Merrell Publishers, New York and London, 2021. 248 pages. 56 illustrations. $35.00
Reviewed by James Leggio
A generation has passed since the Sensation controversy engulfed the Brooklyn Museum for six long months in 1999-2000.
For those whose memories may not go back that far, the words forming the subtitle of Arnold Lehman’s new book succinctly convey the overall course of events:
The Madonna. In the fall of 1999, as the Brooklyn Museum’s director, Lehman brought to the museum an exhibition previously organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, shown in London in 1997 and Berlin in 1998, titled Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. Among works by forty-two artists, the show included the painting The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili, who had incorporated elephant dung among its materials, shaping the Virgin Mary’s exposed breast from dung, decorated with beads, and standing the entire painting on two further lumps of dung, the one on the left featuring map pins spelling out “Virgin” and the one on the right, “Mary.” The Virgin was accompanied by small magazine cutouts of female genitalia, collaged to the painting’s glittering ground to suggest putti.
The Mayor. In London, a number of other works in the show had aroused protest, among them Damien Hirst’s displays of animal corpses suspended in formaldehyde tanks; a large portrait by Marcus Harvey of serial child-murderer Myra Hindley, whose image was formed by child-size handprints; and Jake & Dino Chapman’s fiberglass sculpture featuring conjoined, mutant children with erect phalluses for noses and anuses for mouths. But in New York, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani focused instead primarily on The Holy Virgin Mary, in part because of blatantly false reports that the dung had been “flung” or “spattered” on the painting, rather than confined to three tidy lumps. The mayor attempted to terminate the museum’s city funding because, he said, “You don’t have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else’s religion . . . and, therefore we will do everything that we can to remove funding for the Brooklyn Museum until the director comes to his senses,” threatening as well to oust the director and board of trustees and/or close the museum.
The Media. The controversy metastasized through a frenzy of press attention, and only grew fiercer when reporters added accusations of financial impropriety to those of religious offense, when it became known that Charles Saatchi helped fund the show. (As Lehman notes, “. . . it is important to remember that most of the controversy was carried on in print — the internet and all-day cable news channels were still young. People read newspapers.”)
The First Amendment. In court, the museum defended the show on First Amendment grounds and, ultimately, triumphed in an agreement acknowledging its rights and protecting it from mayoral retaliation. The agreement was signed on March 27, 2000.
Previous Accounts of the Controversy
Before addressing Arnold Lehman’s book directly, I’d like to put it in the context of some previous accounts, in book form, of the Sensation controversy.
The collection of essays Unsettling “Sensation”: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy (Rutgers University Press, 2001) grew out of a conference at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago somewhat provocatively titled “Taking Funds, Giving Offense, Making Money” (and less heatedly subtitled “The Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and the Dilemmas of Arts Policy”), held on February 12, 2000 — while the case was still in the New York courts. Lehman recounts that he decided not to attend the conference because he found its title deeply offensive, though he later regretted not going there to make his case in person.
Some of the essays in the Rutgers book can be faulted as a bit underdeveloped, since they were taking aim at a target still in motion at that time, and their nascent “Arts-Policy Lessons” about the exhibition’s public and private funding issues remained unsettled. I wish the organizers, in turning their conference into a book, had taken perhaps an additional year to thoroughly reexamine the wide-ranging issues and events addressed, and rethink the scope and nature of their project, with further contributions and a more cogent editorial plan. Perhaps they could thereby have produced the definitive history of the Sensation controversy, and its lessons, that the art world, the press, and the general public deserved to have on the permanent record.
Nonetheless, the Rutgers anthology does include a number of fine contributions of continuing value. “Offending Images” by W.J.T. Mitchell stands out, at least in part because Mitchell talks about the complex and contradictory ways in which images can give offense, rather than focusing exclusively on issues of funding. For example, he writes of the individual who vandalized (see illustration) The Holy Virgin Mary late in the run of Sensation:
. . . the defacement of the [Ofili] painting by Dennis Heiner took a specific form that is worth pondering in its details. Heiner did not attack the painting, slashing it with a knife or throwing eggs or excrement at it. He carefully and deliberately covered Ofili’s composition with white paint. Instead of violent defacement or destruction, Heiner chose a strategy that might be called “veiling” or “effacement” of the image, a gesture of protection and modesty. Heiner’s act was (from his point of view) a defense of the sacred image of the Madonna against its sacrilegious defacement by this painting.
