On August 11th I recieved a very bizarre warning from facebook, written in spanish for some reason:  

Hello,

Has cargado una foto que incumple nuestras Condiciones de uso, por lo que ha sido eliminada. En Facebook no están permitidas las fotos que atacan a un individuo o un colectivo, o bien que muestran desnudos, consumo de drogas, violenci a o cualquier otro elemento que incumple nuestras Condiciones de uso. El objetivo de estas políticas es garantizar que Facebook sea un entorno seguro y de confianza para todos los usuarios, incluidos los muchos menores de edad que lo usan.

Si tienes preguntas, visita la siguiente página de preguntas frecuentes: http://www.facebook.com/help/?topic=wphotos

The Facebook Team

It seems once again I have been targeted for censorship by Facebook.  This time it wasn't breastfeeding artwork though, it was a series of nudes I did for my BFA graduating show in 2001.
The Facebook Team

This one was called "Ophelia," and it was a part of a series I called "Liebestod," (literally love-death,) on love and loss.  The subject was a friend of mine who had lost a baby due to prematurity.  The portrait was about grief, loss and longing.  It referenced Sir John Everett Millais' painting of Ophelia, 1852.

Initially I was hesitant about posting these paintings, because I had had some previous problems with Facebook censorship.  I had three breastfeeding mother and child portraits removed from Facebook a total of five times, and a warning sent to me.  Read more on that here.  I didn't feel it was a good time to rock the boat.  However after three months with no difficulty I thought I may as well post my grad show artwork.  They are some of my best work, and I hate the idea of hiding them just because they might offend a minority of people.

I wasn't that surprised when I got my notification and the art was removed.  I thought: "After all these are full nudes, not breastfeeding mothers, and I suppose they could be misinterpreted."  However these nude paintings were still artwork, not pornography, and I think that distinction is important to maintain. 

What I find disturbing about facebook's censorship in general is that they have a lot of power over our lives. I know they are a privately owned site, but it frightens me that they have become the new social medium- on par with the town square or Zocalo, and they are anonymously both aware and in charge of the information we can share. You can't discuss any photo removal with them, they refuse to discuss it. Art that might be fine in any gallery is removed for example, and many people don't even QUESTION it's removal. I find that disturbing too. I am also concerned about the anonymous method of reporting photos. The person who reports a photo takes absolutely no responsibility or consequences for their actions.  I think this results in a kind of "dumbing- down" of our culture in general.

This one is called "Loosing Lily 2," and it's also about losing a baby after childbirth.  It was also removed on August 11th.

The dumbing down process involves removing any material deemed "offensive," a rather obscure definition which seems to mean anything that doesn't fit facebook's standards of mainstream, bland culture.  Material such as women breastfeeding, women giving birth, and gay sexuality are removed, because they do not follow the heterosexual/male culture which we're accustomed to seeing.  Big bosoms in bikinis= fine, woman giving birth = offensive seems to be the formula.  What bothers me about this formula is that we have become so accustomed to seeing everything through this hetero-male lens that we are pretty ready to accept these censorships as "just the way things are," really without questioning their motives.

Artist Leif Harmsen says so eloquantly: "Facebook is worse than useless to you because facebook.com is Facebook's website, not yours. It is not 'your' profile, it is Facebook's profile about you. Those are not your friends, they are at best a Facebook sanitized version of your friends. It took centuries of political evolution to reduce this kind of manipulative abuse from the state - why go backwards to a medieval social structure with you at the bottom? You wouldn't holiday in North Korea, so why would you spend time on Facebook?!"  
(Read my full interview with him here.)

My work was deleted without any idea of the background or meaning behind the work.  My voice was silenced simply because it didn't fit a mainstream of what is acceptable.  Perhaps Leif does have a point- Facebook is a powerful social engine, shallow and vaccuous to the extreme, yet it has a great deal of control over our lives and what information we receive.  Perhaps it's time to take back some of that control. 

On August 16th I received another notice from facebook.  They had removed a portrait I had done of my nude baby boy in the bathtub... obscene?  REALLY??  You decide.

The following art piece by artist Amy Jenkins was censored from a New York art gallery in May 2004.

"The Audrey Samsara" Amy Jenkins, 2004

I was looking up "breastfeeding Artwork" online one evening when I found this photograph.  I looked up her website right away, hoping to find out more about the "Audrey Samsara," which is the title of the artwork.  The actual piece is a video of her baby Audrey nursing, falling asleep, waking to breastfeed and fall asleep again.  It's a meditative and soothing loop, much like the Buddhist cycle of life and death for which it was named.  I also noticed from the website that this artwork had been censored from an exhibition in New York, and I decided to contact the artist.

I spoke to Amy Jenkins on the subject and she told me she was surprised by the reaction to her artwork.  The artist and mother had been asked to do a piece for designer Salvatore Ferragamo to display in their 5th Avenue art gallery.  She was asked to use an item from the store as inspiration, and was granted full artistic license.  Amy fell in love with a little pair of red shoes named "The Audrey," and felt that it was meant to be, since her own eighteen month old baby girl was also named Audrey.

