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>Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 14:01:21 -0400
>From: Gordon Fitch <[log in to unmask]>
>To: Avant-Garde <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Artist Censored By US Senate
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>I have the great honor of announcing that one of ETAOIN's
>artists, Laura Ferguson, has been censored by a committee of
>the U.S. Senate. It's true the writ doesn't run very far --
>the compass of Russell rotunda -- but one guesses they're
>doing what they can. Here's the story:
>
>Some time ago, Laura Ferguson was invited to participate in
>an art exhibition, actual and virtual, sponsored by the American
>Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons. Laura is affected by scoliosis;
>art is one of the ways she deals with her predicament. As she
>says in a statement published on ETAOIN,
>
> We experience the world through our bodies, and the singularity
> of each life experience gives its story, its meaning, but also
> threatens to trap us in the isolation of self. I became
> interested in the visual imagery of the body's interior because
> of my own physical differentness, caused by scoliosis, a
> deformity of the spine and rib cage. My body's asymmetry
> creates the need for a subtle effort of balancing, in my
> physical relationship to gravity and space, and in my psychic
> sense of centeredness and wholeness. The conscious awareness
> of bodily processes that usually unfold by themselves has made
> me finely attuned to my bones and muscles, nerves and senses,
> like a dancer. With a brush or pencil or crayon as an extension
> of my hand, I have sought to find a voice, a process, through
> which my body could express this awareness in visual form.
> ( http://www.etaoin.com/fersta.htm )
>
>Or, as another participant in the show, Allison Berman,
>remarked, "When I paint, I am no longer controlled by my pain
>or disability." In Laura's case, as we can see, the pain and
>disability have become not only a problem to overcome but a
>mode of knowedge many of us do not experience, not just
>a transcendence but an assumption, an encompassing, a
>going-beyond that takes the way along with it.
>
>Laura and Laura's part of the exhibition can be seen at
>http://emotionpictures.aaos.org/ferguson2.html .
>
>Many people who have seen this exhibition have been profoundly
>moved by it. Most importantly, it has given courage and hope
>to others who are similarly afflicted, especially children.
>One mother who took her daughter, also a sufferer from scoliosis,
>to the exhibition wrote to Laura to tell her that her daughter,
>hitherto somewhat discouraged, had been electrified by Laura's
>work and was planning to become an artist herself.
>
>After being seen in San Francisco, the exhibition was to travel
>to Washington, where it was going to be installed in the
>Senate's Russell office building. But as the _Washington
>Post's_ Lloyd Grove reports (in part),
>
> The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has pulled a scheduled
> art exhibit from the Russell Senate Office Building after the Senate
> Rules Committee censored paintings of naked women and their skeletal
> systems. The paintings, by scoliosis-suffering artist Laura Ferguson,
> were among around 40 works in "eMotion Pictures: An Exhibition of
> Orthopaedics in Art," which had been set for display April 23-27 in
> the Russell rotunda.
> ...
>
> Tamara Somerville, staff director for Senate Rules Committee Chairman
> Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), told us that staffers rejected Ferguson's art
> because it featured nudity. "We make no bones about it, we do censor,"
> Somerville said. "We are not an art museum. Nobody's entitled to
> display anything."
>
> Rather than remove Ferguson's paintings from the exhibit, the
> organization opted to move it to Southwest Washington's Millennium
> Arts Center, where 100 pieces will be on display April 23 to May 26.
> Svetlana Mintcheva, arts advocacy project coordinator for the National
> Coalition Against Censorship, decried the Senate's act: "We are not
> even talking frontal nudity or a desire to provoke. What next? Put
> Michelangelo's 'David' in the closet, shame Venus into a frock?" [1]
>
>Actually, it was apparently quite an accomplishment for Mr.
>Grove to get a straight answer out of the Senate Rules Committee
>staff; unlike the Taliban, they were quite coy about their
>dislike of images of the human body and it was very difficult
>to get any sort of explanation out of them. But now that
>they've owned up to the C-word, we can proceed. As Laura told
>reporter Grove,
>
> "It just seems a shame. ... There's a discomfort that people
> have with someone who has a less than perfect body being sensual.
> Disabled people, if they want to be accepted, have to be saintly
> and cheery."
>
>This, I think, is probably the heart of the Senate Rules
>Committee staff's objection to these particular pictures.
>Part of the oppression of the disabled is that many people do
>not wish them to be visible, or, if they are visible at all,
>they are not to be sensual, sexy, attractive, beautiful. The
>precise conjunction of potential eroticism (implicit in every
>human body) together with an abnormality, a disability which
>had been challenged, overcome, even built upon, was too much
>for them, no doubt especially those who are looking over their
>shoulders in fear of reactionary constituencies. To the extent
>they could, then, they deprived people like the young woman
>mentioned above of a chance to live more fully -- maybe even
>to live at all. And so we see, more clearly than usual, the
>death-dealing nature of the repressive mentality and its
>politics -- comfortable with war, money and prisons, frightened
>away by the common truth of flesh and bone.
>
>But regardless of the U.S. Senate, you can see Laura's work
>now on the ETAOIN website at
>
> http://www.etaoin.com/fer0.htm
>
>and on the AAOS's website at
>
> http://emotionpictures.aaos.org
>
>[1] The news story can be found at
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/reliablesource/A25590-2001Apr16.html
>
>--
>
>
> }"{ G*rd*n }"{ [log in to unmask] }"{
>{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 2/25/01 <-adv't
>
>
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