Should Museums Show Their Johnsons? (Part 1)

 

God, I haven't had that much fun creating a title in a long time! I guess the opportunity was arranged by the Fates and Muses in some occult ritual. 

Cries had just gone up regarding the planned placement of Seward Johnson's monumental sculpture of a slightly exposed Marilyn Monroe near the entrance to the Palm Springs Art Museum, when a group of anonymous scholars threw into question the naming of museum institutes and university buildings after Philip Johnson, the modernist architect and one-time American fascist. These days, it seems that having a Johnson is not always an asset.

Let's do Seward first. His 2011 Forever Marilyn depicts the movie star in a famous shot from The Seven-Year Itch, where a gust of wind from a subway tunnel blows her dress up above her knees as she tries to press it back down.

"Forever Marilyn, by Seward Johnson" (Photo: Christopher Lance)

 

No less an authority than the Palm Springs Art Museum's Director, Louis Grachos, as well as three former directors and other Palm Springs cultural luminaries, have spoken out against moving the statue there. Here's a quote from Grachos: “When you exit the museum, you are going to see the exposed backside of a 26-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe, including her underwear,” he explained by phone this week. “That’s not the message we want to give to our community.”

"Exposed backside?" Listen, um, Louis, and your predecessors, with your undoubtedly shining credentials as artworld  judges of taste and propriety, I have one piece of advice for you: Don't go to Florence!

Michelangelo's David at the Academia Gallery in Florence

 (Photo: Anton Alterman)

I mean, seriously - from directly below the statue you can look up at Marilyn Monroe's underwear... So what the hell is in your museum, Mr. Director, if you are so horrified by the thought of the Marilyn's underwear outside the museum? Just still lifes and Abstract Expressionist canvases? Or are you saying it's okay to show depictions of privies within your hallowed halls, but outside you'd better be more cautious? (Actually, don't go to Florence, but do go to the Vatican - where a guard stands outside the Sistine Chapel checking that there are no bare shoulders or knees about to enter, while a priest inside warns over a PA that "this is a house of god". But I digress.)

Let's keep in mind that Johnson's Marilyn has been around the block and behind the bushes once or twice. Forever Marilyn has resided in a public plaza in Chicago, at Grounds for Sculpture, Johnson's public sculpture park, in New Jersey, and in Downtown Palm Springs. This has not, to my knowledge, resulted in the deterioration of the moral fabric of society. (Okay, that fabric has deteriorated - but that has more to do with a certain New York demagogue than a New Jersey sculptor.) The brouhaha is all about moving Marilyn from Downtown to a spot near the art museum's entrance. I guess the culture czars of Palm Springs were too busy to raise the cry of poisoning the public mind when the statue was downtown, so they made it a NIMBY issue. Terribly responsible of you folks.

What, then, is the right "message" to send to the Palm Springs community? How about: "We will do absolutely nothing to offend your presumed 19th century sexual morality. Indeed, we are not so much an art museum as a repository of artifacts pre-approved by a committee of West Coast evangelicals, the Pope and the local Republican establishment..." 

Wait! What? This is actually a liberal southern California city, one with the highest concentration of LGBTQ households in the country, who just elected an openly bisexual woman as mayor, and where a Republican is lucky to get forty percent of the vote in a local or national election. What is this community doing imposing such anachronistic Victorian prudishness on their art institutions?

According to the directors and their cohorts, the objections are not due to phony religious scruples about sexuality. Rather, putting the statue at the museum "elevates an approach to women that is inappropriate in 2020, introducing a blatantly sexist statue in front of our most significant cultural institution." They refer to it as "a 26-foot statement about women and sexual appeal". Johnson's monumental "war memorial" statue of a sailor kissing a woman at the end of WW II has similarly been criticized for its upskirt view and the woman's submissive pose. (He called it "Unconditional Surrender", obviously relishing the double entendre.)

But women have been depicted in sexually suggestive and submissive poses since, oh, Botticelli's Venus? To say nothing of the frankly pornographic works of Picasso and others. Or Lautrec's prostitutes. Today, though, we know better than to show a woman's undies. Today we know that when men depict women's bodies they are being used as sex objects. In fact, why focus on secondary works like Forever Marilyn - what about The Seven Year Itch itself? Not to mention other Marilyn Monroe films, and of course, her Playboy spread. She didn't actually agree to be in Playboy, but she agreed to pose nude for photographer Tom Kelley, who sold the pictures to Hugh Hefner; apparently, she didn't mind the attention it got her. So, is the idea that the best way to honor her is never to show the films and photographs in which she is, clearly, depicted as an icon of beauty and sexual attraction - a role she conspired in over the course of a roughly 15-year career? Or am I missing some hidden logic? 

