Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork

Description

Art is continuously subjected to insidious forms of censorship. This may be by the Church to guard against moral degeneration, by the State to promote a specific political agenda or by the art market, to elevate one artist above another. Now, and in the last century, artwork that touches on ethnic, religious, sexual, national or institutional sensitivities is liable to be destroyed or hidden away, ignored or side-lined. Drawing from new research into historical and contemporary case-studies, Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork provides diverse ways of understanding the purpose and mechanisms of art censorship across distinct geopolitical and cultural contexts from Iran, Japan, and Uzbekistan to Britain, Ireland, Canada, Macedonia, Soviet Russia, and Cyprus. Its contributions uncover the impact of this silent control of the production and exhibition of art and consider how censorship has affected art practice and public perceptions of artworks. Cover Author Biography Title Page Copyright Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork 1 Censorship in Disguise: Elusive Forms of Exclusion and the Examples of Cypriot Artists Socratis Socratous and Erhan Öze Regulating Rumours Language that Confines Protocols that Bind Conclusion 2 Silenced Voices? The Censorship of Art in Iran Engaging with Censorship Authorising Art and Culture in Iran: A Brief Overview Silenced Voices? Conclusion 3 Art and Censorship in Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s Patronage and Oversight Self-Policing The Dawn of the Terror The Anti-Formalist Campaign Conclusion 4 Sex, Art and Museums: On the Changing Institutional Censorship of Shunga What is Shunga? Censorship in Edo Japan Censorship in the UK Changing Attitudes to Shunga in the British Museum Exhibiting Shunga Shunga and Modern Japan Conclusion 5 ‘Naked Ladies’: The Censorship of the Nude in Canadian Modern Art John Lyman’s ‘Travesties, Abortions, Sensual and Hideous Malformations’ John W. Russell and the 1927 Canadian National Exhibition Canada’s Olympia 6 Censorship in the Irish Free State and its Implications for Irish Art Censorship and the Irish Free State Harry Clarke’s Geneva Window Jack B. Yeats’s Jazz Babies ‘Defensive Attitudes’ – the Long-Term Implications of Censorship 7 Post-Soviet and Post-colonial Forms of Art Censorship in Central Asia 8 In the Shadow of Alexander the Great: Censorship, Ideology and Contemporary Art in Macedonia An Ecology of Contemporary Art in Macedonia Case Study: Igor Toševski’s Territory, Plostad Makedonija, 2009 Case Study: Obsessive Possessive Aggression’s Solution, 2012 Conclusion 9 The Contemporary Condition of Eilís O'Connell's The Great Wall of Kinsale 10 Corporate Censorship Not Censorship but Something Else: The Art World Not Censorship but Something Else: The Market Corporate Censorship The Self-Censoring Artist Selected Bibliography Index