In 1865, a wealthy doctor turned banker, George Witt, offered his collection of more than 400 objects from all over the world to the British Museum. They were, he said, symbols of the early world. of mankind. I don't exactly know how much they had to do with religion, not even of the fertility cult variety. They look more like what we would call a collection of soft porn.
It was an awkward moment for the museum management. But in the end, they decided to accept the gift. There was absolutely no way, though, that it was going to go on public display.
Their solution was to make sure the collection was carefully catalogued and then to put it away in a secret museum within the museum as a whole. Latin, a secretum. You only got to see the stuff if you were bush or a professor. A male one, that is.
Today the secretum no longer exists, or not literally, but there's still plenty of art that most of us, for all sorts of reasons, don't get to see, whether because we're not allowed to, or maybe because... We decide not to. And that's been true as long as people have been making art.
Some of it has always been off limits to someone. There's always been a virtual secretum. In this series, I'm exploring how what is and is not forbidden has changed. I'm not thinking here about the extreme hardcore. Ideas of what should or should not be on show have altered over the centuries, and I'm wondering why.
I think the more we encounter death head-on, the less frightening it is. So it's something we should be looking at? Yes.
Is it actually one point of art to show the unshowable? If I go through hell, I'll make paintings about hell, but I don't look for that hell. I'll be considering what, if anything, really does go too far.
You're not supposed to show people vomiting, so that's a good reason to do it. I'm not assessing quality, or at least I won't be arguing that a work's more acceptable if we judge it good rather than bad art. This is about what art gets forbidden, why... And how?
Who gets to see what? And who decides? And I don't just mean outright bans.
I also mean that if we think harder about what we can't look at or what we choose not to, maybe we'll learn a bit more about the nature of art itself and about ourselves. The human body, its pleasures, pains and the business of living in it has inspired some of the most controversial works of art. And that's what I'm exploring in this programme. I want to start with a little-known story of old-fashioned censorship from the 1960s.
This was the decade Britain let its hair down, loosened its morals and generally lightened up. Or so the cliché goes. It wasn't actually like that for quite a lot of us, and there was definitely another side to it.
That's nicely captured in a case of obscenity that came before the local court in Leeds in 1966. In the dock was artist and art teacher Stas Paraskos. And the main object at issue was a painting he'd recently shown in a local exhibition. The big problem was in the bottom left-hand corner and with what exactly the woman was doing with her hand on the man's penis. The case provoked a whole range of arguments. The magistrates wondered about its tendency to deprave.
Meanwhile, a galaxy of art experts were bussed in to argue that it was the artist's privilege, even his right, to challenge us like this. None of it convinced the magistrates. Parascus was found guilty and fined £10 plus £21 costs. But maybe times really were changing, because this was the last occasion in Britain that a painter was successfully prosecuted for obscenity. Nearly 60 years on, viewers don't exactly find it much of a problem.
Okay. That man on the right, is he naked? Yeah, I think everyone's naked.
Everyone's naked. Some sort of sex party at the club? Yeah, kind of. Maybe it's an orgy. An orgy?
It does look like an orgy. It doesn't look obscene. I would say softcore at the most.
I think we're very used to seeing nudity and things like that. It seems fairly innocent. In this day and age, nothing like that would shock anybody, to be honest with you. I just don't think it's that obscene, really. Especially with today's standards.
If a jigsaw was in sale with that as the main picture, I think I'd buy it. But have we simply become more tolerant of art since 1966? I'm not so sure. We have to be careful before we imagine the triumph of some anything-goes kind of culture, because the fact is, anything does not go.
The focus of our anxieties about art may have changed, but the anxieties remain. And even though the role of the law has become more limited, we have other ways of regulating what is seen and not seen. Back in the British Museum, we can get a glimpse of how tastes and boundaries can change radically over the centuries. And I've picked out a couple of objects showing a scene once popular in the art of the ancient Romans.
Thank you. These are two sculptures showing the mythical creature Pan having sex with a she-goat. In different positions, you might say.
They are both versions or variations on an even more striking sculpture dug up from a luxury Roman villa near Naples. It became one of the most notoriously forbidden objects in the 17 and 18 hundreds. Now this is a little terracotta copy of it made in the 18th century and you can see that the goat is resting her feet or her hooves perhaps we should say on Pan's shoulder and Pan is almost kind of tickling a little goatee beard and Here is an original Roman piece, and this was probably the prized possession of some rather posh Roman.
Now, I think that the very idea that a larger marble version of this could be the centrepiece in the decor of a very rich Roman house marks the difference between... Roman ideas of acceptability and our own. I mean, we may not be quite as shocked by this image as people were just after it was discovered, but I still don't imagine that many people would choose this theme to plunk in the middle of their living room.
That said, it's not quite clear what it really meant for Romans. I mean, was it just a bit of raunchy... Erotica.
Or maybe it was a kind of joke. Pan, we mustn't forget, was himself half man and half goat. So this is a half goat having sex with a whole goat, if you like.
For decades after their discovery, the ancient statues were kept away from the public gaze, in the secretum, whether in Italy or Britain. You had to apply formally to see them, and stood no chance at all if you were a woman, or in Italy, a Catholic priest. Even the miniature copy ended up under the same restrictions. Today, those have gone, or almost. When the Naples version came here about ten years ago, It was put in its own room with a content warning at the entrance.
Why is it we find it still somewhat uncomfortable? I mean, I think it's more than just the bestiality. I mean, for me, what's difficult about this one is the way that the goat has been humanised, that Pan is making love to the goat in a human way.
It's as if this is a sculpture which doesn't just... Break the rules, but it breaks the boundaries between what we expect of animals and what we expect of human beings. To put that another way, it disturbs because it mixes basic categories, violating the rightful order. It's easy to assume, though, that it's scenes of sex in particular, illicit... subversive, ethic, unregulated, that moralists have been keenest to keep from our sights.
Henri Gervaix's 1878 work Roller was excluded from the Paris Salon for so overtly depicting a prostitute. In 1917, a Paris gallery full of Morigliani's nudes... was closed down on account of their obscene pubic hair.
And in 1973, this take on male anatomy by Austrian Renate Bertelmann was banned from a show of feminist art. But there's more to it than that. It's not just genitalia and copulation that makes an image problematic. And something doesn't have to be explicitly banned.
for us somehow to cease to look at it. Today, I've asked York Art Gallery to bring out of their storeroom one painting that's really disconcerting, and in this case, more so now than a couple of hundred years ago. There's an elderly man here, in shackles, suckling at a young woman's breast.
It's based on a classical story, which explains she's doing this because he's in prison and starving. It's an allegory of human kindness, but there's a killer fact. The woman is the old man's daughter.
There is more than a hint here of an erotic relationship. It's as if we're looking at what's almost a scene of incest. And you might want to say, well, look, we only see the eroticism here because we've lost that kind of sense of the allegorical symbol. It was treated at the time as, in a sense, the classic example of how devoted a daughter could and should be to her father. That said...
The painter has clearly more than hinted that this is a dangerously erotic scene. She's anxious, her breasts and shoulders are high-lit, and it also turns out that we're not the only voyeurs of this scene, because up in that corner, there's someone peering at it through the window. This painting is by a little-known Dutch artist, but it isn't a one-off.
You may be surprised to learn that there are more than 300 versions of this subject, commonly known as Roman charity, in collections around the world. Now I have to say I find it very hard not to see a kind of dark reading here that the painter is suggesting to us that the line between the love of a daughter for her father, and erotic incest is actually much finer than we would like to think it was. One of the reasons that this is an unfamiliar scene to us is that most, not all, but most of these paintings are actually hidden away, well looked after, in museum stores and basements, so we don't see them. Forbidden art isn't all forbidden because somebody has said, you're not going to look at this. It's not all controversial.
Some of it is just what we have all agreed, sort of, collusively, but be better off out of sight. Not sure that these images were ever entirely innocent. whatever the moral story behind them.
But now that allegory is little known... Well, that's interesting. Modern viewers struggle to make sense of what they might be looking at.
OK. We can be shocked at the forbidden subject, but still try to justify it, or at least to process it. I think he's sucking on her nipple. He is a prisoner.
He's starving. And that's actually his daughter. Oh, God, that's grim.
Um, OK. I mean, now that you've said that, it's just grim. Wow. I was not expecting that at all.
The concept itself, yeah, makes me feel uncomfortable, for sure. If I were a father, I wouldn't want to be doing that. When you understand what that is, you might feel a little bit troubled by it, but then...
Thinking of the story and what it's about, it's practical, it's clever. I don't think it's anything sexual. Even though some people would be like, oh, this is incestuous, she's doing everything that she can to keep her dad alive. If you are starving, would you do that?
Like, probably. Yeah, and if it was commonly done at the time, then... Sign you up. Roman charity might well disquiet us, but our virtual secretum is no longer dominated by sexual images. Their place has been taken by other themes and subjects.
One of those is the art that dares to show us what the end of life might look like. Hundreds of years ago, people in Britain would have been far less estranged from death and the moment of dying. Most of us would have died at home. We'd have been used to open coffins and might even have had death masks made of our relatives. Although often milked for all the sentimentality you could wring from it, the deathbed scene was popular with artists.
Now, it's not just that death itself has become more medicalised, behind curtains, in private, but the representation of death has also become forbidden territory. We have put it into the private realm, not to be looked at. One of a few artists who have confronted this is Daphne Todd. In 2010, she won the National Portrait Gallery Annual Portrait Award for a painting of a 100-year-old woman, half-naked and recently deceased. Right.
The thing to know here is that it is her own mother. How did you go about it? What was the practicality of it? I wept, grabbed the nurse and said actually I do want to paint my mother, how am I going to go about it?
I recommended a funeral director who'd been very, very understanding about various people's requests. And so he made a chapel of rest available. And so in the chapel of rest, you propped her up?
I asked them to prop her up like that. In fact... actually.
I mean, I first thought I might sort of have her laid out as though she was on the slab. And they did that for me. And I thought, I can't cope with this.
The sort of nether ends I didn't really want to be dealing with. And how many days altogether? Three. It just about...
comfortable if I had one more but I was getting uncomfortable myself because she was beginning to change color and the fluid was flowing down into these parts her arm it was dripping out a little bit down here too and her hand changed I mean, because I was painting it, you know, I could see this gap because the hand was gradually turning towards me and I didn't want it to get to a point where there was a smell, I suppose. Yeah. I mean, this might seem a stupid question, but why did you want to do it? I just thought I might. I don't know why I thought that particularly.
I just thought it would be a new experience. I don't think she'd have liked this painting, actually, obviously. I mean, who would? But she had said, yes, you can do what you like. There's a magnificence about death.
Somebody once asked me to explain that, and I can't. I hope I've got a bit of it in there. But there's something really compelling. I mean, you wouldn't be able to walk past a dead body, would you?
No, I'm not sure I've seen a dead body. Not ever. Not ever. I suppose I saw my parents, but both well covered in a hospital bed, not... Yes...almost unrecognisable.
I mean, it's fascinating in itself. But isn't it distressing for you? Once I was painting, no. Funnily enough, that's odd, isn't it? But no.
It's now here in your studio and it's not on public display. What plans have you got for it? I've tried to give it away twice.
The first time to Girton College, Cambridge. But they were quite concerned that this particular painting would upset their students and it was understandable in a way. But also slightly odd that academics, all of whom are adults, are going to be hurt by it.
Anyway, a year or two later, I asked if my local church would like it, but sadly they turned it down, so I cannot give it away. I think the more we encounter death head-on, the less frightening it is, and that means we can live our lives. So it's something we should be looking at?
Yes. I mean, it is distressing, but I think it makes me feel that I want to look at it. I know. And if that means that that's uncomfortable, then I think you should be looking at things that are uncomfortable.
Yes, as long as they're beautiful as well, because the truth is beautiful. I'm not quite so sure that the truth is necessarily beautiful or that it offers such a simple solution to the problem of forbidden art. But Daphne's extraordinary painting certainly exposes the forbiddenness of death in modern western cultures.
It's not always the same elsewhere. I've come to the Wellcome Collection in London to confront some Eastern art that looks forensically at the breakdown of the body when life ends, testing Daphne's belief in the beauty of truth to the limit. This is a rather shocking sight.
It's a series of watercolours belonging to a Japanese Buddhist tradition of image-making going back to the 13th century. This is just one example out of many. What they show is the stages in the decomposition of human body. The series starts when the dead woman is still alive, but most of the rest of the series shows what happens to her body next.
Here, the colour's beginning to change. It's distending. It starts to go horribly blotchy and to ooze blood, and basically this is putrefaction in action.
And at this point, the birds and the animals have come to eat the flesh that remains. And now all she is really is bones. And here, just a little pile of bones, which end up in her last resting place here under the sign of the Buddha. Images like this, still with a place in Japanese culture, were originally made to remind contemplative Buddhist monks of the impermanence of the human body, the foulness of female flesh in particular.
I suppose I managed to take them on board in a religious context. But what happens when we take them out of that religious context? I think there'd be a lot of people, me included, who really would not want to look at them.
There'd be quite a lot of people who'd say, these should not be on show. However much they would prefer not to look at images of dead and oozing bodies... I don't think many people would see them as unethical, morally out of bounds. Works that show the living body in pain take these issues a whole step further.
Since the 1960s especially, various artists have traded in images of violence and distress. Austrian Hermann Nitsch has spent years leading ritualized actions, disemboweling animal carcasses and dousing naked performers in blood, urine and more. In 1974, American Chris Burden had himself crucified on a Volkswagen Beetle.
And in 2000, Israeli artist Sigelit Landau filmed herself performing a naked hula dance with a ring of barbed wire. But debates about the ethics of looking at scenes of suffering are far older. They were kick-started by reactions to a single ancient Roman statue.
A much later bronze copy of it, installed in the 18th century, stands in pride of place at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. One of the most admired works in the Renaissance, it now seems like a standard set piece of classical sculpture. It shows the Trojan priest, Laocoon, who warned his comrades that the great wooden horse the Greeks had left them was a trick. He was right, but his foresight was punished by the gods, who sent two vile serpents to kill not only Laocoon himself, but his two sons.
And that's the moment we're witnessing. Once it had been rediscovered in 1506, there was hardly an artist who didn't copy it or recopy it and attempt to analyze the real power of this work of art. They looked at the twisting torso, the tilt of the head, these extraordinarily taut legs. It was the emotional power of agony. It was a template for how to show pain.
But by the time it got to Houghton, some other questions were being raised. In the 18th century, the most pressing controversy became How could we admire a scene of torture like this? There wasn't even the religious justification here that you might find for a particularly gory crucifixion.
So what was the point? What was the visual pleasure that you got out of looking at this scene of agonizing death and pain? Well, some people tried to argue that this was the scene of a...
a man who was triumphing over his suffering with dignity, and they particularly pointed to his mouth. This man is just groaning, and that for many was the point. He had managed to control his pain. But others still argued that the body in pain was an ugly disfigurement.
Now, when we look at him, I think for us he's mostly lost any of that kind of edginess. He's retreated, really, into the category of famous classical masterpiece. But I got out thinking maybe we should try to bring back some of the controversy and to remember the edginess.
We have no idea if the original ancient artist considered any of the issues that preoccupied critics all those centuries later. But those debates point to the way other artists since have signalled the difficulties of representing violence. pain and suffering. In the early 1800s, the Spaniard Francisco Goya was perhaps the first artist to take as his subject the ugly reality of warfare in a set of engravings now known as the Disasters of War. They were never published by Goya himself.
and unseen by the public until 35 years after his death. They raise even bigger questions about how and why you might represent suffering and what the responsibility of the artist is. I produced more than 80 prints of scenes from the wars in Spain in the early 19th century, and I've picked out two from the series.
The first one shows a couple of men running away, a mother scooping up her kids, and we know that something is going on off to the right of the image, but we can't see it. And it's quite a nasty tease of this whole series that we see the... frightened people, but we don't quite see what they're frightened of.
The other one is perhaps even darker. There's a group of men, women and children, and they're cowering in a cave. And there you do see just the tips of the bayonets that are coming to get them. And none of these people can really bear to look at what's coming for them.
And in fact, this person here is covered themselves up so they cannot see, not just turning away but shrouding their face. But it's the captions that give them something extra, I think. Gore's caption on this one in Spanish is, I saw this. And on the other, it's, One can't look at this.
Now, in many ways, those captions together capture the ethical dilemmas of looking at other people's pain. The artist, in a sense, is saying that he is obliged to represent what he sees in the world, however unpleasant. For the viewer, well, they're caught in a way.
It is almost wrong for us to get visual pleasure out of looking at the pain of these poor people. And yet it would be irresponsible of us not to recognise that that is going on in the world about us, as shown to us by the artist. For me, what is so important about these images is the way they make us face up to what you or the artist can or can't look at.
These themes of looking, not looking, and in a sense the dangers of looking, have a history that again can be traced, indirectly at least, back to the ancient world. At London's National Gallery, there's a chilling, cautionary tale from Greek mythology, painted by the Italian artist Luca Giordano around 1660. It shows a wedding reception that's going horribly wrong. This here in the blue outfit, that's the groom, the hero Perseus.
But his festivities have been interrupted by the bride's ex over here, Phineas, who've come with the boys to make trouble. And you can see that everything is in disarray. The table...
has been overturned. There are bodies all over the place. And Perseus has got out his secret weapon, which is the sneaky-locked head of the Gorgon Medusa. It's a weapon, because the mere sight of Medusa will turn anybody to stone. You see that Perseus is very, very carefully looking away from Medusa's head.
But the intruders aren't being so careful. And Phineas here, the ex, is already turning into a marble statue. And I think that as we look at this, I think it's hard not to say, so where does that leave me, the viewer? I'm not turning away like Perseus.
Will I be turned to stone too? The image of the deadly Gorgon's head held up by Perseus has been represented thousands of times, from ancient Greece to the present day. And it always puts us on the spot, sometimes joking or teasing us about getting a peek at what we shouldn't see, sometimes challenging or frightening us with the consequences of looking at what we should not look at.
To put that the other way around, artists have always claimed the right to represent the forbidden. It's what I call the Medusa problem, and it's at the heart of the practice of art and the practice of looking. Artists have repeatedly put before us sights that are in some sense disturbing and even dangerous to us. Sometimes we are seduced into gazing. Other times we are too disgusted or terrified to look.
You can see all this at work to harrowing effect in a painting from the end of the 20th century. In 1993, Scottish artist Peter Housen was commissioned by the Times newspaper and the Imperial War Museum to go to Bosnia as an official war artist. All the works he produced, the scene of sexual assault was for me and many others particularly troubling. When I first saw this painting, I found it almost impossible to look at. It's a scene of a woman being raped.
With her head down the bowl of a lavatory. What makes it, I think, more upsetting is the hints of the domestic environment in which this is happening. The guy at the top is supporting himself with his hand against one of her family pictures. But it's also voyeuristic. You can just see above his arm.
Someone's looking in and watching, either in pleasure or in horror, at what they're seeing. This painting was exhibited, but it was then controversially not chosen to enter the permanent collection at the Imperial War Museum. Some felt it had been judged just too much to look at. But when pressed, the museum's director argued, echoing the Goya line, that it had been excluded because Housen hadn't actually witnessed the scene. Housen's response was to say, of course he hadn't witnessed this.
I mean, how could anyone have ethically witnessed that? But he had drawn on his conversations with some of the many women who'd been the victims of sexual violence in this war. And he added that many of the most influential pieces of war art were done by people who hadn't witnessed the scenes that they were showing. Picasso had not seen the disaster at Guernica.
I think for me there's also a bigger issue here. We now know that one of the most terrible defining features of the Bosnian War was that it systematically weaponised the rape of women. If we start to apply the criterion of eye-witnessing what we're shown in paintings too literally, we're going to end up...
Not seeing or not being shown images that we really should be keeping in our sights. There's a strong case to be made that it's the cultural job of the artist to show us dangerous truths and make us confront what we don't want to acknowledge. One in particular has certainly done that extensively and single-mindedly.
drawing so many usually private ordeals into public view over 30 years of making art. People say that my work's tediously narcissistic. They don't like my attitude. And guess what?
I'm not making my work for them anyway. Tracey Emin's themes are not unique, but few artists have created such a graphic body of work dealing with sexual assault, abortion, masturbation, grief, and most recently her own cancer treatment. I met Tracey at her London studio.
Tracey, do you think that you have helped the people who look at what you do think about things they perhaps don't want to think about, see things that they would perhaps rather not see? No, I actually don't think that. I'd like that to happen, but I think what actually happens is I reaffirm things for people who maybe don't have or don't feel they can express themselves. They're already thinking like I'm thinking, but they actually don't know how to express it. So, like, with my bed, for example, they say, yeah, I've been there, I know how that feels.
And it's just a matter of fact. So if I've been raped, I say I've been raped. I'm not admitting I've been raped. It's a fact that I was raped.
Or if I have an abortion, I'm not to be made... to feel ashamed of this. I'm not admitting something or confessing anything.
This is what I did and this is what happened. Yeah, I mean, I suppose I think that in a slightly different way in terms of writing, because it must be over 20 years ago I wrote about being raped. It didn't seem a confession.
It just seemed that it was kind of important to say, this is what happened, this is telling it straight. Yeah, but it's a bit like falling over. And then saying, oh, I'm fine, I'm OK.
Well, you're not, you just fell over. And when something awful has happened to you in your life, you need to have a chance for reflection and often society won't let you have that because you're supposed to just pick yourself up and brush it off, everything's OK. But obviously it's not OK, it's not all right. I'm still not sure I can work out what's happening.
Um, does it look like a person that's bleeding? Yeah, it's quite shocking in its rawness. It looks to me like she's having some sort of miscarriage. Or she might have aborted a baby.
For a lot of people, I guess, who've gone through that, they may see that and think, that's an experience I wouldn't want to live again. Maybe a way for the artist to process what she's been through as well. I think it's a very honest depiction of how a woman might feel if she's just miscarried or a woman in pain. This is the reality that women face. It's not shocking, it just triggers a lot of emotion because a lot of people bottle things inside.
