a bit different when you put it together
with the woman peeing.
And she's crouching, she's hitched her skirt up behind.
You can see the pee coming out here, but she's also pooing.
But I think even more important is the way she's looking around.
She's wanting to check that no-one's looking at her.
And, of course, what she's forgotten, in a way,
is that we're looking at her.
And you get the sense that that guy's quite happy for us
to be looking at what he's doing.
We don't think we really should be watching her.
Rembrandt reminds us that Marcel Duchamp,
with his famous Fountain,
and Piero Manzoni and his tins of Artist's Shit
were not the first, even if some of the more memorable, artists
to insist that what we by now generally did in the bathroom
could explicitly be referenced in art.
More recently, from Helen Chadwick's Piss Flowers
to Gilbert & George's Naked Shit Pictures, artists have,
for all sorts of reasons, asked us to linger on subjects
that usually make most of us just go "Yuck!"
But none of these works make us really digest
what goes on beneath our sanitised exteriors
as much as some created 15 years ago.
I'm about to meet up with an artist and sit down with him
to watch two of his short films - Shit and Sick.
That's basically what they're called. And it's not a metaphor.
That's what they show.
Martin Creed has famously affronted many of the art-loving public
since 2001, when he won the Turner Prize for pieces
including Work No 227: The lights going on and off.
I can't explain it, except to say that the lights are definitely
going on and off.
Is the light bulb, really, a case of the emperor's new clothes
for the chattering classes?
Yeah... APPLAUSE
Like Creed's lights,
these works feature something that occurs all the time.
But in this case, he crossed a line.
Many people would think this is about as pointlessly shocking
as it gets...
..so I wanted to ask the sartorially eccentric artist,
who also wrote and performed the soundtrack,
what on earth he was trying to do.
There's no question that these ordinary human functions
are excruciatingly hard to look at when seen starkly on film.
It's that moment when it actually comes out - that's the moment
when I gag slightly.
# B
# B-sharp
# B-flat... #
It's triumphantly holding the stage.
HE LAUGHS
You filmed this in Los Angeles?
Yeah. So, they're on their own in the studio?
Well, there was one woman who was operating the camera
who was in the room. But could you watch what was happening?
Yeah, we had a kind of little video monitor. Right.
Cos I was very worried - cos it's like, "What am I...?"
What am I doing?! Aye, what am I doing?
Which is why I ask myself a lot, really.
Many artists use their own body,
and yet...did you not think that YOU ought to be shitting?
It's funny that you put it that way round, cos a lot of the time,
I actually think I shouldn't be doing this,
in the sense that I should get out of my own work -
because of your own narcissism.
So you're caught between voyeurism and narcissism?
Very much, yeah.
Creed has also made a companion piece to his Shit Film,
which I found even harder to stomach.
WOMAN RETCHES
MARY GROANS
SHE RETCHES, LAUGHS
Do you gag at this?
Well, not any more. I'm just so muted.
This is the cinema version, where there's ten scenes,
and from the person coming on stage to them vomiting
becomes faster and faster.
HE GROANS, RETCHES
Ooh! Oh!
VOMIT SPLASHES, MARY GROANS
This film came out of doing talks,
and I kept thinking that working was like vomiting.
It's like, you've got to get this stuff out
and it makes you feel better if you get it out.
And because I kept thinking about that, I thought,
"Wait a minute. If that is such a good metaphor,
"why don't I try and film people vomiting?"
MAN SNIFFLES, GROANS
Both Sick and Shit make me think. Mm-hm.
These are everyday, ordinary bits of bodily function,
so why do I feel such discomfort?
Cos we do look at this sort of stuff,
comedy and pantomime and carnival.
Ancient Greek pottery has got people vomming over it. Aye.
Aye, but maybe a lot of that is people basically doing
what they're not supposed to do.
You know, it's like being naughty or whatever.
You know, you're not supposed to show people vomiting,
so that's a good reason to do it. HE LAUGHS
You know? I mean, I think there's something
about the kind of ooziness.
It's the idea that the body is oozing stuff all the time -
you know, sweat and blood and snot.
And it's reminding you that you're living a lie
when you think the body is curated and bounded and civilised
and not oozy. It's saying, "Remember, you're messy."
Well, I mean, that's the way I feel! THEY LAUGH
WOMAN COUGHS
I'm sure that a lot of people will not be convinced
that these works are, well, worth it, but that's OK.
There'd be something the matter if we didn't disagree
about art like Creed's.
The questions that all these works raise -
about what it is to be a body, to have a body and to look at bodies -
are ones that we're bound to clash over.
And we have to be careful not to sneer at prudish censors,
as if they were simply repressive or a bit unsophisticated.
The truth is, we are all censors.
There's nobody who thinks that everything should be on show
and there never has been.