Sorry, I don't see any more sexual objectification in this derivative work than in numerous cinematic and photographic images that Marilyn participated in hundreds of times. But perhaps the narrative is supposed to be something like, "Marilyn was forced to let the male-dominated studio system make a sex object out of her in order to have an acting career, but we need not endorse that grim reality." (I believe something like this was argued by Gloria Steinem in a book on Marilyn.) 

There have been plenty of cases where women were taken advantage of in film and other visual arts, and I have no doubt that in order to break into the field Marilyn had her "MeToo" moments. But a blanket label of "blatantly sexist" for representations of her as a sex symbol is blatantly false. She was actually a trend-setter in taking control of her career; she formed her own production company, carefully managed her image, and forced the world to take her seriously as an actress after having edged into cinema in "dumb blonde" roles. I regret if it doesn't fit the pretentious piety of the #MeToo era to point out that some women want to be admired specifically for their beauty, glamor and desirability, but, whatever her other troubles (they were many) Marilyn was apparently very comfortable with expressing her sexuality in a variety of ways. There's absolutely no reason to think she would have been disturbed by Stewart Johnson's sculpture.

It seems that even art directors toss around casual judgments about sexuality without so much as a thought about the broader implications of what they are saying. To give the slightest credit to their offhand comments about sexual morality would be to write off a vast segment of the plastic arts, film, theater, vocal music in various genres, ballet and perhaps much else, past, present and future, as an affront to decency and something from which to protect the impressionable minds of society at large. It is frankly quite disturbing to see people who ought to be upholding principles of liberty, progress, openness and artistic freedom buying directly into a moral agenda that could equally come from the playbook of the religious right. 

But this, sad to say, has been my experience of the left in general, going back many decades, and the more so the more left they are. The unfortunate truth is that there is a thin line between the fulminations of the Moral Majority or the Catholic Church about the sanctity of family, with its narrowly defined limits on what constitutes legitimate sexual expression, and feminist scruples about sexuality and sexual oppression. The latter run side by side with reactionary efforts to suppress female self-expression when it happens to take sexually liberated forms that they do not understand as empowerment. 

Left and right, using superficially different vocabularies, attempt to suppress explicit sexual expression that doesn't fit their political narrative. But before modern feminism and gay liberation and the coming out of transgender people, what happened was the sexual revolution of the sixties, and you cannot go backwards to undo that without taking a lot else with you. We need to sharply distinguish between the critique of moral transgressions like rape, domestic abuse and the sort of serial predatory behavior that #MeToo targets (when it is on target, which it often isn't) and the celebration of sexuality as a game, a skill, an art form and or just a facet of human nature. Otherwise the public conversation is like a coin with the same face on both sides. Attacking a work of art with feminist rhetoric about "sexual objectification" adopts a different language to achieve the same ends as conservative monitors of aesthetic propriety

Let Marilyn's butt wave free. Maybe her message is just what Seward Johnson's was: if you don't like it you can kiss my ass.

Before I leave this part of the Johnson disputes, it seems worth adding that the Palm Springs art directors, before they got into their feminist rant, were complaining about the fact that the statue would obscure the art museum itself. Though it seems like a problem easily solved by judicious consideration of its exact location, I bow out of that conversation. It certainly was possible to debate that point without bringing in spurious social critiques.

But more interestingly, they did not even address other more serious issues of aesthetics and morality in their statement, to wit:

1. The statue, like many of Johnson's other works, was copied from a shot in Billy Wilder's film, and Johnson might be accused of plagiarism, as he was with Unconditional Surrender (apparently based on a famous photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, V-J Day in Times Square). I'm not endorsing this view, for there is a robust tradition of secondary uses of images from previous artworks, and Johnson's sculptures surely add an aesthetic dimension that is not there in the original. But this is a more serious discussion, and one suspects that the relevant authorities had no taste for intellectual challenges, preferring to haul out some trendy epithets about sexism that need not be backed up with real logic in the current climate.

