Editorials
EDITORIAL Body politics Is a bullwhip or forearm up a man's rectum or a finger inserted in a penis a legitimate subject for public art? If some say it is, can offended communities still proscribe...
...Last year he urged the Social Democrats to resist the appeal for reunification and work instead for confederation...
...And there is a sentence in the pope's introduction which reveals other, deeper problems that also need sustained attention: "There is only one culture: that of man, by man, and for man...
...Apparently, the jurors agreed the seven sexually explicit images in question, including two of nude children, met the first two criteria...
...the German people, East and West, opted for seamless union, so that on October 3, East Germany, as a political entity, simply vanished...
...In that time, more than seventy-five thousand Salvadorans have died...
...The telling graphic: Maps showing Germany's varied borders in 1871, 1919, 1943, 1945, and now 1990 (New York Times, October 3,1990), are a powerful reminder of its unstable shape and the price Eastern Europe has paid for the expansive moments and that the West has paid in ransom...
...Obscenity does have an effect on the quality of public life, as a quick visit to Times Square will demonstrate...
...Except for an introductory statement by John Paul n, "From the Heart of the Church" closely follows a third draft prepared by an international gathering of university officials who, working together, crafted a document that left room for local needs and yet addressed the essential problem, the Catholic identity of church-related colleges and universities, and focused needed attention on their drift toward an uncritical embrace of secular culture...
...Artists are not always friends of human dignity, and a self-validating-indeed, infallible-"Art" can contribute to the general erosion of the instinct of self-government...
...Congress took half-a-step in October...
...The decision also, some would argue, replaced a coherent local censorship with an essentially incoherent "artistic" prerogative...
...HIGHER LISTENING A sigh of relief is in order...
...Does it mean that by definition Picasso could not be guilty of obscenity...
...Moreover, artists themselves might come to realize that a "sense of measure" in art can only begin in the coherent moral life of a larger community...
...The Salvadoran Human Rights Commission reports that between January and August of this year, the Salvadoran armed forces committed 899 assassinations, 571 arbitrary arrests, and 105 disappearances (Latinamerica Press, September 27...
...These were vigorously criticized by Catholic university officials here and abroad, by the American Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, and by Commonweal ("Loading the Blunderbuss, January 27, 1989), among others...
...the future political and economic power of this new Germany barely crossed the minds of distracted politicians and diplomats...
...If some say it is, can offended communities still proscribe its exhibition...
...It should have gone the whole way...
...But does such skill make everything he photographed art...
...Moreover, the legal definition of obscenity is so difficult to apply as to make almost any punitive action seem capricious...
...Indeed, Mapplethorpe's severe, often anonymous images are reminiscent of the work of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl...
...Where most see a man urinating into another man's mouth, the adepts see symmetry and "formal values...
...In the garden where four of them were shot at close range, eight rose bushes have been planted: Two yellow ones for the women...
...A neat tautology, that...
...The introductory statement written by the pope reflects his immersion in the life of the university as a student, as a teacher and chaplain, and as bishop of Cracow...
...it will certainly be rewritten to reflect the spirit of the passage rather than its letter...
...But the prosecution failed to convince the jurors that the pictures lacked artistic value...
...has provided hundreds of military advisors, conducted the largest counterinsurgency program since Vietnam, and sent more than $4.5 billion in military and economic assistance to El Salvador...
...Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $ 18.95,123 pp...
...One person's art may be another person's vice, but it also may be somebody's pornography industry...
...As an alternative to reunification, Grass supported confederation, a notion he advanced in a 1970 speech (also the title of a recent collection of his essays: Two States-One Nation...
...Reports from both the U.S.-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and the House Speaker's Task Force on El Salvador, chaired by Congressman Joseph Moakley (D-Mass...
...Riefenstahl's hypnotic films Triumph of the Will and Olympiad harnessed a visual genius to the service of an obscene idea...
...ET CETERA OBER ALLES...
...Eric Buckland (U.S...
...Such an absolutist view of individual rights is a threat to self-government as well as human dignity...
...But it was delivered only last month, and only after Congressman Moakley learned of its existence...