Anyway, it's not the art,
it's not the block of marble, a sludge of paint
or a strip of celluloid that we're arguing about.
It's ourselves.
What we really needed to be asking is where each of us
draws our own boundaries and why.
Next time, I'm going beyond the body...
Drop it!
..looking at forbidden art addressing politics and religion,
history and humanity.
We live in hazardous times for art, especially for statues.
A plinth is a dangerous place to be.
It might raise you up...
Black lives matter.
..but I can tell you, it makes you jolly vulnerable.
You're easy to topple.
There are big conflicts here.
A clash between those who are hurt by the statues they see
in places of honour, and those who value them as part of history,
however flawed that history is.
So pull it down or retain and explain?
To see or not to see?
I want to look at the wider picture to include all sorts of contested
art and ideas that many find offensive
and feel should be forbidden.
When it became a bit of a circus, I was almost sort of blamed
for trying to find a way of monetising this thing
without any kind of moral perspective.
I'm talking politics and religion,
asking about the relationship between art, artists,
and authorities of all sorts.
Drop it.
I want people to understand and to think about their history more,
and I want us to confront the past.
And I'm digging deeper into the long history of what we've wanted
to look at and what we've wanted to hide.
You've got eight or nine foot paintings telling you all the stuff
that the tabloids would like you to think is disgusting and vile.
It's about history and hysteria,
division and dissent,
and about art's role in some of the greatest social, political,
and religious conflicts of our times, or of any.
In the 21st century, all kinds of artistic images have raised
the temperature of debates about what should or should not be seen.
In 2017, many people, especially in America,
thought one image featuring the US comedian Kathy Griffin went too far.
Is that Donald Trump?
That's Trump head? Yeah, it looks like it.
She's clearly not a Trump voter.
It's quite bloody, isn't it?
She's clearly trying to say that the world would be better off
if he was dead.
It's deliberately offensive.
It's barbaric, in a sense, cutting people's heads off.
I think she went a step too far,
irrespective of your feelings or opinions about Donald Trump.
You could see it as a riff on the Greek myth of the hero Perseus,
slicing off the head of the terrifying Medusa.
But classical reference or not, Griffin received death threats,
of course, was investigated by the FBI on suspicion
of threatening the president's life, and was dropped
by all her employers.
The man behind the camera had a reputation
for creating controversial images.
But nothing Tyler Shields had done before had inflamed so many people.
Epic interview, take one.
BACKGROUND LAUGHTER
I talked to the rather irreverent photographer at home in LA
to discover why he thought this picture crossed
some people's boundaries and how he and Kathy devised it.
We were already doing another shoot
and we had kind of finished that shoot,
and Kathy looks at me and goes,
"I'd like to do something political".
She said, "I want to do something about Trump."
And so the first thing that popped into my head was this biblical image
of a beheading, followed by Greek mythology,
followed by kind of all these kind of epic beheading paintings
and sculptures throughout history.
And so we kind of make this mask and it looks horrible.
And, you know, they fashion a wig onto it, and I'm like,
oh, this looks just god awful.
And so I said, "Let's cover it in blood."
This is fake blood, just so you know.
I won't give away what we're doing, but Tyler and I
are not afraid to do images that make noise.
So I hold it back here. Same exact...
That's it. OK.
Rotate a little bit. That's it right there. Pull it up.
Drop it.
When I first saw the photograph,
the image that came to mind was the mythical scene
of the Greek hero Perseus.
But more than that, it was the figure of Perseus,
with the head of Trump holding up a severed head
with the features of Hillary Clinton.
And what then is kind of surprising to me,
people looked at that Trump PR, and some people,
quite a lot of people said it wasn't very nice, but it didn't cause
this kind of outcry.
Why do you think it was that your and Kathy's photograph
just went...viral?
That's part of the power of a photograph.
If you do it as a painting, it doesn't have the reality to it.
I think that was a huge part of it.
There's also something about the photograph.
You know, the fact that it looks like a rubber mask with tomato
ketchup on it, means it doesn't get the protection of any pretence
at "great art".
Absolutely. And I think, look, photographs have only been
considered "fine art" since probably the '80s or '90s.
So, yeah, photography does not have the same, as you said,
protection that paintings have.
I mean, it angered people like nothing I've ever seen,
but worth it, all worth it.
Wouldn't change a thing.
Do you think that images can go too far?
Erm...
I don't know, that's a tough one.
It's tough to say because I'm sure the first time there was
a nude photograph taken, people were like, "This is too far,"
you know, cut to you've got a comedian beheading a president
and then people are like, that's too far.
If you look at all of history, there would be so many examples
of a time where something comes out and people are absolutely appalled
by it, only to then later celebrate it.
As Tyler says, the public's opinions about art
can change radically across generations.
Works can go in both directions,
from loathed to loved
and from loved to loathed.