It's quite painful. thing and I suppose it's a way to grieve. Works of art that people would have just wanted to ignore, you kind of made them unignorable, I think.
Would there be some things that you think... You could or would or should not ever represent? Yeah, definitely, without doubt. Lots of things. People think that dangerous images have to be violent or they have to be frightening or they have to be scary or they have to be, you know, whatever.
But one of the most frightening things, I think, at the moment is Instagram, where people can morph their faces. Because it's like creating this parallel world which people live in. And then the real world is perceived as being ugly and not very nice. For me, art is like a real thing because I feel the emotion come through it from the artist.
So there would be no picture, let's say, no painting on display in the National Gallery that you think, I really don't think we ought to be looking at this? No, absolutely not. But I saw it about 20 years ago.
It was a film by Otto Muehl and it was a performance work where there's lots of people fucking in. doing stuff and there was some women having a rolling pin pushed up their vaginas and it was really over the top and then this chicken otter meal picks the chicken up and then i can't remember if he actually bites its head off or breaks his neck i might be exaggerated but the point is i when i saw this film i screamed and ran all around the gallery floor screaming and hyperventilating it was too much for me and now it's like if i curated a show now that's the number one work that I would put in. It was so shocking. It was so terrible.
How many things in the world make you feel like that, that are inside a gallery? And that's the kind of thing which is, at one level I think it was pretty amazing, another level I think should never be seen and never be made and never exist. Your kind of dilemma, presumably, is that there was something about the film with the chicken's head.
That it was shocking, but it was sort of real. Yeah, if it's real, it's here. And we have to accept it and we have to look at it.
It wasn't invented, it wasn't created, it is here. Tracey's philosophy sounds easy to get behind, and part of me really is behind it. But is it too easy?
Are there some human experiences, even everyday ones, that are arguably beyond? Possibly beneath the realm of art. I'm about to fulfil a bit of an ambition of mine.
Getting a good look round what's, for me, forbidden territory. For most of us nowadays, in Western culture and beyond, some bodily functions are not for public show. But going right back to the ancient world, there have been paintings, sculptures and prints of people, men in particular, peeing.
This is a... a pair of images and we've blown them up really big because in the original they're only about three inches tall and they're by the great dutch artist rembrandt done in the 1630s they're in a way part of a bit of a vogue for pissing images at the time but rembrandt's versions actually beautifully drawn they're really top of the range this figure in some ways is quite typical of the genre You can see the stream of peas raising the dust from the ground and it's as if he's saying to you as you look at him, I don't care if you look at me peeing or even almost I'm pissing on you mate. But that looks a bit different when you put it together with the woman peeing.
And she's crouching, she's hitched her skirt up behind. You can see the pee coming out here, but she's also pooing. But I think even more important is the way she's looking around. She's wanting to check that no one's looking at her. And, of course, what she's forgotten, in a way, is that we're looking at her.
And you get this sense that that guy's quite happy for us to be looking at what he's doing. We don't think we really should be watching her. Rembrandt reminds us that Marcel Duchamp, with his famous fountain...
And Pierre Manzoni and his tins of artist shit were not the first, even if some of the more memorable artists, to insist that what we by now generally did in the bathroom could explicitly be referenced in art. More recently, from Helen Chadwick's piss flowers... To Gilbert and George's naked shit pictures, artists have, for all sorts of reasons, asked us to linger on subjects that usually make most of us just go yuck. But none of these works make us really digest what goes on beneath our sanitised exteriors. As much as some created 15 years ago.
I'm about to meet up with an artist and sit down with him to watch two of his short films. Shit and Sick. That's basically what they're called and it's not a metaphor, that's what they show. Martin Creed has famously affronted many of the art-loving public since 2001. When he won the Turner Prize, the pieces including work number 227, The Lights Going On and Off. I can't explain it, except to say that the lights are definitely going on and off.
Is the lightbulb really a case of the Emperor's new clothes for the chattering classes? Yeah. Like Creed's lights, these works feature something that occurs all the time, but in this case, he crossed a line.
Many people would think this is about as pointlessly shocking as it gets. So I wanted to ask the sartorially eccentric artist, who also wrote and performed the soundtrack, what on earth he was trying to do. There's no question that these ordinary human functions are excruciatingly hard to look at when seen starkly on film. So it's that moment when it actually comes out, that's the moment when I gag slightly. It's triumphantly holding the stage.
You filmed this in Los Angeles? Yeah. They're on their own in the studio?
Well, there was one woman who was operating the camera who was in the room. But could you watch what was happening? Yeah, we had a kind of little video monitor. Right.
Because I was very worried, because it's like, what am I doing? What am I doing? Aye, what am I doing?
Which is what I ask myself a lot, really. Many artists use their own body and yet did you not think that you ought to be shitting? It's funny that you put it that way around because a lot of the time I actually think I shouldn't be doing this in the sense that I should get out of my own work because of your own narcissism.
So you're caught between voyeurism and narcissism? Very much, yeah. Creed has also made a companion piece to his shit film, which I found even harder to stomach. Oh! Oh!
Do you gag at this? Well, not anymore. I'm just so immune to it. This is the cinema version where there's ten scenes. And from the person coming on stage to them vomiting becomes faster and faster.
Oh! This film came out of doing talks and I kept thinking that working was like vomiting. It's like you've got to get stuff out and it makes you feel better if you get it out and because I kept thinking about that, I thought, wait a minute, if that is such a good metaphor, why don't I try and film people vomiting? But both sick and shit make me think. These are, you know, everyday, ordinary bits of bodily function.
So why do I feel such discomfort? Because we do look at this sort of stuff. Comedy and pantomime and carnival. Ancient Greek pottery has got people vomiting over it.
Right, but maybe a lot of that is people basically doing what they're not supposed to do. You know, it's like being naughty or whatever. You know, you're not supposed to show people... Vomiting, so that's a good reason to do it.
I mean, I think there's something about the kind of... Ooziness. It's the idea that the body is oozing stuff all the time. You know, sweat and blood and snot. And it's reminding you that you're living a lie when you think the body is curated and bounded and civilised and not oozy.
It's saying, remember, you're messy. Well, I mean, that's the way I feel. I'm sure that a lot of people will not be convinced that these works are, well, worth it. But that's okay. There'd be something the matter if we didn't disagree about art like creeds.
The questions that all these works raise about what is art, It is to be a body, to have a body and to look at bodies, the ones that we're bound to clash over. And we have to be careful not to sneer at prudish censors as if they were simply repressive or a bit unsophisticated. The truth is, we are all censors.
There's nobody who thinks that everything should be on show, and there never has been. But anyway, it's not the art. It's not the block of marble, the splodge of paint, or...
of celluloid that we're arguing about, it's ourselves. What we really need to be asking is where each of us draws our own boundaries and why. Next time, I'm going beyond the body, looking at forbidden art, addressing politics and religion, history and humanity.
In hazardous times for art, especially for statues, a plinth is a dangerous place to be. It might raise you up, but I can tell you it makes you jolly vulnerable. You're easy to topple. There are big conflicts here.
A clash between those who are hurt by the statues they see in places of honour and those who value them as part of history, however flawed that history is. So, pull it down or retain and explain. To see or not to see.
I want to look at the wider picture. To include all sorts of contested art and ideas that many find offensive and feel should be forbidden. When it became a bit of a circus, I was almost sort of blamed for trying to find a way of monetizing this thing without any kind of moral perspective.
I'm talking politics and religion, asking about the relationship between art, artists and authorities of all sorts. I want people to understand and to think about their history more and I want us to confront the past. And I'm digging deeper into the long history of what we've wanted to look at and what we've wanted to hide.
You've got eight or nine foot paintings telling you all the stuff that the tabloids would like you to think is disgusting and vile. It's about history and hysteria, division and dissent, and about art's role in some of the greatest social, political and religious conflicts of our times or of any. In the 21st century, all kinds of artistic images have raised the temperature of debates about what should or should not be seen.
In 2017, many people, especially in America, thought one image featuring the US comedian Kathy Griffin went too far. Haha, is that Donald Trump? That's Trump's head.
Yeah, it looks like it. She's clearly not a Trump voter. It's quite bloody, isn't it?
She's clearly trying to say that the world would be better off if he was dead. It's deliberately offensive. It's barbaric in a sense, cutting people's heads off.
I think she went a step too far, irrespective of your feelings or opinions about Donald Trump. You could see it as a riff on the Greek myth of the hero Perseus, slicing off the head of the terrifying Medusa. But classical reference or not, Griffin received death threats, of course, was investigated by the FBI on suspicion of threatening the president's life and was dropped by all her employers. The man behind the camera had a reputation for creating controversial images. But nothing Tyler Shields had done before had inflamed so many people.
Epic interview, take one. I talked to the rather irreverent photographer at home in L.A. to discover why he thought this picture crossed some people's boundaries and how he and Kathy devised it.
We were already doing another shoot, and we had kind of finished that shoot, and Kathy looks at me and goes, I'd like to do something political. She said, I want to do something about Trump. And so the first thing that popped into my head was this.
biblical image of a beheading, followed by Greek mythology, followed by kind of all these kind of epic beheading paintings and sculptures throughout history. And so we kind of make this mask and it looks horrible. And, you know, they fashion a wig onto it.
And I'm like, oh, this looks just god awful. And so I said, let's cover it in blood. This is fake blood, just so you know. I won't give away what we're doing, but Tyler and I are not afraid to do images that make noise.
So you want to hold it back here. Same exact thing we just did. That's it.
Rotate a little bit. That's it right there. Pull it up.
Drop it. When I first saw the photograph, the image that came to mind was the mythical scene of the great hero, Perseus. But more than that, it was the figure of Perseus with the head of Trump holding up a severed head with the features of Hillary Clinton.
And what then is kind of surprising to me, people looked at that Trump PR. Right. Some people, quite a lot of people said it wasn't very nice, but it didn't cause this kind of outcry.
Why do you think it was that Jürgen Kathi's photograph just went viral? That's part of the power of a photograph. If you do it as a painting, it doesn't have the reality to it. I think that was a huge part of it.
There's also something about the photo. Photograph, you know, the fact that it looks like a rubber mask with tomato ketchup on it, means it doesn't get the protection of any pretense that quotes great art. Absolutely.
And I think, look, photographs have only been considered... considered fine art since probably the 80s or 90s. So yeah, photography does not have the same, as you said, protection that paintings have. I mean, it angered people like nothing I've ever seen. But worth it, all worth it.
Wouldn't change a thing. Do you think that images can go too far? I don't know, that's a tough one.
It's tough to say because because I'm sure the first time there was a nude photograph taken, people were like, this is too far. You know? Cut to...
You got a comedian beheading a president, and then people are like, that's too far. If you look at all of history, there would be so many examples of a time where something comes out and people are absolutely appalled by it, only to then later celebrate it. As Tyler says, the public's opinions about art can change radically across generations.
Works can go in both directions, from loathed to loved and from loved to loathed. As we see in our own era's statue wars. Wrong! The desecrate, the statue of Winston Churchill! But art is not the first of these wars.
Art has been weaponised in ideological conflicts before. In 1930s Germany, the Nazis toured a blockbuster exhibition showcasing many of the great modernist masters of the early 20th century. But with a twist. The aim was not to celebrate their genius, but to expose their depravity.
That included the works of Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee, and whole artistic movements like Dadaism, Cubism or Primitivism. Now, of course, the Nazis were caught in the trap that many censors are caught in, that if you want to show people what they shouldn't look at and enjoy, then you actually have to show it to them first. And they even produced a kind of commemorative brochure of what was called degenerate...
Kunst, Kunst there, art, written in kind of red crayon and put in inverted commas so you knew that it wasn't art really. And on the first page of illustrations, there's a portrait by the Jewish artist Mark. Chagall of a rabbi.
But it isn't only the horribly predictable targets of Jews and Bolshevists. What the campaign against degenerate art is going for is anything that appears to undermine German cultural traditions, the traditions of German artistic realism or German morality. One of the main culprits on show was Otto Dix.
His determinedly unheroic depiction of the German First World War trenches was something the Nazis wanted verboten. They're an extraordinarily powerful collection of what was often seen as very aggressively anti-war images. Perhaps my kind of, it's hard to say, favourite, this image of two skulls, teeth partly there, partly fallen out, eye sockets oozing away, and they're about as far from human as you can imagine a human being could get, except that just underneath one skull, there is his name tag with his name, Muller. In the Nazis exhibition, the work of Dix and his fellow degenerates was displayed crammed together, surrounded by defamatory slogans. Everything possible was done to say that this was not art, and the organisers claimed it a success.
boasted in Munich alone, over two million people came to see it. I'm thinking that propaganda like this is never quite so simple. And there'll be some people who have gone away from here and couldn't help but be affected by the way that war is shown for what it is, as the disintegration of the human being.
And that like all attempts to censor or to remove things from our vision, it always risks backfiring. One irony here is that Dix and many of the other band artists have since become some of the most revered and expensive in the West. People are often turned like this, with artists demanding we look at subjects that first defy the orthodoxy of the day but in time are highly acclaimed.
Might be Anselm Kiefer in the 1960s, performing the banned Nazi salute to challenge Germans to face up to their history. Or Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1980s America, marking the death of a black man after confrontation with the US police. Or one gay artist in 1990s Britain, challenging prejudice around homosexuality and AIDS with a disconcerting frankness. My father is Christ in the gift shop in Hastings, and the condom is exactly the same colour as the flesh tint that's in there with him.
And I suppose it's a comment on the current Catholic practice of condemning contraception, which in terms of the spread of the HIV virus is actually catastrophic. Quiet everywhere! Derek Jarman was a writer, filmmaker and artist. For years he'd taken aim at homophobia, but with the AIDS crisis and later his own diagnosis, it became his prime target. At the time, being HIV positive was seen as a death sentence.
And for years, the tabloid press had viciously reinforced prejudices against same-sex relationships. Fleet Street takes the view that homosexuality is abnormal, unnatural, a bit evil. It is a gay play. How can you say I go about things alone?
In his final years, Jarman took to huge canvases to make his themes, then still treated as forbidden by many in the mainstream, unignorable. Today, these particular works are rarely seen, but Manchester Art Gallery gave me a preview shortly before a new exhibition. I met with writer John Savage, a friend of Jarman's, to discuss their impact.
I can't remember where, but I do remember seeing this one and getting very upset by it. It's actually an incredible picture because it's obviously a pun. It says, fuck me blind. Yes. I was letting you say that, Mary.
I'll say it again, fuck me blind. But now... I can kind of get a dark humor out of it.
I just look at it and I think Well, I remember having a conversation with Derek about this and I said well Derek, you know, you've got HIV This is pretty bad said John. It's not great. You're right, but you know what I have I had fun with my cock.
So I see it as a kind of double meaning. So, the end of his life, he's also saying, I am going blind? Yes.
Also what I get out of both these pictures, anger. A lot of anger. He was furious. Those bits of red, that's the anger. And also that's the kind of blood.
And of course his whole body was a mess, his whole system was a mess. And it is a kind of erasure, really. It's saying, my powers are going, I know they're going.
I mean, in a way, he's saying, I'm going to show you AIDS differently. And if you come over to the other one, you see that morphine here, morphine written twice across the painting, is over tabloid filth, literally. Filth, storm over East Ender, Rembrandt.
Scandal. Scandal. Get this garbage off TV.
Well, in a very direct way, that's his victory over the tabloids. And these paintings are at, you know, they're at big scale. I mean, it's an insistence on not being invisible, right? Yes, because you've got eight or nine...
...foot paintings telling you what's going on in his life, telling you all the stuff that the tabloids would like you to think is disgusting and vile, but is again a part of reality, and the reality for a lot of gay men in particular during that period. So, you know, these are, they are telling a truth. 30 years on, Jarman's battles have not entirely been won. But by and large, it's the homophobia he railed against that's now, in Britain, unacceptable.
But I'm struck that an image made not long after Jarman's paintings, also fingering the tabloid press, is still one many feel should never have been openly displayed. In 1997, London's Royal Academy staged a contemporary art show that's become legendary. Provocatively titled Sensation, it showcased the collection of advertising mogul and art collector Charles Saatchi, who'd bought up many works by young British artists.
Conceived and curated to draw in the crowds, it featured Mark Quinn's frozen cast of his head filled with his own blood. Jake and Dina's Chapman's child mannequins with grotesque genitalia on their faces Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin's tent everyone I have ever slept with All of them were controversial. But even before the show opened, there were demands that one piece in particular should not be put on display. A picture of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley made with children's handprints has been vandalised. The painting, part of the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition, had paint and an egg thrown at it.
The protest group, Mothers Against Murder, urged a boycott of the show. The mother of one of Hindley's victims said the picture was disgusting. 25 years later, the portrait still divides us.
That's a creepy picture. She's pretty. Is this Mara Hindley?
Yeah, she was an evil woman, wasn't she? She was like one of those child killers, and I believe she was from the 1960s. So, these are like hands? Yeah. Oh, that's grim.
That's probably quite offensive to victims. Maybe a bit unnecessary. That's his brush. That's the artist's brush.
He wants to make a point about this image which is iconic. And I don't think it's there to shock. I think it's to reformat the image in people's minds and make them think about it again. It almost seems like they're kind of celebrating her. If I was a parent of one of the deceased children's, I definitely wouldn't want to see this.
This is purely shock to sell. And people with money like Zahra, you buy it, and then it becomes... A commodity to keep because it's worth money.
If it was one of my children, I would have ripped it down, I think. Marcus Harvey, who created Myra, has rarely spoken publicly about it. But he agreed to talk to me at his South London studio, where he reflected on some of the moral dilemmas about the piece.
I'd sort of been through all the anxiety about whether I should be playing with this subject, had any right to do with all that kind of stuff. And it stayed in my studio for a couple of years under holothene, accumulating this sort of dust, fading. And I think Sarchie saw a transparency of it and said, well, have that.
So its first display was in the Sensation exhibition? Yeah. You talk about feeling anxious about the project, but what point were you wanting to make? That people would have to acknowledge their own attraction to the image, their own excitement around the image, not just the revulsion and the ease of its branding, evil, don't like, lock it up. And also, I understood there was something inappropriate about my attachment to it, that there was a sexual attachment on my behalf towards the image that was very uncomfortable.
And I'm sort of slightly disturbed that it was in me, that there was something quite secretly stimulating and attractive on some level. There was a message about the complacency and the hypocrisy of consuming it. But you don't choose to do this with a cast of children's hands unless you're wanting to say something.
Yeah, there was something about that image. I felt it was important to sort of bring into conversation, to sort of have the humanity and the loss and the tragedy sort of present, fizzing. At the same time as this thing that we'd consumed by the metric tonne for like decades and decades and millions and millions of pounds made.
So in a sense you're kind of, you've got one eye on the tabloids for profiting out of this. Yeah, yeah. When there is a sort of signal crime like this, editors just get on their knees and thank the sweet Lord God for this kind of horror because it's going to make them money. They're not there to sort of banish it and look after us. They're there to sort of bring it on and plenty of it, please.
But when an artist does it, they try to kind of come over all kind of like the beadle in Dickens when Oliver Twist asks for some more and they're like, what? What would you say, though, what did you say to the objection that this was so hurtful to the parents of the murdered children that it should not have been displayed like that? Did you have an answer to that? I had no hand in how it was displayed or consumed. I had hoped that this would find a quiet place to be exhibited where it would be respectful.
So when it became a kind of bit of a circus, I was almost sort of blamed for trying to find a way of monetising this thing without any kind of moral perspective. If someone comes up to you and says, I looked at that Myra piece and I felt really hurt, I felt... offended and I felt upset, what would you say to them? I'd say, well, what exactly upsets you about it?
And I say, I've lost a child. Yeah, but this isn't a celebration of that event. This is drawing attention to the gravity of that event and it's not for a magazine or a tabloid or even a TV programme where this image is... Widespread.
I make images of images, you know, and I'm not sort of witness to the event. I make images of images that have sort of stained my memory. So you're reminding us to think about images in a new way. Yes, yeah, yeah.
I suppose it's my job as an artist. Marcus is asking us to think about what the power of an image is and what it is for. These are old and important questions.
And it's been well beyond the art world and the tabloid press in a very different context, where the biggest battles have been fought. They've been about God. In the City of London... In the chapel of the Mercer's company, there is an extraordinarily rare piece of once forbidden sculpture, a 500-year-old statue of Jesus. In the 1500s, the Protestant state outlawed the display of images like this.
So when the statue was discovered in the 1950s, it was a remarkable find. This is a really emotive image. Jesus is dead, his head has fallen back, his mouth is open. What we can pick out is the suffering, the wounds.
One of the thorns from the crown of thorns has gone into his eyebrow and here there's a really violent gash in his side and blood is streaming out of it. But Jesus appears to have wounds that go far beyond the human eye. Beyond what we read about in the Bible, the whole crown of thorns has gone, but that hand has gone, this arm has gone, and he has no feet.
It almost feels as if he's been maimed. This extra damage was almost certainly inflicted in the mid-16th century statue wars between Protestants and Catholics. Tens of thousands of figurative artworks right across Europe were destroyed or defaced by Protestants. Who saw this sort of sacred art as idol worship. It's easy to write this off as a form of vandalism, but actually it was part of some really important debates about what religious images were for and why they might be dangerous.
One central question was, what were you doing when you worshipped an image like this? Were you seeing beyond the image to God? Or were you actually worshipping?
a lump of limestone. That's also part of an even bigger debate about how religions make God, which is invisible, visible to us. And what's the role of the artist in doing this?
There's hardly been a religion in the history of the world that hasn't argued and thought about just that kind of question. In recent years, it has often been assumed that the sharpest focus of these debates and the most extreme form of prohibition is and has been in Islam. Its mosques don't feature figurative art, but often use elaborate calligraphy as a form of decoration and a way of representing religious truth.
Meanwhile, over the last few decades, satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, published in Denmark and France, have provoked protest and violence. Many people imagine that all images of the Prophet have always been forbidden. But it's not that simple. There is, in fact, a rich history in parts of the Islamic world of representing Muhammad, especially in illustrated manuscripts.
The University of Edinburgh holds one now rare set made in the early 14th century at the Mongol court in what's now Iran. I met with Fawzia Bora, a specialist in Islamic history, to explore them further. So this is an image from the life of the Prophet Muhammad, where as a young man he's in a caravan with his uncle travelling into Syria.
And as you can see, everybody in the image is looking towards this figure. Even the camels are looking at Muhammad. Even the camels, yeah.
And this is an angel coming down from heaven to anoint him. That's right. These are not specifically religious texts, right? I mean, this is not like an illustrated Koran. No, it's a book of historiography.
So it's a chronicle. It tells the story of the Mongols and the author Rashiduddin. is a high official, a vizier, the equivalent of a prime minister today, perhaps, and he has a strong mission of public education.
Right. Now, if I can be very carefully moved up, we've got another image which looks more complicated to me. This is the story of the prophet's miraculous night journey, and he rises to the heavens on a steed.
So the horse... has a human figure at both ends. That's right. And I think it shows different aspects of the prophet's personality in being both a person with warrior-like qualities but also a bringer of scripture.
A lot of people now would find this very surprising because there is a stereotype of Islam as being opposed to images of living things in general, but absolutely forbidding images of the Prophet. These, in a sense, suggest that that isn't quite the case. I mean, are these terribly rare or a bit subversive? Certainly not subversive because the... author of this text and the kind of context he's working in are very mainstream.
You find this kind of imagery is acceptable in phases of Sunni and Shi'i writing and artwork. So you actually get these in the two main branches of Islam, it's not a divide? Not absolutely. In general, to be very broad brush, Shi'i positions on the depiction of the Prophet have been much more accommodating. and Sunni ones, but this is a Sunni text.
Right. But the Prophet, after 1500, his portrait tends to be veiled. There's a historical development here which tends to move away from at least showing the features of the Prophet. Yes, but it's not so much something that is legislated within Islamic law, but there are discourses around idolatry, discourses around... image-making, which could be seen to be prohibitive, but those are matters of interpretation.
What's controversial is the modern context in which they've come to mean something quite different. And the modern context has been satiric, conflictual, rather than referential. Absolutely. In fact, as late as the 2000s, the legal opinions of many scholars were different. that an image of the Prophet, whether in the form of a statue or in the form of a painting, that image's value and permissibility depends on what the image is used for, not the image itself.
I think we should also stress that the Prophet is embodied or remembered in many different ways, and it doesn't have to be a depiction to be valid or culturally useful. So in some senses, our expectations are perhaps Eurocentric in that sense. You know, we expect to see iconography of certain kinds. And so if we don't see that, we feel something is lacking.
But that may not be how devotional Muslims see the issue. Fosia makes the important observation that it is now a very Western point of view to imagine that figurative imagery is somehow the... gold standard of religious representation. With that in mind, it's worth reassessing other certainties about how we look and the value we place on looking. In a way, the merits of showing and sharing are written into the English language.
We talk about things being better out than in, of getting them out into the open. And we're always banging on about the virtues of transparency. But not all cultures see it like that. In fact, some privilege the exact opposite.
The British Museum holds some precious works from the African Côte d'Ivoire made by the Baulé people. These pieces were once subject to strict rules around who could look at them, like this ceremonial mask. Gus, is it dangerous for me to look at this?
It could be considered disrespectful and it could diminish the power of this to be impactful unless you are part of a very particular part of a community. And when you did see them, for many, you shouldn't look at them directly. And these are... Probably hugely heavy, but it's not worn on the front of the face, as one would imagine a lot of masks in the West. This is worn on the top of the head, and it would be worn with a raffia cloak, palm fronds as well, and it would be danced.
So most of the community don't really get to watch? Absolutely not. And there are those who are pretty much systematically excluded from seeing.
You know, they would be the young and women who would be... excluded. But if you were to defy convention expectation and just sort of look at it as we are now, there could be a price to pay.
Punishment? Punishment, punishment, punishment, potentially even death. So that's the mask.
What about the two figures we've got out here? These figures would be commissioned as a way of being in contact with your spirit lover. This is someone who would be partnered with you, who resides in a kind of parallel realm that can impact your life in very real ways. So you ignore them and then, you know, you'll notice your luck isn't so good anymore.
An object like this, you would place it down in a corner somewhere, probably wrapped. And so, again, it's part of a tradition in which... The more that people who aren't meant to gaze upon this, the more that its power, its potency is diluted. So the Western Museum overturns that.
It takes these objects, puts them in a case, spotlights them, encourages us all to look as hard as we can. Now, is that a problem? I mean, we're used to looking in museums.
We're used to... A particular way of thinking about objects that we see there, that the more we see of them, the more we understand them. But this is part of a tradition in which respect and understanding is actually connected to not seeing, to the hidden. The very thing that we're taught to do in museums is actually distancing us from an understanding of what these objects are meant to convey.
By taking a Baolei perspective, Gus is reminding us that looking and not looking can be more complicated than they seem. And he must be right. Even with works we think we understand, there are always different ways of seeing, which means thinking hard about who's seeing them, who's making them, and how they're being shown in different times and places.
And what we discover... is that the modern debates about some of our most controversial images run deeper than we might think. There's one artwork, public in the sense that we own it, even if we can rarely see it, that captures this better than most, and in a surprising way. It's a series of blatantly imperialistic murals on display here in the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office in Whitehall, designed around the time of World War I to decorate the grand ceremonial staircase.
One scene in particular has been the centre of controversy. It's called, in Latin, Britannia Pacificatrix, Britannia the Peacemaker. For some observers, politicians, staff and visitors, the view they offer of the other peoples and nations of the world is not just outdated, it's offensive and even upsetting. Really good candidate to take down or cover up. I wanted to film these paintings, but when we asked for permission, the Foreign Office refused and declined to give a reason.
These archive photographs, however, show us the scene of a beneficent Britannia, surrounded by figures representing world nations. One side, Japan, Greece and France. Below, the scantily clad Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro, seeking British protection.
And to the other side, imperial subjects, an Indian, an Arabian man, and most objectionable to us now, a small Swahili boy with a bowl of fruit, infantilising the people of colonial Africa. It's a degrading racist stereotype. I genuinely think if I was in a gallery and I walked past that, I would probably just walk past it. But it is interesting, you should probably walk past these all the time.
Well, yeah. And you don't realise the controversy of them. Yeah, naturally I would be offended by it, but obviously taking time to really understand the time it was made, I guess it would have made sense to those people, like, yeah, Africa's just a miniature place, like, they're just savages, et cetera.
I find it distasteful. Times change, values change, paintings can change. I think maybe it's time to swap that out for another one. Today, currently, it's unacceptable. I refuse to accept that this painting is hanging there for people to keep seeing.
No, it should have been brought down a long time ago. But there's a more complicated story behind what looks like a straightforward expression of imperial and racial superiority. The whole series is by a now little-known artist, Sigismund Goetze.
In 1912, hearing that the drab Foreign Office interiors were in need of decoration, he volunteered his services for free.. As the work went on, it became increasingly difficult to capture the tragedy of the Great War or to represent the new world order that was emerging. And the final scene of Britannia the Peacemaker was trickiest of all.
