Felicity Wood
Censorship is alive and well in the Eastern Cape, as Hogsback artist Elaine Matthews recently discovered when she submitted her painting, The Sacred Marriage, to an exhibition in the Cuyler Street Gallery in Port Elizabeth.
The painting features an angel and a woman making love in a field of flowers. Matthews states that for her, the painting represents a bringing together of the sensual and spiritual, aspects of life that Western society, with its Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, has kept separate.
Thus the painting expresses an alternative way of viewing sexuality. It can be contrasted with the pornographic approach, which sees sex as essentially mindless, shameful, dirty and furtive.
Yet the painting has been covered by a sheet, with the message, “Please take care! Not for sensitive viewers!”
This defeats the essential object of the painting. The image it contains is presented as something potentially damaging.
By being covered in this way, it is more likely to heighten prurient curiosity and reinforce the idea that sex is something best kept hidden. (In fact, this warning note closely resembles the type of message that is frequently splashed across the covers of magazines like Hustler.)
In a review of the exhibition, the Eastern Province Herald states that the gallery owner, Tossie Theron, said that she had decided to cover the work, particularly because of all the schoolchildren who visit the gallery. (One wonders if Theron realises that, for many schoolchildren, the highlight of the exhibition will be not the range of Eastern Cape art on display, but finding out what the sheet is hiding.)
Oddly enough, Theron did not see fit to censor Anton Brink’s Onan, which depicts a naked man with his penis dripping sperm clutching his head. Possibly the disturbing, painful aspect of sexuality suggested in Onan might make it less upsetting to the average conservative viewer, who might prefer to focus on the suffering sexuality entails, rather than the delight to be had from it.
It is also possible that some people might find this sexually explicit painting less upsetting because it was produced by a man, rather than by a woman.
Finally, Herald art critic Kin Bentley was obviously so shocked by The Sacred Marriage that he did not attempt to look at it too closely. In his review of the exhibition, Bentley states that the painting shows “two beautiful women coupling in a sea of pansies”.