OVER TANNOY: Black lives matter.
As we see in our own era's statue wars.
It's wrong to desecrate a statue of Winston Churchill.
But ours are not the first of these wars.
Art has been weaponised in ideological conflicts before.
HUBBUB
In 1930s Germany, the Nazis toured a blockbuster exhibition
showcasing many of the great modernist masters
of the early 20th century.
But with a twist.
The aim was not to celebrate their genius,
but to expose their depravity.
That included the works of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall
and Paul Klee, and whole artistic movements
like Dadaism and Cubism or Primitivism.
Now, of course, the Nazis were caught in the trap that many
censors are caught in, that if you want to show people
what they shouldn't look at and enjoy, then you actually
have to show it to them first.
And they even produced a kind of commemorative brochure
of what was called "degenerate kunst".
Kunst there - art.
It's written in kind of red crayon and put in inverted commas
so you knew that it wasn't art, really.
And on the first page of illustrations,
there's a portrait by the Jewish artist, Marc Chagall, of a rabbi.
But it isn't only the horribly predictable targets
of Jews and Bolshevists.
What the campaign against degenerate art is going for
is anything that appears to undermine
German cultural traditions, the traditions of German artistic
realism or German morality.
One of the main culprits on show was Otto Dix.
His determinedly unheroic depiction of the German First World War
trenches was something the Nazis wanted verboten.
They're an extraordinarily powerful collection
of what was often seen as very aggressively anti-war images.
Perhaps my kind of, it's hard to say, favourite,
this image of two skulls, teeth partly, they're partly fallen out,
eye sockets oozing away.
And they're about as far from human
as you can imagine a human being could get,
except that just underneath one skull,
there is his name tag with his name - Muller.
In the Nazis' exhibition, the work of Dix and his fellow degenerates
was displayed crammed together, surrounded by defamatory slogans.
Everything possible was done to say that this was not art.
And the organisers claimed it a success.
They boast that in Munich alone,
over two million people came to see it.
But I can't help thinking that propaganda like this
is never quite so simple,
and there will have been some people who'll have gone away from here
and couldn't help but be affected
by the way that war is shown for what it is,
as the disintegration of the human being.
And that, like all attempts to censor or to remove things
from our vision, it always risks backfiring.
One irony here is that Dix and many of the other banned artists
have since become some of the most revered and expensive in the West.
Tables are often turned like this,
with artists demanding we look at subjects
that first defy the orthodoxy of the day
but, in time, are highly acclaimed.
That might be Anselm Kiefer in the 1960s performing the banned
Nazi salute to challenge Germans to face up to their history.
Or Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1980s America,
marking the death of a black man
after a confrontation with the US police.
Or one gay artist in 1990s Britain
challenging prejudice around homosexuality and Aids
with a disconcerting frankness.
I found this Christ in the gift shop in Hastings,
and the condom is exactly the same colour as the flesh tints in there
with him.
And, I suppose, it's a comment on the current Catholic practice
of condemning contraception, which in terms of the spread
of the HIV virus, is actually catastrophic.
Quiet everywhere.
Derek Jarman was a writer, film-maker and artist.
MUSIC: How Soon Is Now? by The Smiths
For years, he'd taken aim at homophobia.
But with the Aids crisis, and later his own diagnosis,
it became his prime target.
At the time, being HIV positive was seen as a death sentence.
And for years, the tabloid press had viciously reinforced prejudices
against same sex relationships.
Fleet Street takes the view
that homosexuality is abnormal, unnatural, a bit evil.
It is a gay plague.
# How can you say
# I go about things the wrong way?
# I am human and I need... #
In his final years, Jarman took to huge canvases to make his themes,
then still treated as forbidden by many in the mainstream,
unignorable.
Today, these particular works are rarely seen,
but Manchester Art Gallery gave me a preview
shortly before a new exhibition.
I met with writer Jon Savage, a friend of Jarman's,
to discuss their impact.
I can't remember where, but I do remember seeing this one
and getting very upset by it.
It's actually an incredible picture because it's obviously a pun.
It says, "Fuck me blind."
Yes, I was... Sorry! ..letting you say that, Mary!
I'll say it again, "Fuck me blind."
But now I can kind of get a dark humour out of it.
I just look at it and I think...
Well, I remember having a conversation with Derek about this,
and I said, "Well, Derek, you know, you've got HIV, this is pretty bad."
He said, "John, it's not great, you're right.
"But you know what? I had fun with my cock."
So I see it as a kind of double meaning.
So the end of his life, he's also saying, "I am going blind."
Yes.
Also what I get out of both these pictures - anger.
A lot of anger. He was furious.
Those bits of red, that's the anger.
And also that's a kind of...blood.
And of course, his whole body was a mess,
his whole system was a mess.
