This week in the arts
Ella Nixon explores freedom of expression in the art world and Marcus Lumi walks us through the Claire Fox cancellation at Royal Holloway
It has been announced this week that Ai Weiwei’s LEGO recreation of Monet’s famous Water Lilies (1914-1926) triptych will go on display at the Design Museum in London next month. Entitled Water Lilies #1, the 50-foot long piece made from 650,000 LEGO bricks will feature in his exhibition, Ai Weiwei: Making Sense (7 April – 30 July 2023).
Weiwei is an artist who stands (and has suffered) for freedom of expression. Water Lilies #1 re-imagines the original painting held at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, but updates it with messages resonant with why freedom of expression is so important today. The triptych features a dark portal on its right-hand side to represent the door to an underground hideout where his exiled father, the poet Ai Qing, was forced to escape the Chinese government in the 1960s. About this, Weiwei explained:
“Our world is complex and collapsing towards an unpredictable future. It’s crucial for individuals to find a personalised language to express their experience of these challenging conditions. Personalised expression arises from identifying with history and memories while creating a new language and narrative.”
Here Weiwei outlines a path to personal expression — an identification with history and memories — and the potential of art to express these experiences and ways of seeing. Against all-encompassing censorship laws, Weiwei’s artwork reminds us to discover our own personal languages of expression.
Perhaps what is so powerful about Weiwei’s work is that it appeals, first and foremost, on an aesthetic level. Water Lilies #1 is profoundly beautiful, and only on closer inspection do its darker themes become apparent. It was for a similar reason that I especially appreciated the recently-opened Number 360 (2023) installation by Brooklyn-based artist, Leonardo Drew, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. His installation is an explosion of plywood pieces, ripped apart and frozen in time. Its monumental energy is felt by the visitor through its woody smell, soft plywood pieces under the foot, and engulfing height. Interestingly, Drew is “adamant in his resistance to impose explicit meaning, and chooses to title his pieces only with numbers in order, ‘to give the viewer enough room to find themselves in the work’”. Drew encourages free interpretation from the viewer, with messages uncircumscribed by the limitations of language. Freedom is both within and without.
In other news, this week Emma Shapiro asked in Hyperallergic, “Is the ‘Free the Nipple’ Movement Too White?” Those partaking in this movement pose topless to raise awareness of sexual double standards (e.g. the notorious anti-nipple censorship on social platforms which apply exclusively to women). In the past, Free the Nipple has hit legal limits; in particular, the protection of children from seeing breasts, which underlie many of the censorship decisions made by social media companies. However, as Shapiro explains, the movement is now being criticised as the concern of only young, white, and slim activists.
Art history shows that opposition to women posing naked for feminist causes is not new. The nude ‘body art’ works of New York artist Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) attracted feminist accusations of ‘essentialism’, due to their erotic nature. For the S.O.S. – Starification Object Series (1974), Wilke photographed herself topless in pin-up model poses decorated with vulvic chewing gum forms. Her beauty shaped the reception such works attracted: accusations of narcissism proliferated. For Wilke, these images were sources of empowerment; for others, these were yet more affirmations that the female body was to be gazed upon and objectified.
With this historical example in mind, are there limits to… ahem, whose nipples can be ‘freed’? Is it only the language of freedom for some? Or, is the end limit of this movement — the autonomy of the body as an unsexualised object — a dystopian goal that puts children in danger?
Ella Nixon is an art historian and PhD candidate from Cambridge.
The Cancellation of Claire Fox
On 1 February, the debating society at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL) announced that Baroness Claire Fox would be speaking at an event later in the month about the importance of debate and her career as a member of the House of Lords. At first, I found this news rather delightful although somewhat surprising. Delightful because the society managed to secure such a prolific and important defender of free expression; surprising because it might ruffle a few feathers given her views on the trans debate. Royal Holloway has experienced two other noteworthy cancellations in recent years: Katie Hopkins in 2020 and former Labour MP Chris Williamson in 2021.
And ruffle a few feathers it did. The event was cancelled quickly after the society started to advertise the event publicly. According to Fox, six societies at the university lobbied the student union to stop the event. In the words of the lobbyists she is a ‘transphobe’ and a bigot who dared to retweet a clip from comedian Ricky Gervais’s Netflix stand-up special which contained a joke about our society’s confused conceptions of sex and gender. The union had written to the society saying that Fox’s presence would make trans students feel unsafe on campus. The former speaker of the house for the debating society, Omar Loubak, in an interview with the Academy of Ideas said that in the meetings between the society and the student union, the latter kept reinforcing the idea that there will be trouble if she comes. It was claimed that this would create bad blood between the union and the society and a committee decided to cancel the event.
In the three years that I have been a student at Royal Holloway, I have not experienced any attempts to censor me for voicing certain views on touchy subjects. Nor has anyone reported me for voicing these views and I have not observed any of my fellow students being censored in this way. There is even a third-year module that is taught on freedom of speech and its controversies where many sides of a controversy are explored.
Despite this, there are some at this university who do not wish to engage in the spirit of free inquiry and debate. Well-known Cambridge academic and free speech activist, Prof. Arif Ahmed has suggested that free speech training should be an essential part of university education regardless of the subject a student studies. I welcome that proposal as it has the potential to prepare students for handling real disagreement in a mature and charitable way. It would help students cultivate the proper mindset for entering an environment where they should be learning deeply, reading widely, and encountering people who may challenge their perspectives on even their most strongly held views. Perhaps this is what Royal Holloway and many other universities across the country need.
Marcus Lumi is a philosophy student at Royal Holloway, University of London.