Save The Children

A controversy rages today over the attempted inclusion in a major show in a leading art museum of a piece containing child nudity and deliberate sexual provocation. Quite rightly, in my opinion, a gallery worker complained to the police about the work. Now, the gallery, as well as the artist, and the extremely well known collector, are under investigation. What the art world seem to forget in attempts to defend such things is that we have a minor being photographed naked here - with its legs apart, according to some reports - and without that minor being in a position to prevent it. Before going anywhere near the issue of what this kind of imagery might ignite in a particularly sick mind, it is exploitation anyway. (I have another gripe - that of the use of dead people in clips, presumably without their permission, such as Steve McQueen in a famous TV commercial, but here we are talking about the living.) There happens to be another artist who has been under the spotlight for this kind of thing. Years earlier she was a model on the other side of the ocean with a fashion photographer boyfriend with a rather tiresome habit of discussing pornography in a loud voice. To have heard this woman a few years ago defend what she was doing - she was photographing her children in studiously lurid poses - was, bizarrely enough, like hearing a child going on about what it's like to be an adult. I believe totally that art should be free to express itself. I believe that people should be free to express themselves. But child protection laws are in place for very good reasons and must be upheld. Of course one must defend the undefended, but this is not the same as defending the indefensible. The only good thing is that the museum may be safe from prosecution by virtue of the fact the piece had not yet been exhibited, and it was a museum employee who contacted the police. (People need their museums.) The artist and collector are different. It's sad. Children, clothed, are also the principal characters in the work of the artist of this blog, so there is a kind of clean authority on this subject here, but such a lasting anger at the exploitation at the heart of today's story. I saw the artist in question across the ocean once. It was on a wintry day and she was sitting by a table with vodka bottles. It was during the opening of a photography exhibition. I don't remember much else, except for the fact she looked unhappy. Was she a victim? Maybe she was a victim too.

Since my babies left me

With humour and exactitude the artist prepares the children for their trip tomorrow with their grandmother and cousin. They are taking a supposedly whizzing and skilfully leaning train out of the congested capital. They will snake from the self-inflated constriction and across the bottle green land into what we shall call the fast-flowing foothills. There they will stay by the tall and handsome mountains where the buzzards fly. (I have the honour of feeling like an African chief when I write the above. Or an Iroquois in deerskin breechcloths.) I can remember the times before we had any children and the artist showing the same amount of care and attention to her art whenever the work would go off – usually via the framers - for an exhibition somewhere. Children, though, represent themselves and the artist knows this fact. They are their own titles. They have their own themes, their own movements. Even the way they carry themselves is about them and nobody else. And it is a kind of freedom. Freedom. There's a word. We hear it less and less these days but even with my limited experience I know it to be real. I have crossed from one place with freedom into one without and the difference is uncanny and very real. As the children shunt along the tracks tomorrow to their vacational prosperity in the hills I shall be here with the artist in the fumbling metropolis delighted they have such freedom. And it all comes back to art. Art for example is freedom. I can remember a gentle old man, the father of an old girlfriend, replying to a card I once sent him. The card was Japanese and bore the image of a bird taking flight. We did not know it at the time but my girlfriend’s father was dying. He wrote back. ‘Such freedom,’ he said of the bird. It was one of the last things he ever wrote. No, the children will be enjoying their freedom with their grandparents and it shall be interesting watching the working artist in their huge absence over the next few days.