Still, Heiner had also committed a flagrant act of racial suppression: in covering the surface of the work with white paint, he thereby “whitewashed” the depicted skin color of a Black Madonna, painted by a Black artist. Mitchell must thread his way through this unsettling complication.
I’ll return to Mitchell’s essay in due course.
•
Another thought-provoking early account from a museological perspective is Steven C. Dubin’s Displays of Power (NYU Press, 1st ed. 1999), in a subsequent, expanded edition with a new subtitle — Controversy in the American Museum from the “Enola Gay” to “Sensation”— and a new Afterword devoted to the Sensation fracas, a story that broke barely three months after his book first appeared.
In the new Afterword, Dubin puts his finger on a key aspect of the controversy:
Had campaigning politicians, zealous religious leaders, and self-appointed moral crusaders learned nothing from the cultural struggles of the past decade, especially in New York City, the self-proclaimed “cultural capital of the world”? . . . But this controversy represents more than just new wine in old bottles. It enlarges our understanding of the pivotal role of the media in shaping and sustaining these battles.
Like the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Sensation controversy was largely sustained by hyperventilating media coverage. Lehman takes up that theme at length, and indeed points to “The Media” in his own book’s subtitle.
Shortly after speaking about “zealous religious leaders,” in an endearing touch Dubin draws a comparison between Rudolph Giuliani and the famously censorious Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498), who consigned Florentine cultural objects he didn’t approve of to the “bonfire of vanities.” (Savonarola was eventually himself burned).
Getting down to the specifics of the Virgin Mary’s dung-breast in the Ofili painting, the feature most vulnerable to misinterpretation by some religious leaders, Dubin reports an interview with Lehman (conducted on April 10, 2000):
Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, offers an anecdote that underscores the folly of privileging your own cultural perspective over others. He recounts that a group of nuns from a nursing order based in Malawi contacted the museum after Sensation had opened. The uproar over Chris Ofili’s painting had reached as far away as Africa, but the sisters were perplexed: they customarily use a poultice incorporating dung to treat women suffering from inflammation of their breasts after childbirth. The poultice takes down the swelling and allows those women to successfully breast-feed — only then does the milk flow. In their experience, dung has revitalizing powers that bolster the image of the Madonna. It corroborates rather than derides the image of women as the source and preserver of life.
In his own book, two decades later, Lehman seems more circumspect about the benefits of a dung poultice in a therapeutic setting (the word poultice and the place-name Malawi do not appear in his text). He now emphasizes the artistic, rather than medicinal, associations of dung.
•
It’s a measure of Sensation’s broad cultural implications that one of the finest early accounts was written by a sociologist. David Halle’s “The Controversy over the Show Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum, 1999-2000” appears as chapter 5 of the anthology Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life (The New Press, 2001), sponsored by the Center for Arts and Culture and the Henry Luce Foundation. The UCLA LeRoy Neiman Center was asked to study the show, and the Brooklyn Museum cooperated by adding its own data.
Halle offers a succinct narrative of the controversy as a whole, as well as an incisive overview of the main issues in play. But his study is most notable for examining this often-overheated controversy with the dispassionate eye of statistical analysis. The heart of the chapter is a detailed parsing of the results of an “exit poll” conducted as visitors came out of the exhibition and were asked if they’d agree to be interviewed; 85 percent said yes.
Among the surprising results: The Holy Virgin Mary was one of the works found the least likely to offend; 81.2 percent said it was “not at all offensive.” The word visitors most often used to describe it was “beautiful.” Less surprisingly, the Chapman brothers’ works were found among the most likely to offend; the words “disgusting” and “pornographic” were used.
Looking at the show overall, one visitor characterized it as “Excellent and very important. A little too pretty.”
The interview responses are broken out in the form of easy-to-read charts. In the stats, the breakdown of visitor responses by political affiliation, religious preference, race, age, sex, and place of residence, as well as attitude toward public funding of arts institutions, yields a fact-based reality check often sorely missing on this subject, and contrary to what one might have imagined from the press coverage. For example, 63.6 percent of Republican visitors liked the show; one wonders what they thought of their Republican mayor.
No history of Sensation can ignore this groundbreaking study, and indeed Lehman cites it as part of the continuing legacy of serious, healthy debate surrounding the show.
•
From a legal standpoint, the most tightly argued account of Sensation comes from Floyd Abrams, the celebrated attorney who represented the Brooklyn Museum in court in this matter. His memoir, Speaking Freely: Trials of the First Amendment (Viking, 2005), includes the substantial chapter “The Brooklyn Museum Case.” There he provides lengthy extracts from the courtroom transcript demonstrating how incredulously received were many of the city’s legal arguments.
In assessing the array of free-speech cases brought against the mayor, he writes:
So often was it necessary for the courts to step in to restrain the Giuliani administration from violating the First Amendment that Professor Amy Adler of New York University Law School observed that “it seems as if I could teach a First Amendment course just on Mayor Giuliani.”
His conclusion is damning:
Of all the conduct of Mayor Giuliani personally and that of his administration that violated the First Amendment, no action was more notorious than his conflict with the Brooklyn Museum, and none resulted in so personally humiliating a defeat for Giuliani.
•
Don Thompson’s illuminating study, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) adds much to our understanding of the mechanisms by which collectors can help support value-enhancing museum exhibitions of the works they own. While not specifically addressing the Brooklyn matter, Thompson does take a famous Damian Hirst work in the show, and the example of Charles Saatchi, to explain the elaborate process of cross-branding by which an exhibition can come to be financed — a delicate dance among a brand artist, a brand dealer or collector, and a brand museum. These self-interested transactions are understood to be business as usual.
Though Thompson’s exposition for the general reader did not appear until 2008, labyrinthine mutual arrangements were common knowledge and accepted practice within the art world at the time of Sensation. If newspaper reporters had educated themselves more energetically about precisely how museums, dealers, collectors, and auction houses conducted their business affairs, much false fire and public injury to reputations could have been avoided.
•
In his 2002 book, Leadership (written with Ken Kurson), Rudolph Giuliani put his own reflections on the record, in the course of giving advice on how to demonstrate exemplary leadership. He was writing in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when his sense of pugnacious determination served him well as a rallying point for New York City, and his public reputation and professional standing soared. A blurb from the New York Times on the back cover of Leadership calls it “A testimony to heroism from someone who has first-hand knowledge of what it takes.” But even at the height of his acclaim, he could not resist citing his own aggression against the Brooklyn Museum as a case study in courageous leadership, devoting a paragraph to it in the chapter called “Be Your Own Man,” blandly restating the same legal arguments that had already been soundly trounced in the courtroom, and speaking as if they still had some kind of standing.
As Floyd Abrams writes, “I still believe that Giuliani knew perfectly well that First Amendment law made his conduct lawless. About that, I think, he simply didn’t care.”
The observation “he simply didn’t care” that his conduct was lawless now seems prophetic. Giuliani’s second term in office ended on January 1, 2002. In recent years, it’s been unnerving to watch him in action as personal attorney to former president Donald J. Trump, as Giuliani went to Ukraine for obscure purposes, helped spread the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was somehow illegitimate (though the actual legal challenges were laughed out of court), and addressed a crowd on January 6, 2021, loudly proclaiming “Let’s have trial by combat!” the day the Capitol was attacked.
In light of Giuliani’s return in the Trump years to politics as combat, urging public behavior far more dangerous than his lawless actions against the Brooklyn Museum, the unintentionally ironic title of his Leadership book begins to invite comparison to Wess Roberts’s 1985 best-seller, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun.
Arnold Lehman’s Account
Now, twenty-two years after Mayor Giuliani threatened to close the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold Lehman has written an engaging new memoir of the Sensation controversy.
The book may seem somewhat unexpected in format. Rather than, say, devoting chapters to the broader themes involved — transgressive art, censorship, funding protocols, guidelines for exhibiting private collections, the role of museums as civic institutions, and so on — he has given us instead a very personal account. It is, in essence, a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, chronicle of how this existential crisis in the life of the museum unfolded, and what it was like for him, as an individual, to be in the hottest seat throughout this six-month firestorm. It’s also deeply researched; the author has clearly spent an enormous amount of time in the archives since retiring from the Brooklyn Museum in 2015.
His solid research does not prevent him from beginning with a flourish of hyperbole:
We were not prepared for what was to happen. No one could have anticipated that SENSATION at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 would become the biggest art story in the history of art history.
He endows the exhibition with a further touch of grandeur by always typing its title in all capital letters, though the text of the accompanying Royal Academy catalogue does not. In Brooklyn, the show’s name begins to look more like a logo than a title.
The author’s chronicle also offers a number of enlivening vignettes of the kind that historian Barbara Tuchman recommended as “corroborative detail.” For example, Lehman writes of the first major court hearing in the case:
Opposite the museum’s counsel table was the one for the city. The contrast between the ten or so lawyers at that table and just Floyd [Abrams] and Susan [Buckley] at ours seemed to underscore the David and Goliath character of this battle. However, I knew that Floyd had his slingshot with him.
