Controversy: The Power of Art

The exhibition Controversy: The Power of Art and forthcoming symposium inspired us to analyse the most out-there artworks

First published on 18 Jul 2012. Updated on 13 Aug 2012.

This event has finished

Controversial art is a “now crowded category” according to the curators of Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery’s exhibition Controversy: the Power of Art. Today, controversial works are just as likely to fire cynical discussions about “crass commercialisation and the self-serving promotion of the artist” says MPRG Director Jane Alexander, as they are to raise ire about their shocking content. The truth is that art and controversy go together like cheese and wine. Studies of human psychological and behavioral responses referenced by this exhibition have shown how society both needs images and fears them. Controversy is the result whenever the twain entwine.

As well as the exhibition, check out the Controversy: When Art Touches a Nerve symposium on August 4.

Jules-Joseph Lefebvre: The Grasshopper (La Cigale)
France, 1872	This undeniably beautiful work references in its title Aesop’s fable of 'The Grasshopper and the Ant' (or 'The Cicada and the Ant', which is 'La Cigale et la fourmi' in French). It was painted following the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war and was said to be a critical allegory of Napoleon III, who lead France to economic collapse at the time. As Art Werx put it, the painting “seemingly represents 'The Grasshopper' at the onset of autumn, realising the consequences of her careless frivolity”. When it showed as part of his exhibition of The Naked and the Nude in 2008, Art Gallery of Ballarat Director Gordon Morrison famously nicknamed the painting ‘Chloe’s sister’, referencing another famous Lefebvre work who is still showing her all to all at Young and Jackson’s Hotel. And as late as October of that year ‘La Cigale’ proved that she still had the power to shock, when this writer's own art magazine, Trouble, featured the work on its front cover and was banned from Federation Square Visitor Centre. You can see 'The Grasshopper' in the Controversy exhibition.
Marcel Duchamp: Bottle Dryer
France, 1914	Duchamp made a leap beyond art into ontology in displaying a perfectly ordinary, ready-made bottle dryer as a piece of Dada art in 1914, at the onset of the First World War. A few years later as the war progressed so did Duchamp, who was now exhibiting a porcelain urinal signed 'R.Mutt' and entitled 'Fountain' at the exhibition of the society of Independent Artists in 1917. The debate raged then and continues today, almost 100 years later, over how or if such ready-made objects can be called art at all. But beyond doubt is the fact that Duchamp’s work has allowed us to look twice at things we often take for granted, and to appreciate them in a new metaphysical light. You can see Bottle Dryer in the Controversy exhibition.
Jackson Pollock: Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952)
USA, 1952	‘Blue poles’ caused much debate in 1973 when the Whitlam Government purchased it for 1.3 million Aussie dollars, a world record for a contemporary American painting at the time. But in 2004 the painting was valued at more than $40 million Aussies, so who’s sorry now? Incredibly, some of Pollock’s works including ‘Blue Poles’ have a fractal effect, similar to a Mandelbrot set in chaos theory, in that a zoomed in enlargement of any section of the work can resemble the whole. Some smart people have called it 'Fractal expressionism', while others call it dripping, smooshing, smearing, slumping and flicking paint onto a big old canvas any old way, and something that any six-year-old might achieve. Those in the latter category need to grow up. Pollock has a different, untitled work in the Controversy exhibition.
Ivan Durrant: Beverley The Amazing Performing Cow
Australia, 1975	In 1975, when Damien Hirst was still only nine years old, another young artist named Ivan Durrant was putting the beef back into Australian art. Cows have been a recurring theme in Durrant’s work since his first solo exhibition of pleasant, inoffensive farm scenes at the old Tolarno Galleries in St Kilda (1970), but in 1975 he took his work to entirely new levels by dumping a freshly abattoir-slaughtered cow on the forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria. Durrant called it an art “happening” and said it was a statement about our “failure to confront the reality of killing … in contemporary society in the West.” He followed up by informing staff at the NGV front desk that he wished to donate the work as sculpture, and asked if they would consider leaving it there for a few days. As the performance coincided with the opening night of the gallery’s first ever blockbuster exhibition, Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse, the work was promptly removed. Durrant was fined $100 for “depositing litter – to wit a dead cow”, and was admonished by the magistrate for “an act of ego”. Durrant has 'Five Pigs' and 'Not titled (Children running down road – image from the Vietnam War)' on display at Controversy.
Ron Robertson-Swann: Vault
Australia, 1980	Ron Robertson Swann didn’t settle on a name for his widely publicised public sculpture until four months after it had been installed in the new Melbourne City Square. During construction of the work the artist referred to it as “the thing”, while the workmen who took eight weeks to build the sculpture from heavy fabricated steel plates dubbed it “Steelhenge”. The war over its aesthetic appeal began almost as soon as the first maquette was unveiled before a startled audience of Melbourne City Councilors. One faction immediately took the view of ex-Lord Mayor Don Osbourne who said: “Why can’t we have a pleasant fountain?” While the other side led by the current, and younger, Lord Mayor Irvin Rockman beheld it as a “startling and outstanding work.” Newspapers went berserk over the public brawl between these two Council heavyweights and in the meantime settled on their own shameful name for the work, ‘The Yellow Peril’, by which it is still better known today. There is a maquette for Vault on display at the Controversy exhibition.