2. This and other Johnson works have also been described more than once as kitsch, not real art. His manufacturing process, employing CAD (computer-aided design) software to create works from existing images, has also put his originality in question. I have been to Grounds for Sculpture, where many of Johnson's works reside, among hundreds of works by other sculptors whose content ranges from contemporary abstractions to, let's say playful humor and fantasy.

Seward Johnson, "Dejeuner Déjà Vu" (Photo: Anton Alterman)

 

I've been to enough sculpture gardens to say that the range felt liberating. There is nothing wrong with modernist mountainsides like Storm King or rolling estates like the one at the Nassau County Museum of Art. But a visit to Grounds For Sculpture can relieve you of the tendency to stomp your foot and insist that "this public sculpture stuff is Very Serious Business!" And whether it is or not, I see Johnson's work being in the tradition of Warhol and the artists who used popular culture as a jumping-off point. He had an eye for the iconic, and if his work is kitsch or lacks originality then so does that of a hell of a lot of pop artists who stand in modern art museums all over the world.

3. There is also a more legitimate reason to at least consider the charge of sexism, though against Wilder, not Johnson. I recall that it was reported not very long ago that Marilyn, though she had agreed to the famous shot in which a gust of wind blows her dress up from below, was not expecting the strong blast that not only blew it above her knees but made it impossible to push the dress back down, exposing her for several seconds on the movie set in public.There was some suggestion that this was all intentional and that she was not very pleased about it. (I am not going to hold up this post trying to find the reference, but I believe it was in the NY Times; I'll keep looking.) Even if true, Johnson would not have known this when he created the statue. But one might argue that it rubs the wrong way to have an embarrassing moment so monumentally immortalized. The problem is, it is already immortalized in the film and a thousand reproductions of the clip. Making a sculpture of it does not necessarily endorse the original motivation, and if someone finds the statue disturbing, all the better. Andy Warhol did silk screens of an electric chair and other unsettling images. This is your culture, make of it what you will.

4. Finally, in this era when support for the arts by morally bankrupt corporate executives, and in particular by those involved with predatory pharmaceutical companies, has become an issue, it might have been interesting to raise the question of the extent to which Johnson's monumental sculptures owe their existence to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, spoils of a drug company that has been involved in plenty of ethical controversies. Seward Johnson was the grandson of Robert Wood Johnson, the company founder, one of whose sons (Seward's uncle) ran the company, and fired him from a job there at the age of 32. Seward became CEO of The Atlantic Foundation, a non-profit established by his father. Though he was not a direct heir of the Johnson & Johnson fortune (he even had to wage a legal fight for a small portion of his father's estate) it seems likely that his studio, artworks and sculpture park were at least indirectly subsidized by money from the pharmaceutical company. It has been an ethically rocky road for Johnson & Johnson, perhaps tainting Seward's work like a bottle of Tylenol or talcum powder. I say "perhaps", since I remain a bit skeptical of this charge too, given Seward's minimal connection with the company himself. But someone might develop such case, and it might even have more sticking power than the sexism label for Forever Marilyn.

So the putative art experts with their feminist consciences decided to shoot from the hip about the exposure of the metallic undergarments of a woman who is known the world over as a symbol of beauty and sexuality, because it was an easy potshot to take, while other objections would actually require an argument. Unfortunately, the whole thing is a sad reminder of another recent public art debacle by the liberal West Coast intelligentsia - the decision by the San Francisco Board of Education to paint over, then (after an outcry) to cover up instead, Victor Arnautoff's historic WPA murals in George Washington High School, out of fear that they may be exposing minority high school students to uncomfortable realities of U.S. history. (Read what the Parrot had to say about this one here.) Maybe California should just remove all its public artworks, close its art institutions, and take a breather.They have Disneyland and the Hearst Mansion, anyway; do they really need all these sculptures and murals too?

I think I have discovered something about myself. When forced to choose between freedom of artistic expression in just about any form, and political correctness in at least some forms, I stand with the artists, ready to endure the slings and arrows of self-righteous activists for the long-term good of our cultural heritage. But (there's always a "but"), there are limits. Peppering the landscape with works by admirers of Adolph Hitler is one of them. I'll talk about that in the next post.