Kathryn Flett: Call me a prude, but ...
Kathryn Flett: Call me a prude, but ... | Life and style | The Guardian
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In Eastbourne, 16 miles from my home, the Towner gallery was showing an exhibition of the work of the late American photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe. I'm sure the words Eastbourne and Robert Mapplethorpe never co-existed in a sentence before this autumn, but it is to the Towner's credit that it has managed to curate a show that does justice to the photographer's work while acknowledging the fact that Eastbourne is, literally and metaphorically, a very long way from either Greenwich Village or Soho.
Anyway, there I was on one of my child-free weekends, soaking up the culture, clocking the penises and the Patti Smith portraits, when I spotted a couple of cool-looking mid-30s mums and dads plus their offspring, ranging from babies to not-quite-double-figures, all "enjoying" the Mapplethorpe oeuvre en famille. At which point I felt almost comically middle-aged and reactionary. And for the second time in a fortnight, no less, having experienced similar bemusement at the sight of groovy parents, singly and in couples, hauling their kids around one of the edgier exhibits at the Brighton Photo Biennale the horribly mutilated subjects of Stuart Griffiths's fine but harrowing (and also very large) colour portraits of maimed ex-servicemen.
I probably qualify as a reasonably groovy, albeit rapidly ageing, parent of young children. I am fortyblah, my sons are eight and four, and though I have hauled them (and been hauled by them, especially in Tate Modern's Turbine Room) around numerous exhibitions, frankly they're both still happiest at the Takashi Murakami end of the contemporary art spectrum. I wouldn't expose them to even Mapplethorpe's most cheerful penises because it would provoke more questions (never mind sniggers) than I feel it's currently necessary to answer.
Confronting bombarding, even children with images that many parents would ban them from viewing if they'd been stumbled across randomly on the internet, strikes me as laughably hypocritical. But these days, it seems to be positively encouraged. My children yours too, probably are already (wildly, exhaustingly) sophisticated enough without me introducing them to images that are, frankly, unsuitable. And though "unsuitable" is an old-fashioned sort of word, and loaded too because "suitability" is both subjective and dependent on the child it's still the best word for the job.
So what about Mapplethorpe's unsuitable willies? Surely, the Towner has been besieged by the good burghers of Eastbourne unprepared for even "tasteful" depictions of homoerotic S&M?
"Er, no. The response has been great," says exhibitions curator Sanna Moore. "We have disclaimers around the building warning people that there is adult content and to use their discretion. It is also possible to enter the exhibition and still avoid the Leather and Eroticism Room and even when families do enter the rooms there is always someone on hand to flag that up again. But we are actually positively encouraging young people to see collections of great art, and that's one of the reasons we decided against having an Adults Only room."
I should probably make it clear that I believe children should be exposed to art lots of art, as much as possible. And I also believe that the creation of art must be uncensored and artists allowed to explore all the cultural taboos they fancy exploring, within reason, as long as that process does not intentionally cause emotional or physical harm to any other living soul
That would be my liberal art-consuming manifesto. But appreciating and enjoying art is not entirely dissimilar to appreciating and enjoying food. The taste buds evolve to enjoy more complex and demanding tastes and it must be the same with our visual-art buds or else I would still believe that the greatest artist who ever lived was Theo Geisel aka Dr Seuss as I did when I was five.
I didn't feed my children bottles of Pouilly Fumι and plates of steak tartare when they were newborns, and today would only let them within squinting distance of the Chapman Brothers' penis-faced child-mannequins if I was either a Very Bad Parent or an Overly Groovy one which in my book amounts to the same thing.
But perhaps there's some sort of sliding scale of child-appropriate art. And even if I don't (yet) want to talk to my children about S&M, maybe I ought to be engaging them in a dialogue about the bloodier aspects of war, especially as they are male children in thrall to the whole idea (and indeed the actuality) of fighting.
Having first been struck by the Small Children + Scary Pictures = Who Knows What equation at Stuart Griffiths's Brighton private view, I wondered what the photographer felt about his work being right up there with a Pizza Express pit-stop and 3D Despicable Me as part of a cosy family day out: "Well, I grew up with a very rose-tinted, Action Man view of the army as somewhere where men were able to be men but my son, who has grown up with my images, doesn't have that at all. I've asked him if he'd ever want to join up, and straightaway he said no, he doesn't want to end up like one of my photographs. As far as he's concerned, war is bad and that's that," says Griffiths.
As anti-war propaganda, then, Griffiths's pictures are undeniably powerful tools and all the more so for having been made by an ex-soldier. And then there is a human narrative largely missing from the Mapplethorpe oeuvre that might engage even relatively young children (though I think mine are too young) in a potentially positive way.