For the most part, though, Lehman’s is a strictly factual accounting. He tells his story chiefly by scrupulously examining a massive corpus of documentation, quoting and analyzing each and every one of the press stories and mayoral utterances as they came out, along with many revealing private communications, weaving them into a dense narrative of precisely who said what, who did what, to whom, when, and why. Though his appetite for exhaustive detail — or what Elaine Benes once called “excruciating minutiae” — may sometimes exceed the reader’s, in truth there’s a lot of actual new information here that even the museum’s lively grapevine back then had not tapped. And in a way, that’s the point: who knew how much turmoil was going on? Now, we do. Lehman gives us the raw, agitated stress of the Situation Room over the course of months. It would make an exciting HBO series.
I thought I already knew the Sensation story. I had joined the Brooklyn Museum as head of publications and editorial services in May 1998 (a position I held until August 2018). All of us on staff lived through these events knowing that our jobs, and professional reputations, were on the line. Many pages of this book made me cringe with old, remembered angst — especially when unforgettable newspaper headlines were put in front of my eyes once again.
Ingeniously, Lehman allows “The Media” to be hoist with its own petard. That is, the titles of a number of his chapters reproduce, word-for-word, certain over-the-top tabloid headlines from the height of the controversy, allowing the most hectoring members of the press to speak for themselves in all their excess. Some memorable examples of headlines as chapter titles come from the New York Post, including its advice BETTER UPDATE THAT RESUMÉ, ARNOLD. Most egregiously, its front-page banner headline, above a large photograph of the Ofili painting being vandalized, cheered the vandal on with DUNG HO! (while also including a self-congratulatory “POST PHOTO EXCLUSIVE”).
In addition, a great many more headlines, with their newspaper attributions, appear in the margins throughout the book as a kind of running commentary, their texts reset in a uniform style within little boxes, placed adjacent to where Lehman discusses each article. In this long and, it must be admitted, fiendishly entertaining succession of headline boxes, we get the full range of stories, from the New York Daily News, with its B’KLN GALLERY OF HORROR — GRUESOME MUSEUM SHOW STIRS CONTROVERSY; to Newsday, with CITY MOVING TO EVICT MUSEUM; to the New York Times, with BROOKLYN MUSEUM ACCUSED OF TRYING TO SPUR ART VALUE — LATEST MOVE BY CITY HALL. As the pages go by, we can track via the boxes the changing tenor of the media conversation, from the shock and awe of the early days, to a gradual awakening of First Amendment awareness, to a grudging respect for the museum’s refusal to knuckle under.
•
Beyond his meticulous reconstruction of the press coverage, Lehman recounts a number of individual interviews he granted to reporters. He would come to rue one of them in particular, because on that occasion he let slip a fib, in an interview with David Barstow of the New York Times, about having seen the show in London when in fact he had not.
We agreed to meet at the Carnegie Deli on 7th Avenue. It was really noisy with “early-bird” dinner customers. However, there was one redeeming aspect to the Carnegie, and it wasn’t the great pastrami sandwiches that, as a New Yorker, I loved. No one there would have any idea who either of us were!
During the interview, among a myriad of questions, all with a very unexpectedly pointed tone, David [Barstow] asked me how I had made the decision to present SENSATION at Brooklyn. As I had with reporters who had worked on earlier articles on the preview, I responded with the same information that I had repeated previously, a fact that would haunt me and my relationship with David later in the crisis. I told David that I had seen the show in London, marveled at the size and diversity of the crowds lined up for blocks to see the exhibition, and wanted to see if we could achieve something similar in Brooklyn. In truth, I had, indeed, seen and marveled at the crowds lined up to see SENSATION as they spilled out onto Piccadilly when I was in London in mid-September 1997, now as the new director of the Brooklyn Museum. I often stayed at a hotel across Piccadilly and walked by the RA numerous times. However, I had only seen the catalogue of the exhibition, and not the exhibition itself.
(The museum’s Exhibition Archives web page devoted to Sensation, frozen in time, still quotes him as saying, “From my first visit to this extraordinary exhibition in London, it has been a goal to make this material available to our audiences in New York.”)