And it is a kind of erasure, really.
It's saying, my powers are going, I know they're going.
I mean, in a way, he's saying,
"I'm going to show you Aids differently."
And if you come over to the other one, you see that morphine here,
morphine written twice across the painting,
is over tabloid filth, literally,
and, "Filth. Storm over EastEnder rent boy." Scandal.
"Get this garbage off TV."
Well, in a very direct way, that's his victory over the tabloids.
And these paintings are at, you know, they're at big scale.
I mean, it's an insistence on not being invisible, right?
Yes, because you've got eight or nine foot paintings
telling you what's going on in his life.
Yeah. Telling you all the stuff that the tabloids would
like you to think is disgusting and vile,
but is again a part of reality
and the reality for a lot of gay men in particular
during that period.
So, you know, these are, they are telling a truth.
30 years on, Jarman's battles have not entirely been won,
but by and large, it's the homophobia he railed against
that's now, in Britain, unacceptable.
But I'm struck that an image made not long after Jarman's paintings,
also fingering the tabloid press,
is still one many feel should never have been openly displayed.
In 1997, London's Royal Academy staged a contemporary art show
that's become legendary.
Provocatively titled Sensation,
it showcased the collection of advertising mogul and art collector
Charles Saatchi, who'd bought up many works by young British artists.
Conceived and curated to draw in the crowds, it featured
Marc Quinn's frozen cast of his head filled with his own blood,
Jake and Dinos Chapman's child mannequins
with grotesque genitalia on their faces,
Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde,
and Tracey Emin's tent - Everyone I Have Ever Slept With.
All of them were controversial.
But even before the show opened,
there were demands that one piece in particular
should not be put on display.
TV NEWS PRESENTER: A picture of the Moors murderer, Myra Hindley,
made with children's handprints has been vandalised.
The painting, part of the Royal Academy Sensation exhibition,
had paint and an egg thrown at it.
The protest group Mothers Against Murder urged a boycott of the show.
The mother of one of Hindley's victims said
the picture was disgusting.
25 years later, the portrait still divides us.
That's a creepy picture.
She's pretty.
Is this Myra Hindley?
Yes, she was an evil woman, wasn't she?
She was, like, one of those child killers,
and I believe she was from the 1960s?
So these are, like, hands?
Yeah. Oh, that's, that's grim.
That's probably quite offensive to victims.
Maybe a bit unnecessary.
That's his brush.
That's the artist's brush.
Wants to make a point about this image, which is iconic,
and I don't think it's there to shock. I think it's to reformat
the image in people's minds and make them think about it again.
It almost seems like they're kind of celebrating her.
If I was a parent of one of the deceased children,
I definitely wouldn't want to see this.
This is purely shock to sell.
Then people with money, like Saatchi, buy it and then it becomes
a commodity to keep because it's worth money.
If it was one of my children, I would have ripped it down, I think.
Marcus Harvey, who created "Myra",
has rarely spoken publicly about it.
But he agreed to talk to me at his South London studio,
where he reflected on some of the moral dilemmas about the piece.
I'd sort of been through all the anxiety about whether I should be
playing with this subject, had I any right to do that?
All that kind of stuff. And it stayed in my studio
for a couple of years under polythene,
accumulating this sort of dust, fading.
And I think Saatchi saw a transparency of it and said,
"Oh, I'll have that."
So its first display was in the Sensation exhibition? Yeah.
You talk about feeling anxious about the project... Mm-hm.
..but what point were you wanting to make?
That people would have to acknowledge their own attraction
to the image, their own excitement around the image,
not just the revulsion and the ease of its branding - evil,
don't like, lock it up.
And also, I understood there was something
inappropriate about my...
..attachment to it, that there was a sexual attachment on my behalf
towards the image that was very uncomfortable.
And I'm sort of slightly disturbed that it was in me,
but there was something quite secretly stimulating,
attractive at some, on some level.
So there was a message about the complacency and the hypocrisy
of consuming it.
But you don't choose to do this
with casts of children's hands
unless you're wanting to say something.
There was something about, there was something about that image
I felt was important to sort of bring into conversation,
to sort of have the, the humanity and the...
..the loss and the tragedy,
sort of, present, fizzing at the same time as this thing that we'd
consumed by the metric tonne for, like, decades
and decades, and millions and millions of pounds made.
So in a sense, you're kind of,
you've got one eye on the tabloids for profiting out of this.
Yeah, yeah. When there is a sort of signal crime like this,
editors just get on their knees and thank the sweet Lord God
for this kind of horror because it's going to make them money.
They're not there to sort of banish it and look after us,
they're there to sort of bring it on and plenty of it, please.
But when an artist does it, they try to kind of come over
all kind of like the beadle in Dickens
when Oliver Twist asks for some more. "What?!"
