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My friend Angela Goddard, Director of Griffith University Art Museum in Brisbane, is in hot water. Christians are attacking the Gallery for including Juan Davila’s 1985 painting Holy Family in its current show, and the media are all over it like a cheap suit. Davila’s work is based on Michelangelo’s iconic sculpture, the Pieta, which shows the Virgin cradling the dead, deposed Christ. In Davila’s painting, Christ’s body is replaced with a man-sized penis.

The media—as per usual—has amplified a storm in a teacup into a flood of biblical proportions. The rhetoric is ripe, the reports overblown. The idea—that Christianity and Christians are so fragile that such images need to be removed for their safety—is silly. No one is being forced to view the work. It’s in an off-off-Broadway, campus gallery, seen by a small art-world audience entirely familiar with such things—with trigger warnings added for anyone who isn’t. The claim that the Gallery shouldn’t show the work because the University gets millions from government is bogus. First, the Gallery is a tiny part of the University, and admirably run on the smell of an oily rag. Second, if that logic was applied across the board, no one working anywhere in any major university would be able to say anything that offended any taxpayer—universities couldn’t function.

Of course, the irony is that media coverage has given the work far more exposure and status than it would ever have enjoyed in the Gallery alone. Plus, I suspect, far from being genuinely injured, the plaintiffs are revelling in the spotlight opportunity that this engineered controversy has afforded them—milking it for more than it’s worth. Meanwhile, to the art world, it’s a yawn. We had the blasphemy debate in the early 1990s. The work itself is now almost forty years old and Davila part of art history.

But, putting all that aside, I don’t see how the work is even anti-Christian. What do the critics think it means? In The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, published two years before Davila painted Holy Family, Leo Steinberg drew attention to the frequency with which old masters once depicted Christ’s genitals. This highlighted the incarnation, the core Christian doctrine that Christ was God made flesh, made man, with all that entails—sexuality included. Artists deliberately exposed Christ to affirm his connection with humankind, with us all. Reiterated and monstrously exaggerated by Davila, this idea is surely the crux of Christianity, not a threat to it—even if Davila is out to offend.
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It’s been an odd week. Last Monday, Ronnie van Hout’s giant public sculpture—which grafts his face onto his hand—was installed on the roof of City Gallery, and mass media and social media went ape. Most of the big media in New Zealand have covered it, and, overseas, so has CNN, Time, the Guardian, W, and even the Hindustani Times. It’s provided an opportunity for harmless fake-news headlines and pseudo-hysteria—Giant Hand Terrifies Capital!—even though no one seems remotely terrified.

People see crazy things in the work. Some think it looks like Trump. Someone described it as the invisible hand of Adam Smith (even though it is excessively visible), another claimed it was the devilish white hand of Theo Schoon. One caring person proposed making a glove for it, to keep it warm in winter; another said they will not set foot in Civic Square until it is gone. It’s been suggested that there should be a trigger warning for those with suicidal thoughts. And, all the while, people flock to Civic Square to see it and take photos.   

It’s true that public sculptures are the butt of jokes and a routine target of deranged interpretations, but Quasi is asking for it. It’s named after Quasimodo, the misshapen misunderstood bellringer from Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, a target of scorn and fear. Van Hout wants to show how we reveal ourselves in our responses to ‘the freak’. In installing his curious figure without a narrative to explain its presence or intentions, Van Hout leaves it to us to provide our own explanations, revealing ourselves in the process, then to watch how our and other views play out in the court of public opinion. So those who think they are attacking Van Hout’s sculpture are simply playing the artist’s game. Quasi is a conversation starter. Everything will be revealed.
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For the 1991 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, Christian Boltanski created a vertiginous corridor—an alley of floor-to-ceiling industrial metal shelving stuffed with archive boxes bearing obscure names. Who were all these nobodies? The penny dropped when visitors finally encountered a familiar name. These were the 5,000-plus artists included in all previous fifty-one Internationals. Stars in their day, they were now largely forgotten—or likely soon would be. It was an artist cemetery. They come, they go.

After writing my post on the curious apotheosis of Guy Ngan, I’ve been thinking more about art-world recognition and what it means. We say artists are ‘recognised’ as if they’ve passed some test and been accredited, but art-world recognition is a more complex, amorphous thing. It’s not determined dispassionately by experts ranking everyone across the board in relation to clear, agreed criteria. (Agreed criteria went out the window with Duchamp.) Recognition is unregulated. It’s the cumulative effect of miscellaneous, intersecting individual and corporate vested interests and endorsements, engagements and opportunities. It results from artists being shown, bought, argued about, responded to, profiled, and resourced. It’s about being in play, in the right place at the right time, the stars in alignment, resonating. It’s political: what you know and who you know. And it waxes and wanes with the volatile art-world weather.

At any time, most art is overlooked. As the art world is made up of people, prejudices are always in play—racism, sexism, nepotism, chauvinism, and tribalism. But the main reason most art is overlooked is that the spotlight is tiny and competition is fierce. The art world is agonistic and opinionated, not impartial. A small number of artists and ideas necessarily dominate the discussion at any time and that’s not likely to change. When we hear of neglected artists only now getting their due, it presumes that the scene generally makes fair calls, but occasionally fails. But things were never so sorted. Despite any pretence to be above it, institutions are players in the game—not referees. And, besides, all ‘neglect’ arguments are partisan, because no one argues on behalf of everything that’s overlooked, only the specific things they want to champion.

But don’t be glum. The art world may be volatile and erratic, but it is also insanely generative. Churn—resulting from ambition, curiosity, short attention spans, and the dictates of commerce—keeps the game interesting and stops the canon from setting in stone. Today’s big thing will be knocked from its perch tomorrow, when something new appears, as if from nowhere. And artists can be buoyed along by the fact that their own overlooked practice could become utterly central some day soon—stranger things have happened. Tomorrow will be the same, but not as this is.
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