Amy earned her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, but also spent some time in Florance Italy, where she completed a certificate in Fine Arts.  She felt a kind of affinity for the italian background of the famous shoe designer, and agreed to create a piece for the art gallery upstairs.  Her work is mostly photography and video installation; meditative and timeless loops involving  themes of family, childbearing, relationships and discord.  They are often both serene and disturbing; surreal yet familiar. 

 
The video she created for them was a video of her daughter wearing the red shoes, nursed by a dark figure, so that the baby appears almost to float in mid air.  Amy told me that this peice was especially meaningful to her; she called it a "tender record" of her breastfeeding experience, and was shocked by the reaction it incurred.  The image evokes the timeless archetype of the Madonna and Child in a modern context.  It also reflects the classical religious theme of the "Pieta," (a depiction of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Christ.) 

La Pieta- Michaelangelo, 1499

A few hours before the scheduled opening of the show in May 2004, Amy was informed that her work had been removed.  An executive found the artwork to be "distasteful" and refused to exhibit it as planned.  Amy and her family bravely attended the gallery opening, hoping to speak to someone and resolve the issue, but no one would speak to her about it.  They would not explain why it was considered "distasteful," and nothing was done by way of apology.  Amy herself wonders if it has something to do with the fashion aesthetic of the designer store- the fact that the breasts depicted in her work were functional rather than visual.  She wonders if people are so used to seeing breasts used for marketing purposes and that the sight of breastfeeding makes people uneasy. 

I personally also wonder if we as a society are unused to seeing the female nude from a female perspective.  Breastfeeding is very much a feminine experience of the female body; it doesn't involve men or sex, and can be very personal, subjective and intimate.  I would venture to guess that we as a society are unused to seeing the female nude from a female point of view; with a female gaze, if you will.  The female nude as the subject rather than an object is unfamiliar to us visually, and invokes discomfort in the viewer.  Perhaps the public, men and women alike, are used to seeing the female breast as an object of desire, and the breast from the inward, personal perspective of the woman doing the breastfeeding is unusual to us.

Whatever the reason the reaction was the same.  The artist was excluded, her point of view was rejected.  The Audrey Samsara, a beautiful timeless piece, was denied to the public.  As Amy Jenkins said- the flatscreen monitor which was meant to show her work was like "a black hole" in the gallery during the opening.  She went on to have several articles published on her story, she had plenty of public support and found many other suitable venues to share The Audrey Samsara.  I think ultimately it shows that her work is effective.  It obviously created a reaction and made people think and talk about an issue that deserves attention.  What started as a simple, beautiful moment between mother and daughter became something which shocked and also moved and inspired people.  What more can we ask from an artist than that?

Yesterday afternoon I received an interesting tweet from @KimKardashian "EWW Im at lunch,the woman at the table next 2 me is breast feeding her baby w no coverup then puts baby on the table and changes her diaper"

Apparently later she did a follow up tweet saying: "My sister breastfeeds! It's a natural beautiful thing, there's nothing wrong w it, but she covers herself, not w her boobs exposed."  Thank you for the lesson in modesty, dear Kim.  I will be sure to cover myself whenever nursing in public from now on. 

First of all the irony of the statement is obvious- she posed for Playboy!  How could she be so prudish about a little bit of boob exposed in the act of nursing!  It was funny.  And also very very sad.

I find it disturbing how vicious women can be to one another.  When I had an article published in the Toronto Star on the subject of the censorship of my art from Facebook http://www.thestar.com/living/article/794323--are-these-obscene?bn=1  some of the nastiest attacks in the reader comments were from other women; the worst being the following statement: "As a mother of 2, trust me, others are not interested in seeing your bloated breasts from pregnancy. And another newsflash, they ain't gonna last!"

 It's unfortunate for Kim that she made a statement like she did, because she is the classic Glass House that shouldn't throw stones.  It would be so easy to attack her, point out her hypocricy, insult her figure... that is partly why I feel sad about her comments.  Let's instead take a step back and see her as a product of her society. This is precisely what is wrong with society's view of breasts today.  Women are taught to see themselves as sexual objects first, with breastfeeding being a secondary function.  There is a de-humanizing quality to this, as women are detached from their own biology, their relationships to others, their needs and desires, and put in a realm of pure asthetics.  Women are not judged for the content of their character, but merely for the quality of their skin.

It's also unfortunate for the many many young women who follow her tweets.  The breastfeeding statistics for young women are depressing already- something like 20% -30% of young women choose to breastfeed.  Imagine how many more might be affected by this post: "EWWW! ...breastfeeding!" and choose not to give their babies the best start to life.  The diservice this statement has made to the breastfeeding advocacy movement is staggering.