What would you say, though, or what did you say,
to the objection
that this was so hurtful to the parents of the murdered children,
that it should, you know, it should not have been displayed like that?
Did you have an answer to that?
I had no hand in how it was displayed or consumed.
I had hoped that this would find a quiet place to be exhibited,
where it would be respectful.
So when it became a kind of bit of a circus, I was almost sort of
blamed for trying to find a way of monetising this thing
without any kind of moral perspective.
If someone comes up to you and says,
"I looked at that Myra piece and I felt really hurt,
"I felt offended and I felt upset",
what would you say to them?
I'd say, "Well, what exactly upsets you about it?"
And I say, "I've lost a child."
Yeah, but...
This isn't a celebration of a...of that event.
This is drawing attention to the gravity of that event,
and is not for a magazine or a tabloid or even a TV programme,
where this image is widespread.
I make images of images, you know,
I'm not sort of witness to the event.
I make images of images that have sort of stained my memory.
So you're reminding us to think about images in a new way?
Yes. Yeah, yeah. I suppose it's my job as an artist.
Marcus is asking us to think about what the power of an image is
and what it is for.
These are old and important questions.
And it's been well beyond the art world and the tabloid press
in a very different context where the biggest battles
have been fought.
They've been about God.
In the City of London, in the Chapel of the Mercers Company,
there is an extraordinarily rare piece of once-forbidden sculpture.
A 500-year-old statue of Jesus.
In the 1500s, the Protestant state outlawed the display
of images like this.
So when the statue was discovered in the 1950s,
it was a remarkable find.
This is a really emotive image.
Jesus is dead, his head has fallen back,
his mouth is open.
What we can pick out is the suffering, the wounds.
One of the thorns from the crown of thorns has gone into his eyebrow,
and here, there's a really violent gash in his side
and blood is streaming out of it.
But Jesus appears to have wounds that go far beyond
what we read about in the Bible.
The whole crown of thorns has gone,
but that hand has gone,
this arm has gone, and he has no feet.
It almost feels as if he's been maimed.
This extra damage was almost certainly inflicted in the
mid-16th century statue wars between Protestants and Catholics.
Tens of thousands of figurative art works right across Europe
were destroyed or defaced by Protestants
who saw this sort of sacred art as idol worship.
It's easy to write this off as a form of vandalism,
but actually, it was part of some really important debates
about what religious images were for and why they might be dangerous.
One central question was,
what were you doing when you worshipped an image like this?
Were you seeing beyond the image to God?
Or were you actually worshipping a lump of limestone?
That's also part of an even bigger debate
about how religions make God, which is invisible,
visible to us?
And what's the role of the artist in doing this?
There's hardly been a religion in the history of the world
that hasn't argued and thought about just that kind of question.
In recent years, it has often been assumed that the sharpest focus
of these debates and the most extreme form of prohibition
is and has been in Islam.
Its mosques don't feature figurative art,
but often use elaborate calligraphy as a form of decoration
and a way of representing religious truth.
Meanwhile, over the last few decades,
satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in Denmark
and France have provoked protest and violence.
Many people imagine that all images of the Prophet
have always been forbidden.
It's not that simple.
There is, in fact, a rich history in parts of the Islamic world
of representing Muhammad, especially in illustrated manuscripts.
The University of Edinburgh holds one now rare set
made in the early 14th century at the Mongol Court
in what's now Iran.
I met with Fozia Bora, a specialist in Islamic history,
to explore them further.
So this is an image from the life of the Prophet Muhammad
where, as a young man, he's in a caravan with his uncle
travelling into Syria.
As you can see, everybody in the image
is looking towards this figure.
Even the camels are looking at Muhammad. Even the camels, yeah.
And this is an angel coming down from heaven to, to anoint him?
That's right.
And these are not specifically religious texts?
This, this is not like an illustrated Koran?
No, it's a book of historiography, so it's a chronicle.
It tells the story of the Mongols.
And the author, Rashid al-Din, is a high official, a vizier.
The equivalent of a prime minister today, perhaps.
And he has a strong mission of public education.
Right. Now, if I can, very carefully, move that,
we've got another image which looks more complicated to me.
This is the story of the Prophet's miraculous night journey,
and he rises to the heavens on a steed.
So the horse has a human figure at both ends.
That's right, and I think it shows different aspects of the Prophet's
personality in being both a person with warrior-like qualities,
but also a bringer of scripture.
Well, a lot of people now would find this very surprising
because there is a stereotype of Islam
as being opposed to images of living things in general,
but absolutely forbidding images of the Prophet.
These, in a sense, suggest that isn't quite the case.
I mean, are these terribly rare or a bit subversive?
Certainly not subversive.
Because the author of this text and the kind of context
he's working in are very mainstream.
You find this kind of imagery is acceptable in phases of
Sunni and Shi'i writing and artwork.