...Establishing the immunity of Mapplethorpe's pictures from the collective judgment of the local community is not a cost-free vindication of free expression...
...Either way, it is further evidence of how moral argument is excluded from public discourse...
...Army), reaching the appropriate Salvadoran judicial authorities...
...I'm not an expert," said one juror...
...What if his pictures celebrate violence or racism...
...As art critic Robert Hughes has written (Nothing If Not Critical, Knopf), Mapplethorpe's reputation was greatly inflated during the 1980s, a sign of a "slump in cultural history," and evidence of the art world's loss of any "sense of measure...
...Caveats and questions about the document will be raised, no doubt, when university officials and bishops' conferences around the world sit down to establish local norms...
...Grass worries about how much the Germans may forget...
...Less easily understood is the easy acquiescence of the West, which for decades gave lip service to the idea of unification, but only while it remained a distant and receding goal...
...More important, imposing sensible prohibitions against obscenity requires an appeal to a collective public conscience, the same kind of conscience needed in the battle against environmental pollution or social injustice...
...The long-debated Vatican statement on Catholic higher education has been issued...
...But when Willy Brandt went down on his knees on the spot where the Jewish ghetto had been under German rule, it became clear that the murder of 6 million Jews, planned and carried out by Germans...
...military aid to El Salvador in half...
...the lure of future prosperity (and, with it, power) overshadowed the memory of what prosperity and power had brought the nation in the past...
...This appeal, especially when directed to displaced Prussians, Pomeranians, and Silesians whose homes now lie in Polish territory, seemed only a political tease nourishing a dangerous nostalgia...
...ROSES IN NOVEMBER November 16 will mark the passing of a year since U.S.-trained soldiers, members of the Salvadoran Army's Atlacatl Battalion, brutally executed Elba and Celina Ramos and six Jesuits at the Jos6 Simedn Caflas University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador...
...It is one thing to protect an artist's freedom of expression, but it is very much something else to hold any hope of a larger common life hostage to such expression...
...he might also worry about how much the rest of the world seems barely able to remember...
...For more than ten months the U.S...
...This additional information might have led the investigation far up the Salvadoran chain of command...
...If so, is the autonomy and moral life of a community helpless before an artist's superior craftsmanship...
...But in El Salvador, the desecration continues with the blessing of U.S...
...In many respects the final document is a good deal better than the first two drafts augured, and the collegial process that produced it a good deal more effective and careful than the in-house drafting done prepared by the Congregation on Higher Education...
...rather, it registered exasperation with the stalled investigation into the murder of the Jesuits, their cook, and her daughter...
...Ironically, as Alexander Bickel noted, modern obscenity law imposes one national standard of permissiveness where a real pluralism of values had existed...
...The corrective political analysis: "You don't mean unification, you mean the annexation" (a young German student on being queried about the events of October 3...
...The Salvadoran military has knowingly presented the wrong witnesses to the judge investigating the case, has destroyed crucial documents, and has stifled all investigation of the high command...
...They are tended with special care by the university's gatekeeper-Elba's husband, Celina's father...
...State Department has deliberately stalled the investigation...
...In the event, of course, history took a different path...
...Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani waited eight months to admit that he personally authorized the search of the Jesuits' residence two days before their assassination, and ten months to admit that he was at the military high command at the exact time the murder operation was in progress at the UCA...
...The sources of that decay were evident in the Cincinnati trial...
...As a former citizen of Danzig (now Gdansk), Grass understood that nostalgia, "I, too, took the loss hard, time and again I had to remind myself of the reasons for it: German arrogance and disdain for human beings...
...But if democratic choice is important, why shouldn't New York and Cincinnati differ on what is an acceptable public use of the human body...
...Other expert opinion was tortuously euphemistic in its critical vocabulary, employing a rhetoric that reduced pictures of human bodies and human acts to aesthetic abstractions...
...In granting such art a public place we must keep ultimate public aims, not just personal means, in mind...
...Offered little contradictory testimony, the jurors felt compelled to defer to the opinion of the specialists when judging the moral implications of the photographs...
...Embassy in San Salvador prevented further testimony from Maj...
...Mapplethorpe rather reversed the process, glamorizing images of human degradation and challenging the fair-minded viewer to object...
