Artist says censorship of public exhibit shows “lack of understanding”
Carolina Loyola-Garcia took some friends to 2 PPG Place on June 3, to show them a video she made to display as part of the Three River Arts Festival.
She was proud that the piece was being shown in the windows of the building that faces Fourth Avenue. Instead of seeing her video, however, she found a black strip of cardboard completely blocking the view of the 8-inch monitor inside.
Loyola-Garcia wasn’t told that her art had been censored. So she gained access to the showcase by obtaining a key from the security desk, removed the cardboard rectangle covering the screen and went home.
She returned on Monday to find the same thing she saw on Sunday — her video, which contains scenes of a nude woman, was censored, cut off from public viewing.
“It’s annoying that someone can decide for others what is proper and moral,” she says. “There is a long tradition of nudity in art, but there is a fear of sexuality in society today. It is a huge lack of understanding.”
She may be right. Loyola-Garcia showed her video to City Paper at PPG Place. After activating the video, it remained on for about a minute before it was shut off by someone inside the building. She went in to the building and returned wearing a frustrated expression, at which time the video was shown in full.
The five-minute video depicts a nude woman walking through a park in the early morning. She proceeds to wash herself with milk and honey in a “ritualistic performance of spirituality,” according to Loyola-Garcia, in which honey represents health and milk is life. It is an “act of healing and self-validation,” she says.
Loyola-Garcia originally cut six small holes in a piece of paper covering the monitor, so that the video wasn’t visible to passersby. An observer had to bend over and peep through these small holes to view it. However, the holes were later covered by the cardboard rectangle, completely blocking any view of the monitor.
Real-estate firm Grubb & Ellis manages the building and deemed the video inappropriate because it faced the sidewalk and was viewable by the public, says TRAF spokesperson Lindsay Clark. The firm had the material covered shortly after the exhibit opened on June 1. Company officials did not return calls seeking comment.
“The piece showed nudity to people on the sidewalk, which is pushing the corporate community’s limitations,” says Clark. “Displaying nudity in a setting where the general public is passing by is not what we intended.”
Katherine Talcott, curator of the exhibit that included Loyola-Garcia’s work, praised her as a nationally and internationally respected artist, and said she didn’t feel that the video was “inappropriate for the location” at PPG Place. However, Talcott says that a representative from Grubb & Ellis told her that the video did not represent the company well and that it was “inappropriate for their audience.”
Loyola-Garcia, an assistant professor of media arts at Robert Morris University, can’t understand why someone would be offended by a naked body in an artistic context, considering the fact that nudity has been a subject of art for centuries.
“Is someone going to censor and cover up portraits at the Carnegie Museum of Art?” she says. “Are you going to go to Florence and cover up the statue of Michelangelo‘s ‘David‘? I don’t think so.”
Loyola-Garcia has filmed nudity on the streets of San Francisco in broad daylight without controversy, she says, so she didn’t expect this kind of outcry.
TRAF’s Clark explained that the video would not be an issue if it were in an art gallery. She also says the video is being moved to “a more appropriate location” on the third floor of the TRAF gallery, at 937 Liberty Ave. “That decision should have been made from the start,” adds Clark.
Loyola-Garcia says there is a “tremendous lack of respect” for modern art. At press time, she was planning to travel to Mexico to showcase her work. She won’t find controversy there, she says, and maintains that the problem doesn’t lie in her art but in contemporary society.
“The fact that people are offended by the human body in its natural state shows how disconnected we are from who we are and where we came from,” she says.
This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2007.
I feel your pain Carolina. As an Art College graduate, I always refused to show in Pittsburgh. It’s the do as I say, not as I do center of the mid-Atlantic states. Having grown up here, I know how provincial and small some of the minds can be if they had a mind at all.
These are the same people who will kneel in front of a wooden cross with a mostly nude Christ nailed to it and dismiss it as religion. But when the body is celebrated for its own beauty, supposedly a gift from God, it takes on a filthy connotation.
No, Carolina, you and other artists of substance should take your art elsewhere, where the minds are developed and appreciative of ones talents and not frightened of boobies, hoo hoos or pee pees.
Maybe next year, the Three Rivers fast Food Festival plus Art should show only a collection of fully clad saints on holy cards.
That and an Iron City and you’ve got one helluva day in the ‘burgh’ Oh, yeah, don’t forget the Kolbassi and kraut. It was the Festival First place award winner.