So you actually get these in the two main branches of Islam.
It's not, it's not a divide? Not absolutely.
In general, to be very broad brush,
Shi'i positions on the depiction of the Prophet have been much
more accommodating than Sunni ones, but this is a Sunni text. Right.
But the Prophet, after 1500, his portrait tends to be veiled.
So there's a historical development here, which tends to move away
from at least showing the features of the Prophet. Yes.
But it's not so much something that is legislated within Islamic law,
but there are discourses around idolatry,
discourses around image making,
which could be seen to be prohibitive.
But those are matters of interpretation.
What's controversial is the modern context in which they've come
to mean something quite different.
And the modern context has been satiric,
conflictual, rather than reverential. Absolutely.
In fact, as late as the 2000s,
the legal opinions of many scholars were that an image of the Prophet,
whether in the form of a statue or in the form of a painting,
that image's value and permissibility depends on
what the image is used for, not the image itself.
I think we should also stress that the Prophet is embodied
or remembered in many different ways, and it doesn't have to be
a depiction to be valid or culturally useful. Yes.
So in some senses, our expectations are perhaps
Eurocentric in that sense.
You know, we expect to see iconography of certain kinds.
And so if we don't see that, we feel something is lacking,
but that may not be how devotional Muslims see the issue.
Fozia makes the important observation that it is now
a very Western point of view to imagine that figurative imagery
is somehow the gold standard of religious representation.
With that in mind, it's worth reassessing other certainties
about how we look and the value we place on looking.
In a way, the merits of showing and sharing
are written into the English language.
We talk about things being "better out than in",
of "getting them out into the open",
and we're always banging on about the virtues of transparency.
But not all cultures see it like that.
In fact, some privilege the exact opposite.
The British Museum holds some precious works
from the African Cote d'Ivoire made by the Baoule people.
These pieces were once subject to strict rules around who could
look at them, like this ceremonial mask.
Gus, is it dangerous for me to look at this?
It could be considered disrespectful and it could diminish the power
of this to be impactful
unless you are part of a very particular part of a community.
And when you did see them,
for many, you shouldn't look at them directly.
And these are probably hugely heavy,
but it's not worn on the front of the face, as one would imagine
a lot of masks in the West.
This is worn on the top of the head and it would be worn with a raffia
cloak, palm fronds as well, and it would be danced.
MUSIC PLAYS
So most of the community don't really get to watch?
Absolutely not.
And there are those who are pretty much
systematically excluded from seeing.
You know, they would be the young and women who would be excluded.
But if you were to defy convention, expectation
and just sort of look at it as we are now,
there could be a price to pay.
Punishment. Punishment, punishment, punishment.
Potentially even death.
So that's the mask.
What about the two figures we've got out here?
These figures would be commissioned as a way of being in contact
with your spirit lover.
This is someone who would be partnered with you,
who resides in a kind of parallel realm... Right.
..that can impact your life in very real ways.
So you ignore them, and then, you know, you'll notice
your luck isn't so good any more.
An object like this, you would place it down in a corner somewhere,
probably wrapped.
And so, again, it's part of a tradition
in which the more that people who aren't meant to gaze upon this,
the more that its power, its potency is diluted.
So the Western museum overturns that,
it takes these objects, puts them in a case, spotlights them,
encourages us all to look as hard as we can.
Now, is that a problem?
Well, I mean, we're used to looking in museums, we're used to
a particular way of thinking about objects that we see there,
that the more we see of them, the more we understand them.
But this is part of a tradition in which respect and understanding
is actually connected to not seeing, to the hidden. Yes.
The very thing that we're taught to do in museums
is actually distancing us from an understanding of what these objects
are meant to convey.
By taking a Baoule perspective, Gus is reminding us
that looking and not looking can be more complicated than they seem.
And he must be right.
Even with works we think we understand, there are always
different ways of seeing, which means thinking hard
about who's seeing them, who's making them
and how they're being shown in different times and places.
And what we discover is that the modern debates about some
of our most controversial images run deeper than we might think.
There's one artwork, public in the sense that we own it,
even if we can rarely see it, that captures this better than most,
and in a surprising way.
It's a series of blatantly imperialistic murals
on display here in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office
in Whitehall, designed around the time of World War I
to decorate the grand ceremonial staircase.
One scene in particular has been the centre of controversy.
It's called, in Latin, Britannia Pacificatrix -
Britannia the Peacemaker.
For some observers, politicians, staff and visitors,
the view that it offers of the other peoples and nations of the world
is not just outdated, it's offensive and even upsetting.
A really good candidate to take down or cover up.
We wanted to film these paintings, but when we asked for permission,
the Foreign Office refused and declined to give a reason.
These archive photographs, however, show us the scene of a beneficent
Britannia surrounded by figures representing world nations.
