Reflections on an Art Controversy (With Simon Solomon)

John William Waterhouse: Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) 
Oil on canvas (132 x 197.5 cm)
Manchester City Art Gallery

I.

The controversial decision by Manchester City Art Gallery working in collaboration with Black British artist Sonia Boyce to temporarily remove the well known and - so it would seem - still much-loved painting by J. W. Waterhouse depicting the story of a handsome Greek youth, Hylas, being seduced by a group of water nymphs in that slightly pervy but rather pedestrian pre-Raphaelite manner, caused a predictable shitstorm of reaction.    

And that, apparently, was the aim; to incite discussion and challenge the contemporary relevance of a Victorian fantasy belonging to the male porno-mythic imagination.

It certainly seems to be the line that Clare Gannaway, the gallery's curator of contemporary art, is holding fast to now that Waterhouse's masterpiece is hanging back on the wall. She insists that there was never any intention to censor or permanently remove a work that some today consider offensive and even obscene; suggesting as it does that the pubescent female body exists to serve a decorative and titilating function.

I have to admit, I'm slightly skeptical about this. One can't help feeling that Gannaway and Boyce were rather hoping to test public opinion and see how far they could go, or what they could get away with. Having said that, I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the arguments advanced by both women and certainly don't think that any artwork is above critical contestation (though this is probably not best served by simply removing it from view and then inviting visitors to leave post-it notes in the empty space).    

My friend, the Dublin-based poet and scholar Simon Solomon, feels rather more strongly on this issue, however, and has posted a series of remarks on the gallery's website voicing his anger and making clear his contempt for Gannaway and Boyce. Generously, he's consented to my reposting below his latest piece on this ludicrous (though vitally important) affair, written in response to Boyce's article in The Guardian defending the takedown of Waterhouse's work as part of a performance piece of her own.


II.

"In Boyce's pursed-lipped piece of historical revisionism, the Waterhouse painting depicts 'seven long-haired, topless nymphs (pubescent girls)'. Is she really this offensively reactionary or is she being paid by Manchester Art Gallery to be? They are NYMPHS! As in alluring mythic/inhuman feminine entities in mortal garb. The Victorians didn't share our paranoiac, paedo-coated modern concept of pubescent in this domain, with all of its moralistic cultural anxiety. Boyce also seems suspiciously preoccupied with their exposed breasts for reasons best known to herself (of which more below) - presumably, she would feel better if they had been depicted in bathing suits, bloomers and caps. (Or just not depicted at all.)

Boyce then attempts to make the ridiculous case that, because other galleries do not display and/or store certain artworks at certain times for different reasons, the accusations of 'censorship' in this case against Manchester Art Gallery are ill-conceived - and even tries to imply we, as mere 'visitors', are extraordinarily lucky to have been invited into the discussion at all. We are then advised that the 'dialogue' that has been engendered (a dialogue she clearly feels she must resist) is composed by hate-filled simpletons looking for 'easy soundbites', driven by 'bigotry', and is misguidedly 'polarising'. (Even though the hundreds of posts I have read on the gallery blog have been, for the most part, stirring, educated and highly articulate, as well as, yes, angry and justifiably indignant.)

She asserts, as if it were self-evident, that 'judgment is at the heart of art'. The problem is this authoritarian statement is far from obvious. One could say - I would say - that being moved or disturbed, being ravished or silenced, is the alpha and omega of aesthetic feeling. Or falling in love with an image so hard one cannot forget it. [...] Unfortunately, for the likes of Boyce and Gannaway, classicism, monumentality, genius and mythic beauty are 'out', because art must fit modern demands for contemporary relevance, cultural inoffensiveness and whatever the #metoo generation is twittering about this week. Apparently, she also knows much more about these things than the Ancients, myth-makers and visionaries of our Western past.

There’s an ill-advised reference to Mengin's 1877 painting Sappho, in regard to which the first adjective she can tellingly find is that the subject is, once again, 'topless'. Apparently, this Sappho is not lesbian enough, among other things, for her retrospective/revisonist needs [...] and/or not evocative enough of Sappho’s cultural achievements. (The lyre that the subject is holding has apparently been overlooked by Boyce.)

What Boyce claims to celebrate is the contestability of art and its meanings. But she exposes her true agenda by telling us that the removal of the Waterhouse painting 'can' (read should) be seen in the 'context' (an hilarious irony, given her peerless deafness and blindness to Victorian context) of visitor-centred curatorial initiatives in Eindhoven and Middlesborough, in addition to conveying the spiteful and embittered reactions above that suggest people just aren’t sophisticated enough to attune themselves to her ideologically motivated cultural programme. The boot is so clearly on the other foot it’s embarrassing: a self-selecting elite - organised by fatuous/simplistic notions of binary gender, seduction and resentment of myth and history, topped off with puritanical outrage over bare-breasted images of femininity - hijacking art for politically driven ends. Against which hundreds of people, as invited, have now spoken eloquently, incisively and emphatically - not that, to read Boyce’s snookered, self-serving and bitter piece, you’d have realised this fact.

I do not wish art to be preserved in aspic and love the kind of baroque, life-loving and darkness-affirming criticism of feminist commentators such as Camille Paglia. I will also concede that Boyce makes a decent point about the modern hypocrisy of sometimes treating, say, myth differently from photography. But one reasonable claim hardly gets her off the dozens of hooks upon which she is rightly snagged.

The painting is back up ... and the egg is all over these imposters’ faces!"

Note: Simon Solomon can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink