ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s Senator Alfonse D’Amato stood up in the US Congress and ripped up a reproduction of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987). This sparked a long-running feud over the awarding of grants for artistic projects considered by many to be obscene. In the UK in 1998 police from the West Midlands raided the home of a Birmingham fine art student, confiscated photographs of pictures by Robert Mapplethorpe and confiscated the book itself from the University of Central England’s student library. Both the institution and the student were threatened with possible prosecution on the grounds of obscenity, though no prosecution was forthcoming. In 1997 the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy, subsequently transferred in 1999 to the Brooklyn Museum, caused a great furore. A large-scale portrait by Marcus Harvey of Myra Hindley (1995), sentenced to life in the 1960s for murdering children, was considered so offensive that it was defaced by ink and eggs thrown by angry members of the public. In Brooklyn controversy focused on Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) which, in its depiction of an African Madonna, used collage cut outs of bare bottoms from pornographic magazines in its decorative patterning. The then Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, publicly declaimed it as blasphemous. In March 2001 the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘I am a Camera’ exhibition was raided by Scotland Yard’s obscene publications unit. The police’s consternation focused on two images by the photographer Tierney Gearon, depicting her six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. Her partly naked son urinates in the snow in one and, in the other, they are both looking at the camera wearing nothing but theatrical masks. The photographs themselves were part of a series of fifteen representing her personal family life. The fine art book associated with the exhibition was also considered to be in possible breach of the Children’s Protection Act. Again no action was taken by the Crown Prosecution Service. In 2002 the US Department of Justice covered in drapes two semi-nude art deco statues that had stood in their Hall since the 1930s.