We now tend to concentrate on the Swahili boy. But at the time, people were concerned about the representation of Belgium as a naked girl kneeling at the feet of Britannia. And some British officials were worried about the representation of Japan as a geisha, but happily they were able to borrow from the Japanese embassy a more formal aristocratic ceremonial outfit for Goetze to copy in doing a revised version of it. That wasn't the end of it though. Goetze was soon the victim of racism himself when the murals were attacked in the journal Plain English.
Who ordered them? Painted by a man who is an alien in common law and a perpetual enemy of the Christian empire. Where were our British artists?
Our Foreign Office is quite foreign enough. without the spacious decorations of a foreign Jew at the expense of the British taxpayer. Goetze took them on, sued for libel and won his case on the grounds that he'd worked for free, he was British, his family had been here for more than a century and he was not Jewish. For us, there are some sobering parallels and a reminder that with controversial works of art... The controversies can go back a long way.
He was not the last person in this country to have to prove that he belonged in a place that his family had lived for generations. And in a way, the prejudices that Goetze faced are uncannily similar to those that we now detect in his paintings. Recently, one work of art in particular has opened eyes to these dilemmas, especially to the challenge posed by statues in public places. For centuries he took pride of place in Bristol, celebrated as a merchant, politician and philanthropist. Now reviled for his part in the slave trade.
The latest demonstrations came 13 days after the killing of George Floyd by U.S. police. The monument to Edward Colston, which had stood in the city center for more than a century, was toppled and pushed into the river. There's never been a time in history when statues have not been pulled down. But Colston's dramatic departure captured headlines and divided opinion.
For a lot of people, it's a reminder of what the UK specifically was built on. To see the people of Bristol come together and say, as a community, this needs to come down, it was honestly great to see. What I think they've got no right to do is to take our history away, whether it be good or bad. I'm not sure if, you know, vandalism is the right answer, but I believe people wanted to see some kind of radical change. If there are people of colour who are seeing that statue, that's got to be a horrible, horrible thing to see every day.
I've experienced my share of racism, but there's a better way to... go about wanting people to hear your frustrations or your concerns. You can't teach the newer generation where things have gone wrong through history if you haven't got no reminders of it.
Do you just take down these statues because you now see things from a different way? Andrea Emelife is a member of the London Mayor's Commission. Looking into how history should be represented in the public realm, I wondered, did she think about the fate of Colston and the future of other similarly contentious works of art?
I think what we saw quite poignantly was with the Black Lives Matter protests, how that sort of allowed us to understand, oh, these statues are here, they're representing something that is obviously not in the current context and in the current conversation. If Black Lives... matter how can we also have these characters up i mean part of the issue is presumably and part of the the tension comes from whose voice counts yes in whether something is goes on display continues on display or is removed Who gets to decide? Yeah. That's a very tricky issue.
I mean, if you remove something, will we forget them? I'm not sure. We lose something.
Put something on them or have some different contextualisations. There's a great artist called Hugh Locke who did a photographic series where he put cowrie shells on Edward Colston. Imagine if that was real, if that was there and you could put the sort of pomp of slavery on a slave trader.
I mean, America has been doing quite interesting things with their Confederate statues. Kehinde Wiley recreated a Confederate statue with a black man on it wearing a hoodie, and that was a huge statement that was in the language of the statues. It could almost blend in if you didn't quite look at it. It too often gets brought down to a kind of... a sort of binary choice, isn't it, between...
People move. Yeah. And there isn't anybody who wants to keep every statue.
I mean, you know, I mean... You know, we don't want statues of Jimmy Savile up. But after that, we don't know... Where to go. And how do we judge the level of offence?
This is where I get back to. I think a lot of it should be rooted back to the people that live in those places. I guess I'm using Colston again as an example.
But you can completely understand how that would be a great affront to people. Do you think it matters to the acceptability? of a sculpture, who the artist was that did it. Mark Quinn's attempt to replace the statue of Colston.
White celebrity artist exploits or celebrates the black protester. I think that debate started a long time before that statue. I mean, people... discussed Andy Warhol's race riots that showed the Birmingham attacks.
People were wondering whether he should be doing that work. But then what I was most excited about is seeing an image like that in the public realm. And then, secondly, I heard a lot of racist remarks at seeing a back woman on the plinth. And it made me realise that as important as who made the statue is, it made us realise how necessary it is to have more statues like that up in... Public.
So kind of paradoxically, you're wanting more and more and more statues, so we see them differently. Yeah, I want people to understand and to think about their history more, and I want us to confront the past. Other countries in the world are facing up to the statue dilemma too. And Germany...
which looks back to a 20th century marked by two world wars, dictatorship, division and reunification, has attempted one solution, at the Citadel Museum on the edge of Berlin. We've seen the Nazis getting rid of art, but other regimes did so too. Here, a variety of monuments, at different times unwelcome in the capital's public spaces, have been brought together. You can walk amongst them, and now even touch them.
There are Prussian bigwigs, a Nazi athlete, a couple of East German border guards, and more. In a way, the poster boy of the museum is this head of Lenin that once topped a colossal statue of him, set up in 1970 in communist East Berlin and taken down again in 1991. and buried in the ground. In 2015, the head was dug up again to be installed here.
He's a severed head and a symbol of toppled tyranny. And the idea of the curators of the museum is that this should be a safe space where people can come and confront and debate the historical issues that these images raise. This is a stunning and slightly eerie space, with its wounded statues, its battered marble bodies all lined up. And it's certainly one solution to the problem of what to do with monuments that have passed their use-by date.
But I'm not convinced that the, oh, put them in a museum line, has all the answers. The sheer elegance of this display is just a bit sanitising. It tends to... blunt the political edge, and it might make it easier to turn a blind eye to their contested histories.
Besides, you have to choose to come here to confront them. Putting statues away like this can be a way of dodging their legacy as much as facing up to it. This is not the only drawback to the idea that the solution lies in museums.
In fact, I think those on all sides of the debate about the future of our statues might be missing a bigger point. Brought home to me in Bristol, when I saw the toppled Edward Colston for myself. Oh wow!
Look at its extraordinary side. There's something pretty unsettling actually about being sort of so up close. I mean I'm not somebody who was ever a victim of what this man stood for or his legacy but when he fell I still thought there was a bit of history here being rewritten and I felt pleased. But now when I look at him in this slightly pathetic state and almost catch his eye, I kind of think also that he's now challenging my moral certainty about things. I watched Colston come down on my television and I was clutching in my hand my smartphone.
Now I think I know and most of us know in what conditions our smartphones are made, our other bits of high tech. cheap clothing and yet we don't want to see that. Suppose I wondered how different is my blindness from the blindness of Colston himself or the people who put his statue up in the late 19th century or the people who made him a local hero.
Not so very different I think. I can tell you, you learn a lot about how exposed you feel on top of a plinth by trying it out. But I've not just been talking about the statue wars.
I've been talking about art, religion, tradition and politics. kinds trying to think harder about what or who we get to see and what or who we don't from the sacred to the slave trader throughout history people have argued about what work should be on public display who should decide in the end the arguments come down to what we think those images are for I can't help thinking that they do more than celebrate an honour. They help us frame debates about what's important to us. And of course, they turn the spotlight back onto ourselves.
offering a salutary warning that one day it might be us and our heroes who are candidates for the chop. So don't blame the artists. They're shining a light onto our anxieties. Which reminds me, how exactly do I get down from here? Has anybody got a ladder?