This momentary carelessness with the finer subtleties of the truth soured his relationship with Barstow, who became one of the museum’s foremost critics. What Lehman didn’t expect in that supposedly casual interview, amid the friendly aroma of pastrami at the Carnegie Deli, was to be closely interrogated, point-by-point, as if giving a legal deposition. As they used to say in a Monty Python sketch, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”
When he first perused the Sensation catalogue, Lehman points out, he realized that “I knew many of the works and almost all of the artists in the exhibition.” Ultimately, then, how much did it matter whether this lifelong aficionado of contemporary art had seen work by almost all the ascendent Young British Artists at various other times and places, instead of in Sensation at the Royal Academy?
As if this blip weren’t troublesome enough, there was another unfortunate episode with flawed information given to the press, later on: the denial (soon abandoned) of Saatchi’s role as a funder of the show. In the author’s account, his own words run into Barstow’s paraphrase of them:
In his October 31 article, Barstow had stated that “While officials at the BMA made Christie’s involvement public, they tried to conceal Mr. Saatchi’s financial support, documents show.”. . . “In Thursday’s interview, Mr. Lehman said that museum officials had concealed Mr. Saatchi’s involvement not out of embarrassment or deceit but simply to honor Mr. Saatchi’s wish to remain an anonymous donor.”
The collector’s wishes greatly complicated this and many other matters for the museum, leading it in this instance to stray into the uncharted semantic territory lying between an “anonymous” donor and a “concealed” one. In retrospect, clearly it wasn’t worth equivocating about the fact that Saatchi, as wealthy mega-collectors sometimes do, paid part of the daunting costs of exhibiting works he owned, some of which in this case required hazmat handling. The museum paid a price for trying to be too discreet about a major, unpredictable funder.
Again, the air would have gone out of that funding story more quickly if reporters had shown a little more alacrity in educating themselves about art world business practices.
But arrangements between collectors and museums were too unfamiliar for some of the press to grasp in the first, breathless newspaper stories, especially those written by investigative reporters who had been taught since Watergate to “Follow the money.”
“Be Warned”
At one point, because his chronicle primarily concerns the behavior of politicians, lawyers, civic leaders, and reporters, Lehman apologizes for not saying more about the works of art in the show.
He does, however, have something unusual to say about the cover design of the Sensation exhibition’s catalogue. The cover is not a work of art from the show, problematic to choose in a group exhibition, but rather two photographs by Rocco Redondo and Photodisc, in a graphic design by Why Not Associates.
The design depicted the rounded end of a very soft and fleshy pink tongue making contact with the sharp metal tip of what I imagined to be a very hot electric iron. That image released a deeply embedded and terrible memory of an important lesson for me. As a four- or five-year-old child I had once expressed my gratitude for the good things that popped out of an electric toaster by kissing it. The memory of my burnt and blistered lips is perhaps allegorically appropriate to my pursuit of SENSATION!
Given Lehman’s vivid recounting of a childhood trauma, the “deeply embedded, terrible memory” triggered by the catalogue’s cover, it’s noteworthy that as director he went out of his way to issue a warning to exhibition visitors about the danger of trauma for them, too — the unwise Sensation “Health Warning” advertisement (see illustration). It’s reproduced full-page facing his Prologue.
The WSJ printed the museum’s proposed copy for an ad campaign I had written earlier that summer. Our “tongue in cheek” campaign warned: “The contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria, and anxiety. If you suffer from high blood pressure, a nervous disorder, or palpitations, you should consult your doctor before viewing this exhibition.” Meant to be humorous in its hyperbole, after the first few media criticisms I regretted issuing it and pulled the campaign almost before it had started. Nevertheless, the “health warning” was repeated over and over again in the press and on shopping bags sold for a brief time in the museum shop or on airline vomit bags printed by the Catholic League in opposition to the exhibition.
The telling words here are “an ad campaign I had written.” The director affirms that he wrote the ad copy himself, when the museum had full-time publicists on staff. The people I knew at the time were flummoxed by the words he chose. Shortly before the “Health Warning” was published, a colleague rushed into my office anxiously waving a preliminary proof, concerned that the ad risked turning Sensation into a “freak show.”
Despite in-house pushback, Lehman’s clinical language of trauma — “shock, vomiting, confusion, panic” — persisted when the ad went public. Once the printed ad created that indelible first impression, no amount of more adroitly worded museum publicity could entirely efface its memory.
Though the ad itself was soon pulled, its ethos remained. The huge sign on Eastern Parkway in front of the museum advised, in type as large as the title of the exhibition, BE WARNED.
The Holy Virgin Mary and Brooklyn’s African Collection
As the controversy evolved, Lehman, as a museum professional, moved to broaden the debate by relating The Holy Virgin Mary to important objects in the museum’s own collection.
