Immediately I noticed that one of the pieces which I had donated to the silent auction for a local fundraising event had been covered slightly with a notice which read: PARENTAL VIEWING –ADVISED– THANKS!. My first censored work of art. Excellent. I grinned from ear to ear when I saw it, knowing that “the forbidden” only draws more attention. It was not my intent to be controversial in any way, but here I was, the center of a quietly bubbling controversy.

The piece in question is this one:

I didn’t think anything about it, and continued perusing the other art on display. As I was walking through some of the sculptures, one of the members of the board of directors for the organization which was holding the fundraiser approached me. He wanted to explain to me the reason for the censorship and make sure I was OK with it. I told him, regardless of the reason, I thought it was great. He then explained the story to me.

A middle aged man attended the event with his two young sons, about ages ten
and eleven. The man explained that while he appreciates art, and he liked my piece, he thought that it was inappropriate.

Because the event was intended for all ages and wanting to respect the wishes of the parent, but also wanting to keep the piece on display, the windowshade solution was implemented.

His boys were participating in the event, which consisted of creating an original sculpture out of objects and materials found throughout the establishment’s cache of goodies within an allotted amount of time. The sculpture the boys created was a machine gun, pictured after the jump in previous posts.

A discussion ensued amongst some of the board members and myself regarding the irony of the situation. Sex is often packaged along with violence. The father was objecting to a piece that he perceived as portraying sex. Yet his sons created a piece of art that portrays a machine intended to kill people. To me, this made my piece even more poignant, because the text of the piece reads:

Server Error in ‘/Love’ Application. The resource cannot be found. Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is permanently unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested URL: /Love/login/default.aspx

If there is no love in someone’s heart for a person or some people, he may instead have violence and hate in his heart, thereby allowing him to justify using a machine such as a gun to kill his perceived enemies.

The question was asked, how is war and violence acceptable in our modern society, but depictions of a naked body are not?

Also created during the competition was another, slightly more subtle, depiction of war, a chess set:

There was discussion about weather or not it was appropriate to speak publicly about the disconnect involved in this controversy, but it was decided that the fundraising event was not the venue for such a discussion. I agreed.

See the photo of me with the gun they built.