Nikki Petroni
"The nude has always played a central role in the evolution of art. The painting of the nude has engendered endless debate, and many a time evoked a furore. It also underlined a hegemonic statement behind a whole structure of mores, customs and laws."
Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci ('The Nude. A study', in Patrick Dalli: The human figure, 2010)
The recent approval of the censorship reform bill is a milestone event in Maltese history which exemplifies important shifts in our understanding of the relationship between art and morality. Many have been lobbying for change since the play Stitching was banned in 2009, and the situation was exacerbated with the publication of the crass literary illustration of local masculine displays of supremacy, told by Alex Vella Gera (Li Tkisser Sewwi). However, these are only two events within an entire history of artistic struggles against moral authority and provincial ways of thinking. The arts in Malta have not only suffered from a lack of freedom, but also the ability to develop skills and techniques which were considered as standard academic practices overseas. Such decisions affected the cultivation of artistic knowledge which had serious repercussions on intellectual and artistic growth. For the purposes of today's article, I will be focusing on the issue of nudity and on the depiction of the human body as a political statement.
Kenneth Clark wrote in 1956 that "the naked human body was the central subject of art" in cultured communities. Today we are aware that all cultures have placed great emphasis on the representation of the human body to express social and religious ideals and values. The human body has always been a site of political action, both to sustain norms and to subvert them. Antiquity presented the notion of the ideal human body, the epitome of beauty, which continues to inspire artists to this day. The Greeks were not concerned with imitation but with searching for perfection. The problem was that academic artists, mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, succumbed to the temptation of mimetic mannerisms which did not question the role of the nude but sustained the authority of the idealised image.
The artists Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet were swiftly ridiculed by the Paris Salon public for daring to challenge the over-exhausted conventional standards of harmonious representation. Manet's provocative Olympia was described as vulgar, immoral and tasteless. The outburst of impassioned criticism was hardly surprising when considering that Manet turned art on its head with his subversion of emblematic portrayals of Venus into a crude, flattened, unsentimental, and empowered picture of a modern Parisian courtesan.
Olympia has now become a venerated symbol of beauty. On the other hand, Courbet's L'Origine du Monde is still causing trouble in the 21st century. The painting was one of the first, if not the first, to test the liminality between art and pornography, without surrendering to the latter. In 2011, this work was censored on Facebook (which has no qualms about permitting the circulation of violent and offensive content). Earlier this year it was finally decided that legal action can be taken against the social media site. Contemporary artworks featuring nudity have also been censored on Facebook (Lisa Levy's The Artist is Humbly Present; Shu Lea Chang's UKI), as well as images showing the female nipple, which instigated harsh criticism of the site in 2016.
As the Facebook cases above has shown, the struggle to liberate the visibility of the human body is a global one. Courbet and Manet were the two artists who catalysed the cult of imperfection. This diametrically opposed the falsity of vapid renderings of beauty which were alienated from the realities of modern life. Since the mid-19th century, the representation of the human body in art has undergone revolutionary developments; from feminist violent bodily interventions, to the nihilist objectives of Viennese Actionism, and the explicit use of bodily fluids to create art.
Returning to the Maltese situation, we are aware that radical and obscene artistic practices have been kept at a safe distance from our shores. The human body has been protected from the scrutiny of the gaze, prohibited from public exposure, and as a result has retained its innocence. So much so that artistic knowledge became the victim of unwarranted fear.
As stated by Schembri Bonaci in the above cited source; "The nude in Malta has always formed part of a prohibitive collective consciousness: a collectively suppressed unconscious feeling that in many instances provoked a violent and all too conscious reaction."
One of the greatest reactions was against the art education system in Malta. As early as 1802, Mgr. Francesco Saverio Caruana established the School of Drawing at the University of Malta. With the help of Caruana, Giorgio Pullicino was able to introduce life drawing session at the School, a first in Maltese history. The classes were later discontinued. It was not until Josef Kalleya set up the short-lived Scuola Libera del Nudo in the 1930s that Maltese art students were able to study the nude human figure. No life drawing classes were offered by the Government School of Art at the time. Kalleya was forced to halt his evening classes due to them upsetting the moral social balance.
Such cases cannot even be categorised as instances of freedom of expression. Art academies required life drawing classes to permit the analysis of human anatomy and to cultivate well-trained artists. The development of Maltese modern art suffered greatly due to this censorship, but still many artists challenged the status quo by proposing new possibilities and roles for the human body and the nude. These are somewhat overlooked, and research still has to delve into the subject of the subversion of gender and sexuality implicit in the works of some Maltese modernists from the mid-20th century on. The implications of these works within a context of religious restraint over bodily freedom require proper study to open up new spheres of knowledge on Malta's leading artists.
Kalleya himself presented the idea of the ungendered universal body achieving eternal salvation, showing the indiscriminate, non-judgemental power of God's love; Antoine Camilleri perennially represented himself naked and emaciated, linking his image to that of Christ. Camilleri's female nudes are intensely erotic, as are Carmelo Mangion's portrayals of empowered immoral women. Other examples include Willie Apap's nudes and sketches of Brazilian women. Caesar Attard tackled the body incisively with his drawings of genitalia.
In more recent years, contemporary artists have successfully transformed the conventional image of the human body, dealing with present-day realities. Gilbert Calleja's photographs are exemplary, as were the exhibitions The Life Model: Between Nude and Naked (curated by Patrick J. Fenech) and Milkshake (curated by Lisa Gwen Baldacchino) which were two collective attempts at lifting the veil of prohibition. The human body has been a subject of analysis in the works of Vince Briffa, Austin Camilleri, Pierre Portelli, Zvezdan Reljic, and others.
Things are changing in Malta. Just a couple of weeks ago, two Greek contemporary dancers (Astarti Athanasiadou & Achilleas Chariskos) gave a performance at Splendid in Strait Street as part of the Strada Stretta Concept events programme, and when the male dancer performed nude, nobody seemed shocked by the occurrence.
Art must discuss subjects such as vulgarity, nudity, pornography, and bodily norms within the wider historical context. These categories cannot be celebrated for their own sake, but must be inextricable from the central concept of the artwork.
There is no doubt that many viewers will resort to discussing the scandalous and controversial aspects of works which deal with such subjects, but art must always task to challenge the status quo without losing sight of artistic merit. The problem is, I believe, that certain 'inappropriate' events are silenced or swept under the carpet. Without dialogue, art and its effects will be forgotten. Research must perpetually investigate and openly debate the socio-political meanings of artworks and exhibitions.