“Shock and Amaze”
Appeared on October 25, 2006 in “The Ithaca Times,” Ithaca, NY
Perhaps it can be said that you cannot judge a book by its cover but upon first
glance at the latest from Michael Kammen, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies
in American Culture, the inquiring, uninformed reader might giggle at jacket designer
Chip Kid’s juxtaposition of two seemingly phallic images, the Washington Monument
and Constantin Brancusi’s “Bird In Space,” and think visual shock indeed. However, the
comparison between the two works speaks less of sexual innuendo and more of the
American public’s historical reluctance to accept modernism. Robert Mill’s concept for
a large, pyramid-shaped monument for our nation’s first president was accused of being
too symbolic, too classically influenced and too gigantic throughout its renovations.
Ultimately, Kammen argues, an 1880s America loved the completed Washington
Monument because “there was ‘something characteristically American’ about finishing
the tallest structure in the world.” What then is its connection to Brancusi’s “Bird In
Space” which, consisting simply of elongated bronze, looks nothing like a bird in space?
Both works were resisted because of their respective abstractness. When Constantin
Brancusi attempted to bring “Bird In Space” and seven other sculptures to the United
States, two disapproving curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art struck a deal with a
customs agent. The latter refused to admit “Bird In Space” to the US duty-free as a piece
of artwork because it did not look like a bird.
Kammen stated that he traced the history of outrage because he’d like his
“readership to have an understanding that the art controversies of the past fifteen years
are not new.” American response fits in an almost predictable pattern, particularly
toward nudity. In 1893, a Chicago-based group associated with the World’s Columbian
Exposition asked Auguste Rodin to send sculptures from a series inspired by Dante’s
Inferno. The Kiss depicts two nudes, Paolo and Francesca, eternally damned to embrace.
Francesca is the clear aggressor, her arms wrapped around Paolo’s head as she sits across
his lap. Appalled, the Chicago group only allowed patrons to view Rodin’s display with
special permission. Interestingly, a nude contemporary to Rodin’s The Kiss, Hiram
Powers’ The Greek Slave never encountered public indignation because Powers sculpted
a bracelet with cross onto his slave girl’s wrist in 1848. The clergy openly praised The
Greek Slave and, the girl seen as a Christian repressed in slavery by the pagan Greeks, the
public adored it as a statement for abolition.
To the Rodin example there are surely some resounding, idealistic cries of “but
we’ve come so far since then.” We have and have not. In 1997, after planning a Rodin
exhibit at its university museum, the representatives of Brigham Young University
refused to uncrate the sculptor’s famous nudes. In more recent examples, a Texas
schoolteacher lost her position because she brought her students to the Dallas Art
Museum in which there were, of course, nude statues. Chris Kockin’s
“Interdependence,” portraying a naked man and woman supporting another disrobed
female, had to be relocated from its Lovelin, Colorado traffic circle after mothers’
complained and bureaucrats feared car accidents. Even in our relatively free-thinking
city, Ithacans denounced local artists’ mural of big-breasted babes in bikinis next to AJ’s
Foreign Auto.
Cornell History professor and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Kammen will
discuss similar issues of abstraction, nudity, the changing face of public sculpture and the
transformation of the art museum from an elitist club into a lucrative enterprise
at the Bookery. “Attendance in art museums has spiked. The American Museum has
been democratized,” Kammen says, “Art is hot.” With more Americans attending art
museums than any other comparable venue—including National Football League games
and movies—the American art museum is also now big business embodied. Kammen
attributes this to several factors, the first being the budget boost for the formulation of
Cleveland Museum of Art’s Department of Education in the 1950s. Consider the field
trips of backpack-carrying school kids at the Met. The level of education and ensuing
intellectual curiosity has significantly increased since the 1870s when the art museum
was exclusively for the elite, its doors purposefully shutting before working class patrons
could leave their day jobs. Now blockbuster exhibits, emporium-sized gift shops and
weekend hours are the norms, making the visit to the American art museum an accessible
social event where controversy is often the best draw.