To one side, Japan, Greece and France.
Below, scantily-clad Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro,
seeking British protection.
And to the other side, imperial subjects,
an Indian and Arabian man and, most objectionable to us now,
a small Swahili boy with a bowl of fruit,
infantilising the people of colonial Africa.
It's a degrading, racist stereotype.
I genuinely think if I was in a gallery and I walked past that,
I would probably just walk past it. But it is interesting
because you probably walk past these all the time
and you don't realise the controversy of them.
Yeah, naturally, I would be offended by it, but obviously taking time
to really understand the time it was made,
I guess it more than made sense to those people that, yeah,
like, Africa's just some miniature place.
Like, they're just savages, etc.
I find it distasteful.
Times change.
Values change.
Paintings can change.
I think maybe it's time to swap that out for another one.
Today, currently, it's unacceptable.
I refuse to accept that this painting is hanging there for people
to keep seeing. No, it should have been brought down a long time ago.
But there's a more complicated story behind what looks like
a straightforward expression of imperial and racial superiority.
The whole series is by a now little known artist,
Sigismund Goetze.
In 1912, hearing that the drab Foreign Office interiors
were in need of decoration, he volunteered his services for free.
But as the work went on, it became increasingly difficult to capture
the tragedy of the Great War or to represent the new world order
that was emerging, and the final scene of Britannia the peacemaker
was trickiest of all.
We now tend to concentrate on the Swahili boy.
But at the time, people were concerned
about the representation of Belgium as a naked girl,
kneeling at the feet of Britannia.
And some British officials were worried about the representation
of Japan as a Geisha.
But happily, they were able to borrow from the Japanese Embassy,
a more formal, aristocratic, ceremonial outfit
for Goetze to copy in doing a revised version of it.
That wasn't the end of it, though.
Goetze was soon the victim of racism himself,
when the murals were attacked in the journal Plain English.
SHE READS: Who ordered them? Painted by a man who is an alien
in common law, and a perpetual enemy of the Christian Empire?
Where were our British artists?
Our Foreign Office is quite foreign enough without the spacious
decorations of a foreign Jew at the expense of the British taxpayer.
Goetze took them on, sued for libel, and won his case
on the grounds that he'd worked for free, he was British,
his family had been here for more than a century,
and he was not Jewish.
For us, there are some sobering parallels and a reminder
that with controversial works of art, the controversies can go back
a long way.
He was not the last person in this country to have to prove
that he belonged in a place that his family had lived for generations.
And in a way, the prejudices that Goetze faced
are uncannily similar to those that we now detect in his paintings.
Recently, one work of art in particular has opened eyes
to these dilemmas, and especially to the challenge posed by statues
in public places.
SHOUTING
COMMENTARY: For centuries, he took pride of place in Bristol.
Celebrated as a merchant, politician and philanthropist.
Now, reviled for his part in the slave trade.
The latest demonstrations came 13 days after the killing
of George Floyd by US police.
The monument to Edward Colston, which had stood in the city centre
for more than a century, was toppled and pushed into the river.
CHEERING
There's never been a time in history
when statues have not been pulled down.
But Colston's dramatic departure
captured headlines and divided opinion.
For a lot of people, it's a reminder of, like, what the UK specifically
was built on.
To see, like, the people of Bristol come together and say as a community
like, yeah, this needs to come down, it was honestly great to see.
What I think they've got no right to do is to take our history away,
whether it be good or bad.
I'm not sure if, you know,
vandalism is the right answer,
but I believe people wanted to see some kind of radical change.
If there are people of colour who are seeing that statue,
that's got to be a horrible, horrible thing to see every day.
I've experienced my share of racism, but there's a better way to go
about wanting people to hear your, your frustrations
or your concerns.
You can't teach the newer generation where things have gone wrong
through history if you haven't got no reminders of it.
Do you just take down these statues because you now see things
from a different way?
Aindrea Emelife is a member of the London Mayor's Commission looking
into how history should be represented in the public realm.
What I wondered, did she think about the fate of Colston
and the future of other similarly contentious works of art?
I think what we saw quite poignantly was with the Black Lives Matter
protests, how that sort of allowed us to understand,
oh, these statues are here, they're representing something
that is obviously not in the current context
and in the current conversation.
If black lives matter, how can we also have these characters up?
I mean, part of the issue is, presumably, and part of the tension
comes from, whose voice counts... Yes.
..in whether something goes on display, continues on display
or is removed. Who gets to decide? Yeah. That's a very tricky issue.
I mean, you remove something and will we forget them? I'm not sure.
We lose something. We lose something.
Put something on them or have some different contextualisations.
There's a great artist called Hew Locke, who did a photographic
series where he put cowrie shells on Edward Colston.
Imagine if that was real, if that was there and you could put
the sort of pomp of slavery on a slave trader?
