Temecula city officials apologize for removal of nude portrait

Comment by: Jennifer J. Posted: February 24, 2010, 8:52 pm

“The city’s not in the censorship business,” he said. “But neither does the city want the reputation of exposing children to art that’s not appropriate.”

I would accept that.

“The City recognizes the importance of artistic expression and has endeavored to draw the best art from the many talented artists in the region and display that art in appropriate venues,” the statement said. “Most of the time we are successful in balancing these important interests, but in this case we appear to have offended some important segments of the arts community and regret that we could not have found the proper balance of these important interests in order to avoid the controversy.”

This seems to make sense too.
I hope this helps heal the wounds – I’m sure this was painful to both sides.

Comment by: fhansen Posted: February 25, 2010, 7:17 am

Maybe i’ll bring some of my work to temecula next year. I could really use the exposure I would get with some of my works!

Comment by: Kathrin Raab - Questenberg Posted: March 15, 2010, 9:57 pm

I am a sculptor and I would like to share a letter I wrote for the Ventura County Star newspaper, as I was confronted with the same kind of censorship:
” I am responding to comments concerning some pieces of art in the new Hillcrest Center of the Arts show, which some viewers found inappropriate. First, let me say that it’s always satisfying to see artistic reflexes in other human beings, reflexes that resonate to the symbols that breathe in good art, but that are nevertheless missed by many as they burrow through the minutiae of daily living. The complainants seem to understand that meaning hums from the center of art, and express a willingness to mine that meaning for themselves. In other words, they engage in the sacred artistic dynamic of filtering what they see in art through the complex of their own emotional experiences.

But, in the process, they have become frightened, and I must say that was never my intent. They have pulled meaning from the pieces that burgeon far beyond their original implication, choosing to see a malevolent and vulgar sexuality in them that they simply do not possess. Contrary to their suspicions, the pieces they malign are modeled on nothing more than the sublime biological opus of God, on the warm concavities and convexities found everywhere in this stunning repository of his creation. The same forms can be seen on the pistil and stamen of a day lily, in the achingly stretched petals of a Phrag orchid, in the fluttering and floridly orange edges of a Caribbean coral. If these forms mirror or telegraph what are (for the unnamed critics) disorientingly sexual themes, it is ultimately due to their own interpretation rather than to anything intrinsic to the art itself.

There is a difference between sexuality and pornography, between God’s creation and lascivious human corruptions, and our critics seem to blur that distinction.

But enough with the theoretical discussion of the substance of art — I know that members of the Arts Council are entrusted with representing not just art, but the interests and sensitivities of the community as well. In this vein, let me affirm that the complainants were wrong in their fear that an epidemic of corruption will radiate from these pieces, particularly regarding the youth.

I don’t know exactly where their expertise regarding “the youth” lies, and I am sure they mean well, but I, for a fact, have surveyed the many children who tumble through my home on a daily basis (friends of my three young boys), and they have always seen nature, not naughtiness, in these pieces. Children funnel a natural awe with both beauty and the broad world, are innately free of the neuroses that often complicate the intellectual and emotional inner life of adults.

I personally cannot explain the critics’ reflexive apprehension that the pieces are sexually tainted, that they drip with lasciviousness, that they are, according to the newspaper article “blatant genitalia.” They, of course, are free to feel as they do. Ultimately, art is a Rorschach test, one in which viewers often wittingly (and unwittingly) morph the artist’s message to fit their own preconceptions. That they construct from the radials and curves, pockets and hips of these pieces a suspicion of carnality is fascinating in its own right. It is exactly this predisposition of human beings to respond to art in personal and unusual ways that makes art such a magical pursuit.

But, in the final analysis, the critics who began this controversy in Thousand Oaks are simply wrong. The pieces they complain of, though frankly biological, transmit only the sublime innocence and grace of that biology. They are only echoes of the gorgeous movements of God’s hand on the material surface of the world, reiterations of the god-caressed forms that float inside this space we occupy. They are just as lurid as an orchid, just as licentious as the apostrophe of skin that marks the edge of a human smile, just as indecent as the rounded “O” of a baby’s mouth.

Yes, the council could play it safe; there are plenty of pieces of art that the critics would not find offensive. But then, what are we saying to the panorama of God’s creation? That only certain things are acceptable? That we will decide what is appropriate and what is not in the broad textures of this Earth? That anything that even remotely resembles something even remotely sexual will be condemned, making things as superficially innocuous as a rose garden (where flowers seek sexual reproduction) or a petting zoo (where animals sometimes do the same) off-limits to our children? Of course, Michelangelo’s David would be declared obscene, and a proof of age required for viewing it; Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man would be locked away behind the counter at a local 7-Eleven.

A world dissolved of everything humanly potent is a world dissolved of everything human. In the umbrage these critics take, we find the beginning of the sterilization of our children’s lives, the first imperious step toward being so sure we protect them from everything bad, we end up protecting them from everything.

And that, frankly, is a world I think even our critics would abhor. Now, if they could only see that it is exactly such a world they are so assiduously trying to form.

— Kathrin Raab-Questenberg lives in Westlake Village.