What is the fuss all about?
By Ooi Kok Chuen
Monday, December 21, 1998
Source unknown

When is nudity immodest, vulgar, pornographic in art?

This question cropped up when Galeri Seni Maybank officers at first
demanded that three paintings, and then 13 works, of Sivarajah
Natarajan, be removed from the Around The Body group exhibition.

Set the ultimatum on the eve of the exhibition scheduled for Dec 1,
Sivarajah withdrew rather than make do with only three of his works
shown.

His action led to a boycott by three other participating artists
present at the gallery - Anurendra Jegadeva, Ajis (Zainurin Mohamad)
and Harris Ribut. The fifth artist, Yau Bee Ling, who lives in Klang,
could not be contacted then.

In recounting the incident, Ambassador Datuk N. Parameswaran, the
organiser-curator, said he was informed by phone at noon on Nov 30
that seven of Sivarajah's works had to be removed. When he went over
to the gallery, the Maybank staff maintained that three works could
not be displayed.

A few hours later, a more senior Maybank staff insisted that 13 works
had to be banned.

In protest, Parameswaran and the artists took down all the exhibits
and left the premises at 6pm.

Parameswaran was miffed with the discrepancies in Maybank's exhibition
policy.

"While we accept that Maybank's views on the works that were to be
displayed needed to be taken into account, we protest the censorship
that different Maybank staff imposed, citing that it emanated from
'the Management', which kept varying from hour to hour," he said in a
faxed Press statement.

On learning this, dancer-choreographer Ramli Ibrahim offered his Sutra
Dance Theatre, where Sivarajah has been the resident artist since
1992.

So the exhibition went ahead at Ramli's 12 Persiaran Titiwangsa 3
premises on Dec 12-18. The show has since been extended to Dec 31 to
enable more art-lovers to judge if indeed Sivarajah's works were
licentious, provocative and/or offensive.

Said Sivarajah, 32: "I am just a victim of circumstances. I feel sorry
for my artist friends who backed out because of me but I am pleased
that they stood together.

"If the issue is nudity, I see it as something beautiful and divine.
It's a celebration of the senses."

While his earlier figurative works shown at the Concorde Shah Alam
this year and also the Balai Seni Maybank last year were more airy
with the accent on movement, his more focused forms this time may have
over-titillated the imagination of some.

Ironically, an explicit painting of a nude woman by a Taiwanese artist
went on display without incident at the 13th Asian Invitational Art
Exhibition which just ended at the new National Art Gallery building.

Truth is, there is a great more latitude towards nudity in art, or
what one Western art critic once put euphemistically as the
"idealisation of the human effigy unadorned."

Nude representations of the human body are nothing new in Malaysian
art though we have been spared the Fischl/Mapplethorpe fetishest
types. Artists such as Long Thien Shih have "got away" with them in
public spaces many, many times.

In February last year, the NN Gallery, then at its Imbi bungalow
premises, displayed Long's provocatively erotic prints of the 1970's
of dismembered torsos and limbs complete with genitalia and also his
sensuous O'Keefee-ian orchids of the 1980's.

During the 1960's, some women artists even had life-drawing sessions
of male nude models!

It is clear that Sivarajah's concerns are more aesthetic, inveigling
the figure into ambiguous spaces and symbolic geometric shapes.

His human forms are outlined with swift, staccato strokes and
accentuated by light-toned acrylics. There are no close-ups or
detailed rendering.

His pure intentions in his acrylic/charcoal on canvas and the sepiaed
mixed-media on paper can be gleaned from some of the titles:
Interface; Blue Flourish; Emotional Release 1 and 2; Balancing 1 and
2; Three-Cornered 1, 2 and 3; Red Moon and Red Dream.

So what is the fuss all about?

It is sad, for this controversy unfairly detracts from some remarkably
accomplished works by the young Ajis, 34, and Anu, 33.

Ajis with his monochromed 'silver-screen'-era Photo-Realist facets of
rustic Malay life and values. His works on children and the
generational rapport are imbued with innocence, charm and nostalgia.

And Anu with his self-deprecatory self-portraits and dirges of
sedentary boredom -- the figures shown with unflattering ordinariness
with ugly excesses of cascading flesh and hirsuite overgrowth.

The witty titles such as Miniature With Flowers and Backstroke are
gems too.

In less realistic ways, Harris deals with the figure with quaint
stylistic distortions, using a vertiginous approach which amplifies
the body which however does not seem to be at odds with the
chicken-drumstick limbs.

Here, the forms are compact, making the women subjects look like
sumo-wrestlers in batik sarungs.

Bee Ling's works, which delve into interaction (or lack of it) in
marital relationships, have become more formal and structured as
opposed to her earlier post-graduation works a few years ago.

Those large-family portraits of life with the flattened
pictorialisation ala John Bellany, show greater candour and warmth,
with interesting narrative elements.

Bad art (?) or false morals, obscenity in art is not all in the mind.
In the end, it is also a question of taste, time and place.

(Picture)
CENSORED ... Sivarajah's 'Red Moon', 1998 (acrylic and charcoal on
canvas)
 
 

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