More Obscenities

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.

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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.