This is such a load of crap. Look – I too am an artist, a musician, a writer, and a staunch supporter of freedom of expression/speech, and even the right to offend other people if it is justified. However, I also understand that we live in a “society” whereby, for better or worse, we’re bound by a certain set of guidelines for what is deemed tasteful in PUBLIC. PUBLIC being the operative word here since this item was in clear public view – NOT being displayed in a private gallery, a home, etc.
I love your quote: “It’s annoying that someone can decide for others what is proper and moral,” No shit, Carolina. What are you 11? It IS annoying, but that’s not really what is going on here.
You see Carolina, you have the freedom to create any art you want and display it in an appropriate venue where it can be viewed by people who CHOOSE to see it. By doing so, individuals can then also be free to make up their minds about what is “proper and moral” for themselves.
It is such a narcissistic cry of entitlement that you feel your artwork deserves to be seen by everyone, whether they find it offensive or not. So are YOU trying to decide what is “proper and moral” for everyone who happens to be walking down the street during TRAF? Give me a break.
Censorship happens when the GOVERNMENT tries to deem what is appropriate and available for people to see/hear/read by squashing people’s views and art. This is not a case of censorship – this is a case of a private property owner not wanting to be represented by something they feel is not fit for public consumption, for WHATEVER REASON, whether you or I agree with them or not.
Maybe this perspective will make sense (I will make it all about you here for a second) – Imagine someone came along and placed an advertisement for a product you don’t believe in, or an idealogy you don’t agree with, or a sign for political candidate you don’t endorse in your front yard, would you leave it there because it is their “right” to say whatever they choose? Hell no, you would remove it with a quickness and you’d be well within your rights to “censor” (your word) their message because YOU happen to be the private property owner in that scenario.
CP – You know there is no story here. Don’t stoop to this grandstanding bullshit. Slow week for features or something?
Jack M.
“CP – You know there is no story here.”
>>> If only that were true. Sadly, however, both the P-G and the Trib also covered this situation, after our story was written but before our issue was published.
No. I mean it’s a bullshit story and you know it.
I guess we’ll have to disagree on this one. I’m merely saying both the city’s dailies — and I believe one of its TV stations — apparently disagree with you, since they also ran stories about this. A Google search suggests the artwork’s removal has appeared as a wire story in some regional papers too.
Like I say, though, I wish the story HAD only appeared here. It’d be more fun to defend our story, and it might be more fun to attack it as well.
This article would be better with pictures.
Obviously some concerned mother like Mary Hawk must have complained that it was inappropriate.
Yes, it is sad that some parts of our society are so offended by as another poster said “boobies”.
I haven’t seen the video, and since the art festival is now over, I’m not likely to get to see it.
But you are opening up a big debate amongst feminists about female nudity in our society. Is it explotation? or empowerment? or if you used a young, thin, pretty woman in the video a reinforcement of the beauty standard? I’m going to guess that you didn’t use a 40 year old 200 pound female model in your video though. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that.
Hopefully it got moved to the art gallery mentioned in time that a few folks did get to see it. Maybe the Carnegie can put it next to David Salle’s “Tulip Mania of Holland”?
damn it. It ate my SARCASM tags. I had a SARCASM on and off tag in my post that now appear as blank lines. I do feel it’s important that it’s quite obvious my comment about Mrs. Hawk is clearly identified as sarcasm.
I find it really ironic that people use “children might see” as an excuse to ban breasts, when the primary purpose of the breast is to feed children.
I actually found this article very interesting. I was just having a conversation with my mother about doing a research paper on the difference between art and pornography and how we decide what should be censored when she told me of this story. The human body is beautiful and it is the hardest form to perfect when it comes to art, which is why it is so commonly shown nude throughout the centuries. But isn’t there a line to be drawn? I’m not saying that her piece should be censored completely, because I have not viewed it. I’m just saying, viewing “art” such as Mapplethorpe’s, I don’t consider that art at all, rather pornography. This is my personal opinion. I know there would be major problems if his work was hung in a window for everyone in the world to view. I have viewed his work on the internet just once and wish never to see it again because it offends me, even as a striving artist. Like someone said earlier, this work should be shown in private that way people have a CHOICE whether they want to view it or not. If you were forced to view something that offends you, if it was put in public for everyone to see, I’m sure that you would have a fit about it as well and want it shown privately. You may have the freedom of expression, but we have the freedom to view what we want and not view what we don’t want to see.