I mean, America has been doing quite interesting things
with their Confederate statues.
Kehinde Wiley recreated a Confederate statue
with a black man on it wearing a hoodie.
And that was a huge statement that was in the language
of the statues. Could almost blend in if you didn't quite look at it.
It too often gets brought down to a kind of,
a sort of, binary choice between... Keep or remove? Yeah.
And there isn't anybody who wants to keep every statue.
I mean, you know, I mean, you know, we don't want statues
of Jimmy Savile up, but after that, we don't know...
Where to go. And how do we judge the level of offence?
This is where I get back to.
I think a lot of it should be rooted back to the people
that live in those places.
I guess I'm using Colston again as an example,
but you can completely understand
how that would be a great affront to people.
Do you think it matters to the acceptability
of a sculpture, who the artist was that did it?
Marc Quinn's attempt to replace the statue of Colston.
White celebrity artist -
exploits or celebrates the black protester?
I think that debate started a long time before that statue.
I mean, people discussed Andy Warhol's race riots
that showed the Birmingham attacks.
People were wondering whether he should be doing that work.
But then what I was most excited about, is seeing an image like that
in the public realm.
And then, secondly, I heard a lot of racist remarks
at seeing a black woman on the plinth, and it made me realise that,
as important as who made the statue is, it made us realise how necessary
it is to have more statues like that up in public.
So kind of paradoxically, you're wanting
more and more and more statues so we see them differently? Yeah.
I want people to understand and to think about their history more,
and I want us to confront the past.
Other countries in the world are facing up to the statue dilemma too.
And Germany, which looks back to a 20th century
marked by two world wars, dictatorship, division
and reunification, has attempted one solution
at the Citadel Museum on the edge of Berlin.
We've seen the Nazis getting rid of art, but other regimes did so too.
Here, a variety of monuments, at different times unwelcome
in the capital's public spaces, have been brought together.
You can walk amongst them and now even touch them.
There are Prussian bigwigs,
a Nazi athlete...
..a couple of East German border guards, and more.
In a way, the poster boy of the museum is this head of Lenin
that once topped a colossal statue of him set up in 1970
in communist East Berlin, and taken down again in 1991
and buried in the ground.
In 2015,
the head was dug up again to be installed here.
He's a severed head and a symbol of toppled tyranny.
And the idea of the curators of the museum
is that this should be a safe space
where people can come and confront and debate the historical issues
that these images raise.
This is a stunning and slightly eerie space
with its wounded statues,
its battered marble bodies all lined up.
And it's certainly one solution to the problem of what to do
with monuments that have passed their use by date.
But I'm not convinced that the, "Oh, put them in a museum" line
has all the answers.
The sheer elegance of this display,
it's just a bit sanitising.
It tends to blunt the political edge,
and it might make it easier to turn a blind eye
to their contested histories.
Besides, you have to choose to come here to confront them.
Putting statues away like this
can be a way of dodging their legacy
as much as facing up to it.
This is not the only drawback to the idea
that the solution lies in museums.
In fact, I think those on all sides of the debate about the future
of our statues might be missing a bigger point,
brought home to me in Bristol
when I saw the toppled Edward Colston for myself.
Oh, wow.
God, it's an extraordinary sight.
There's something pretty unsettling, actually,
about being sort of so up close.
I mean, I'm not somebody who was ever a victim
of what this man stood for, or his legacy.
But when he fell, I still thought there was a bit of history here
being rewritten and I felt pleased.
But now, when I look at him in this slightly pathetic state
and almost catch his eye,
I kind of think also that he's now challenging my moral certainty
about things.
I watched Colston come down on my television and
I was clutching in my hand my smartphone.
Now, I think I know, and most of us know, in what conditions our
smartphones are made, our other bits of high-tech, our cheap clothing,
and yet we don't want to see that.
I suppose I wondered, how different is my blindness from the blindness
of Colston himself, or the people who put his statue up
in the late 19th century, or the people who made him a local hero?
Not so very different, I think.
I can tell you, you learn a lot about how exposed you feel
on top of a plinth by trying it out.
But I've not just been talking about the statue wars,
I've been talking about art, religion, tradition
and politics of all kinds, trying to think harder about
what or who we get to see
and what or who we don't.
From the sacred to the slave trader.
Throughout history, people have argued about what work
should be on public display and who should decide.
In the end, the arguments come down to what we think
those images are for.
I can't help thinking that they do more than celebrate and honour.
They help us frame debates about what's important to us
and, of course, they turn the spotlight back onto ourselves,
offering a salutary warning that one day
it might be us and our heroes who are candidates for the chop.
So don't blame the artists,
they're shining a light onto our anxieties.
Which reminds me,
how exactly do I get down from here?
Has anybody got a ladder?