Maybe things cease to be provocative when they've been around for a while, like classic cars. In which case, if an erect penis image is over 20 years old it's "art", and therefore OK to be seen by kids. Rubens's The Rape of the Sabine Women is (never mind the raping) a no-brainer on the grounds that it's a) really old and b) painted. I've taken my kids to the National Gallery because big old art even big old saucy art appears to elicit the same kind of response from them, as does watching, say, Mary Poppins: it's kind of interesting, but it's kind of a bit boring, too
Of course, I sound like the "British Matron" who wrote as follows to the editor of the Times in 1885 (from The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art by Alison Smith): "Is it not a crying shame that pictures are flaunted before the public from the pencil of male and female artists which must lead many visitors to the gallery to turn from them in disgust and cause only timid half glances to be cast at the paintings hanging close by, however excellent they may be, lest it should be supposed the spectator is looking at that which revolts his or her sense of decency
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Or, worse, I am that stern finger-wagging Victorian paterfamilias whose porn collection was kept under lock and key in the library to be studied by gaslight in the company of a fine malt and a few other discerning gents, but who would cover the piano's well-turned legs with modesty "pantalettes" lest everyone be overcome by the erotic thrill of wooden ankles.
In truth, there is no evidence that the Victorians were markedly more uptight than we are the piano pantalettes are a myth. But they were infinitely better at both etiquette and discretion. Double standards do as I say, not as I do abounded then and still do now. We've probably been grappling with notions of what constitutes an "appropriate" childhood for at least a couple of hundred years and we're apparently no nearer to nailing it.
I still wouldn't let any pre-pubescent child in my care get up close and personal with a fruity Mapplethorpe or, for slightly different reasons, Griffiths's grittier and more gruesome images. But it's becoming depressingly apparent that I may be in a minority, existing somewhere at the outer limits of Squaresville yeah, even for Eastbourne because I am assured that on weekdays the Towner is full of school groups making up their own sweet, young and impressionable minds about whether Mapplethorpe = Art.
Mind you, right next door to the Towner, at the Congress theatre, they are already taking bookings for Cinderella, so if you're a groovy, tongue-in-chic sort of parent looking for a memorable south-coast family day out then you could do a lot worse than consume some posh American porn followed by a saucy old British panto. Any old irony in that, I wonder?
The Mapplethorpe Artist Rooms exhibition runs until 21 November at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne; tel 01323 434670
Jonathan Jones: The art critic's view
A while ago we were at Tate Britain with our five-year-old daughter. Her attention was caught by a Damien Hirst sheep. I don't have a problem with that. But Sarah, my wife, stood in front of a photograph on the wall of Hirst posing alongside a severed head in a Leeds mortuary. Keeping your eyes on the ball and leaping in at the right moment even, in this case, standing in front of a picture is one way to negotiate the adventure of the art gallery.
It is better than denying that experience. Either you encourage children to enjoy art or you don't. Any cultural encounter can lead to the "inappropriate". When I was 12, we were in Italy on holiday. In Siena cathedral, a priest beckoned my younger sister and showed her the pickled head of St Catherine. The flesh looked like a pink sponge. Deborah burst out crying. It was more horrible than anything children are likely to see in a modern art gallery. But was it wrong to take us to a great Gothic cathedral that also houses works by Donatello and Michelangelo?
The National Gallery, too, is full of shocking images. They do not seem to me to be "safe" just because they are painted rather than photographed. Our child finds them exciting she relished teasing her mother, when she was three or four, by claiming her favourite painting there was a canvas by Cornelis van Haarlem, of a dragon chewing a man's face off.
There is surely an analogy here with Terry Deary's Horrible Histories books. At a time when history in schools has been criticised for failing to interest children, Deary has found that by putting in all the gory bits you can bring the past to bloody life.
In the same spirit, the British Museum is encouraging families to visit its Egyptian Book of the Dead exhibition, which features corpses, tombs and macabre myths. Children love Egypt, there's even a Playmobil Egypt set in the shops ρ so the museum is right to draw on this fascination.
It is wrong to expose children gratuitously to violent, let alone sexual, images, and having seen the Mapplethorpe show in Eastbourne, I cannot see any justification for taking a child to that. But is it better to leave kids with the sad belief that high art is boring? Horrible Art History is better than Dull Sunday Museum Trips.
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I'm all for avoiding uncomfortable questions, but at the same time I think that "Daddy, what are those two men doing?" is an adult's idea of what a kid would ask. Gay leather orgies are the sort of thing that's inherently interesting to kids, and they won't need to question any of it. They generally have a high tolerance level for unexplained wierdness.
On the other hand, I suppose it does leave you pretty open to, "Not that I don't appreciate the gesture, mum, but I'm sleeping in the garage tonight with the door locked. Kthxbai."
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