...Since 1979, the U.S...
...If it's in an art museum, it is intended to be art, and that's why it's there," said one...
...funds...
...Rather than buy-outs, he wanted aid without strings to ease the economic burden crushing the and allow the East Germans to shape an autonomous and perhaps social democratic state in confederation with the existing social market state of West Germany...
...How do we logically distinguish between the sick but sincere child pornographer and Mapplethorpe...
...That is hardly surprising...
...Inevitably, First Amendment safeguards make obscenity decisions ambiguous...
...policy...
...His original revelations led to uncovering the involvement of Salvadoran officers in the murders at the UCA...
...Self-government demands we guard against the temptation to substitute mere technical expertise for moral and personal responsibility...
...detail that obstruction from a variety of quarters...
...I don't understand Picasso's art...
...Over the Bush administration's objections, the Congress voted in October to cut U.S...
...There is a deep sense of appreciation for the university, its way of life, and its singular contribution to the church...
...in the U.S...
...And, most important, the dissenting voice: Novelist Giinter Grass has long criticized what he considered the chauvinist appeal of West German politicians calling for a reunited Germany...
...But the vote did not effect a basic change in U.S...
...That loss of meaning, Hughes maintains, mirrored "the extraordinary decay of American public life...
...This demonstrates an admirable open-mindedness, or gullibility, depending on your view...
...His words reflect a positive and affectionate understanding that many Catholics long to see in other Vatican documents...
...Lincoln said it better...
...Warren R. Carlin writes in this issue ("Holy Ground," page 635) that some gardens are consecrated with the blood of martyrs...
...Then, as now, it hinges primarily on reform of the Salvadoran military, which we train, supply, and maintain...
...Congress did well to do so...
...Who's competent to judge such questions...
...A passage that requires a quota of 50 percent Catholics on a faculty will be impossible to meet in some countries...
...Yet the de facto approval of two Germanys as a permanent fixture on the European scene has collapsed without a second thought...
...six red ones for the men...
...Mapplethorpe's photographs undoubtedly demonstrate an impressive technical mastery...
...But I assume the people who call it art know what they're talking about...
...Legally, the case to be proven by the state had to meet the three-part Supreme Court test: the pictures had to appeal to prurient interests, depict sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and lack serious artistic value...
...Many attributed the verdict to the prosecution's failure to contest the testimony of defense "experts," mostly museum curators, who professed to the artistic value of Mapplethorpe's work...
...Still, Cincinnati's concern over the photographs was not, as many have suggested, the reaction of culturally retarded yahoos...
...He accompanied then Chancellor Willy Brandt to Warsaw in December 1970 for the final signing of the German-Polish treaty, settling their borders at the Oder-Niesse line...
...He argued that the East German's courageous struggle for freedom, "chipping away without violence at the bastions of a hated system," marked a new and positive element in German history...
...The U.S...
...When we boarded the plane to Warsaw it was not with glad anticipation but with feet of lead...
...Today, as in 1979, the only hope for peace is a negotiated settlement...
...could not be rectified, and our loss of a homeland seemed insignificant...
...After all, is the question of obscenity really so esoteric that authority must rest with a self-serving elite...
...That does not mean, however, that no public purpose is served by a debate over community standards...
...The vindication of forty-five years of cold-war policy, the great celebration before the Brandenburg Gate, the unification of Germany on October 3 were hedged about with some degree of uneasiness that included: The nervous joke: "Most non-Germans may understandably feel that where they put their capital is something for Germans to decide for themselves-provided they don't try to put it in Poland" (Michael Kinsley, New Republic, October 15...
...Censorship has a high cost, and any case made in its favor must be absolutely compelling...
...Given the entirely voluntary decision made by those who chose to view Mapplethorpe's work, Cincinnati's efforts to ban the exhibit seem misplaced...
...When a Cincinnati jury last month acquitted the local museum curator of obscenity charges in exhibiting New York photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial work, the verdict hardly resolved these issues...
...The health of democratic culture and politics, which are the sources of individual rights, depends on a citizenry encouraged to bring moral values to bear on social questions...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 19