Andres Serrano: Piss Christ
USA, 1987	Piss Christ is arguably the most often vandalised photograph in history. Over the years it has been hammered in Australia and Avingnon, France, slashed in the States, and ransacked by neo-Nazis in Sweden. Republican Jesse Helms famously once told the senate that Serrano was “not an artist. He’s a jerk.” Despite the artist’s claim that the image is not intended to denounce religion but to address “a perceived commercialising or cheapening of Christian icons in contemporary culture” it is clear that a great many people do not like this work one bit. Sister Wendy Beckett, an art critic and Catholic nun who presented a series of art history documentaries for the BBC in the '90s, took a deeper and more measured view of Piss Christ, describing it during a television interview in 1998 as a statement on “what we have done to Christ”.
Robert Mapplethorpe: John, N.Y.C
USA, 1978 from ‘X Portfolio’	Prior to his death on March 9, 1989, Robert Mapplethorpe had been planning to show his latest series of works in a new travelling solo exhibition entitled ‘The Perfect Moment’. It was a show destined to raise ruckus, with some of his most explicit depictions of homoerotic play being featured, including a self-portrait with the handle of a bullwhip inserted … down below. The crunch came when one of the galleries scheduled for the tour, Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., took offense and refused to display the works. The media was called immediately, and it was on. As the exhibition was publicly funded the debate soon turned to how hard-earned American tax dollars could be spent on such ‘sick and depraved’ work. The two Mapplethorpes exhibited in the ‘Controversy’ exhibition – Self Portrait (PD 110) c.1973, and Autoportrait – in drag 1980 – are not quite so perverse, but they do exhibit the same classical black and white purity that was the artist’s trademark aesthetic. Mapplethorpe has two different works in the Controversy exhibition.
Patricia Piccinini: Protein Lattice (Red Portrait)
1997	This image pits “perfected beauty against monstrous distortion”. It provoked shock when first displayed in 1997 at the same gallery where Bill Henson’sUntitled #30 was later to cause such a fuss, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, but far more interesting than that was the scientific work that inspired the picture. The original photographs were published in Time and Arena magazines around 1995, illustrating an article on a then recent biotechnological experiment that was aimed at creating a new ear for a small child. The experimental lab rat was first fitted with an ear-shaped lattice of synthetic protein on its back, and then cloned human cartilage was grown over the lattice while vamping on the rat’s blood supply. “For a media second we saw the future,” said Piccinini in her statement for the exhibition, “and it was a sorry little rodent weighed down by an ear vastly out of scale with its emaciated body”. 'Protein Lattice' is on display at the Controversy exhibition.
Mike Parr: A Stitch in Time
Australia, 2003	If Australian Art were a backyard barbeque, Mike Parr would be the normally quiet guy who suddenly does something so wild and crazy and brave that everyone thinks he is an absolute legend. In various performances over the years Parr has hacked off his arm (he was born with one misshapen arm and used a prosthetic filled with minced meat and fake blood to achieve this effect for his unknowing live audience), sat for 30 hours in a gallery with his ‘good’ arm nailed to the wall, isolated himself in the same gallery for 10 days with no human contact and only water to drink, and, for A stitch in time, had his lips and face stitched with thread into a caricature of shame, again before a live audience. Parr has 'Portrait of M and F' on display in the Controversy exhibition.
Bill Henson: Untitled #30
Australia, 2008	Late in the afternoon of Thursday 22nd May 2008, a notice was posted on the downstairs roller door of RoslynOxley9 gallery in Paddington. “Tonight’s opening has been cancelled,” it said. “Apologies for any inconvenience.” The posting followed a media frenzy that had begun less than 48 hours earlier, when an invitation to the opening night of Bill Henson’s 2007-2008 exhibition landed on the desk of Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine. The photograph chosen for the invitation depicted a young naked girl with budding breasts, and Devine just happened to be busy at the time working on a column about the sexualisation of young girls. “Defending the innocence of childhood had become Miranda Devine’s trademark,” writes David Marr in The Henson Case. “… no one wrote about the perils of growing up too soon with anything like Devine’s verve.” The ensuing debate over where the line between porn and art is located reached to the highest levels of government when Kevin Rudd called the images “absolutely revolting” and with “no artistic merit” in a televised interview the next morning. Police threatened prosecution, but by 6 June were all out of puff, when it was reported in The Age that no charges would be laid after the images were declared “mild and justified” and given a PG rating.