My Art Was Censired Becouse Its Not Family Freindly

Clarity Haynes, "Janie" (2014), oil on linen, 62″ x 58″ (image courtesy the creative person)

I'm a queer feminist artist, and my work is regularly censored online. Until recently, this had been something I accepted and learned to live with. Information technology felt embarrassing when information technology happened —  an Instagram or Facebook message appearing out of the bluish saying that something was wrong with my work — but it wasn't something I wanted to draw attending to.

But this was the harbinger that bankrupt the camel's back: A few months agone, Hyperallergic published a review past Heather Kapplow of my solo show at Brandeis University's Kniznick Gallery. The next twenty-four hour period, a friend texted me to say that Facebook had deleted the article from her wall. I tried to get on Facebook and plant that I'd been banned for three days, every bit penalization for posting a link to my exhibition catalogue on Issuu. I was warned that if I violated community guidelines again, I would be banned permanently.

(screenshot past the author for Hyperallergic)

At present, instead of embarrassment, I felt anger. Was I supposed to refrain from sharing anything about my work or career on Facebook? When I logged in after my pause, there were multiple posts from friends letting me know that their shares of the Hyperallergic commodity had been removed. Information technology was clear that, at least in my circles, the circulation of this review of my work had been halted and erased, either by Facebook'south algorithm or by its administrators.

Creative person Marilyn Minter calls online censorship "the art world version of slut shaming." Artists like Minter and Betty Tompkins, now art stars, were censored and shunned in the 1970s considering they were feminist artists dealing with sexual practice. Minter warns united states of america non to let the same matter happen in the digital age.

I pigment large portraits of the bare torsos of women, trans, and gender nonconforming people. The paintings celebrate my lesbian gaze and community, and point to the body as a topography of our life experiences. Scars, wrinkles, stretch marks, and tattoos tell intimate stories of surgeries, survival, and self-determination. In many means, my work is almost confronting and healing shame. I've been working with this subject affair since the late '90s.

And so why is my work such a censor magnet?

(screenshot by the author for Hyperallergic)

You could say that it's but about the nipple — but we take to ask ourselves: is the female nipple ban about shutting out porn? Because if and then, it doesn't work. If you search for 'tits' on Facebook y'all'll find endless pornographic photographs of breasts, all with nipples covered merely not in a way that decreases their highly sexualized nature.

Whose nipples go censored? The rule is: women's do, men's don't. But at that place is a spectrum of breasts, just like there is a spectrum of gender. In that location are infinite possibilities of what breasts can expect like, and they tin belong to men, women, and nonbinary people.

The Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art'south 2015 exhibitionIrreverent: A Celebration of Censorship explored the history of censorship and queer fine art. A few of the artists in the prove — Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and David Wojnarowicz — are well known for their battles with censorship. But in that location are many more cases that we don't hear almost. The show's curator, Jennifer Tyburczy, points out that censorship "takes many forms, occurs all the time, and generally, happens behind the scenes." Many stories of censorship, she says, alive only "in the memories of the artists whose work was deemed 'controversial,' 'obscene,' 'offensive,' or 'pornographic'" — and they are permanently lost.

Barbara Hammer, "Wrestling, Hornby Island, British Columbia" (1972) (photo courtesy Company, New York)

Recently, I posted a 1972 photograph by the legendary lesbian artist Barbara Hammer on Instagram. The photograph depicts two women with brusk hair standing and wrestling outside in the sunshine, wearing jeans but no shirts. Information technology was deleted within a few hours. Around the same time, the Zoe Leonard verse form "I want a President" was removed repeatedly from multiple feeds in my Instagram circles. The poem begins, "I want a dyke for president." It would seem that much of queer feminist civilisation is unfit for social media.

Zoe Leonard, "I Want a President" (1992) (photo past Avi Lubin for Tohu Magazine)

As artists know, social media tin be a kind of magic. It can open doors, annal our professional activities, and dilate our work. Hashtag feeds are valuable interactive records of our careers and exhibitions. Instagram posts in detail are a style for museum and gallery visitors to appoint with our work, and for artists to be intimately linked to the work'southward reception. Curators look for artists on Instagram; real opportunities and transactions take place in that location. Merely every fourth dimension I mail service my work, I add a plea to Instagram to please not have it downward. Accept a look at the hashtag associated with my proper noun, and the posts you lot'll see — some mine, some from friends, some from strangers — are only the ones that remain; they are constantly disappearing. I take no idea what percentage is left. Merely I know that this amounts to a persistent erosion on the platform of my public tape, my work, and my history.

When an article, link, or mail well-nigh my work is removed, of a sudden and without permission, it feels like I've been robbed. And it is a violation — if not legally, then emotionally, and certainly materially in terms of costs to my career.

Clarity Haynes, "Chest Portrait Triptych" (2002), 22″ 10 80″ (image courtesy the artist, collection Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

Like most painters, I'd rather be painting than doing but nigh annihilation else. But I had to write most this, considering to be silent when censored is another facet of censorship. I can already feel that self-censorship happening, when I hesitate, think twice, before sharing artwork online — either my own or someone else's —- that challenges the condition quo. As Adrienne Rich wrote, "Whatsoever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is mis-named as something else, fabricated difficult-to-come-past, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of pregnant under inadequate or lying language — this volition get, non only unspoken but unspeakable."

During the time of my Facebook ban, I happened across a post of my work on Instagram that made me grinning. Someone had shared "Ellen," my painting of an old woman'south blank trunk, and they accompanied it with a long annunciation that sounded like a blessing. It said something like, "May 2018 be the dawn of the return to matriarchal power!"

Information technology was exactly what I needed to see in that moment —  an affidavit, reminding me of why I make my work, and why information technology needs to be seen.

But I wish I'd taken a screen shot, because when I looked it up once more, you can probably guess what happened.

Yep. It was gone.

Clarity Haynes will talk over social media censorship of queer and feminist art as a panelist in "The Art Museum as a Political Space," at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, on Sat March 24 at 2pm. Other panelists include Nato Thompson and Shantrelle P. Lewis, and the conversation will exist chastened by Susan Lubowski Talbott.

cardwelllicedle.blogspot.com

Source: https://hyperallergic.com/433549/im-queer-feminist-artist-paintings-censored-social-media/

Share this post