The museum’s collection of early Italian paintings, with numerous depictions of the Madonna, clearly brought a contextual richness to how visitors could understand Chris Ofili’s work, showing the European preconceptions to which Ofili, with his African heritage, was offering an alternative. This Madonna of Humility, for example, shows the kind of gold ground that presumably inspired the shimmering background surface of Ofili’s piece.
The volatile encounter between this European tradition, on the one hand, and, on the other, the “organic materials” visible in the Ofili, and in the museum’s African collection, is what drove the controversy over The Holy Virgin Mary.
It therefore became the museum’s responsibility, grounded in its role as an educational institution, to argue its case not only in court, but within the discipline of art history. In this ongoing effort, Lehman received a crucial assist from the work of the museum’s then-curator of African art, William Siegmann, as discussed in two issues of African Arts (to be quoted below).
Speaking about an article by New York Daily News columnist Michael Daly, Lehman rather proudly notes:
Daly offered a brief history of the Brooklyn Museum’s leadership in regard to African art. In 1923 it was the first museum in America to exhibit African art as art and not ethnography, and in 1954 it was the first to apply the word “masterpiece” to African works. Daly, after speaking with the late Bill Siegmann, then the museum’s scholarly curator of African art, suggested that had the Giuliani family not moved to the suburbs just at that time, Rudy could have visited Brooklyn’s astounding collection of African art with his school, as almost all Brooklyn schoolchildren do, and learned about all the materials used in making that art like “porcupine quills, wood, metal, honey, mud and, yes, dung.” Siegmann had told the columnist that “We’ve discreetly called it ‘organic materials.’”
The charged link between Sensation and the museum’s African collection was immediately apparent to Donald J. Cosentino when he visited the show. As he wrote shortly afterward in his article “Hip-Hop Assemblage: The Chris Ofili Affair” in the spring 2000 issue of African Arts:
Ironically, evidence which might have quashed much of this H-AfrArts debate [about the uses and meaning of dung] exists just downstairs from the “Sensation” exhibition, in the African gallery of the Brooklyn Museum. Anyone who cared to look might have noticed the handsome boli at the gallery entrance and read the label:
“Boli: Wood core overmodeled with materials such as mud, blood, urine . . . cow dung. In many traditional sub-Saharan societies, bodily fluids and excrement are regarded as extremely potent; because of their inherent powers, these materials may be incorporated into sculptural objects to augment the objects’ spiritual powers as well as give them visual impact. A boli concentrates these powers into a single focal point. Because of this concentration of power, the boli is used to maintain order in society, serving as judge, tribunal and executioner all in one.”
And very near the boli, the same visitor might have found a Komo mask: “[Made to] harness the power (nyama) contained in the mask . . . constructed in secret, [made of] blood, chewed and expectorated kola nuts, millet beer,” and something else which, from its surface texture, looked very much like the encrusted dung on boli. I would not argue that Ofili somehow extends or even incorporates these African models, but they do exist as part of the cultural milieu in which he and all other Pan-African artists imagine and create their works. These objects also remind us of qualities which should be kept in mind when considering the metaphoric value of dung.
The labels Cosentino quotes, highly informative for the Sensation viewer as well as the collection visitor, were prepared by Siegmann for his reinstallation of the African galleries in March 1995.
The quality of those exhibition labels had been recognized in the professional press for some time.
A dual review by Marie-Thérèse Brincard, in the summer 1997 issue of African Arts, of Brooklyn’s 1995 reinstallation and one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1996, though not enamored of Brooklyn’s gallery design, had high praise for Siegmann’s labels and text panels — features not often scrutinized in exhibition reviews. Brincard was especially impressed by “the attention given to the supporting educational materials, representing a rare collaboration between a curator and an education department,” and went on:
First, the excellent panel at the entrance introduces the visitor to the arts of Africa and underlines the focus and origin of the permanent collection. Second, the clear and concise labels not only contextualize the objects but echo some of the themes addressed in the gallery guides; labels and guides complement one another. An elegant and simple map accompanying each label orients the visitor quickly; within an outline of the continent, an arrow points to the cultural group represented. Finally, the free gallery guides address the themes of “Art and Leadership,” “Ancestors and Art,” and “Masks,” the major sculptural form found in Africa. . . .
Brooklyn’s significant new contribution lies in the collaboration between the curator and the Education Department, a collaboration visible in the language, the choice of information, and the graphics of the didactic materials. No such collaboration is apparent at the Metropolitan, whose interpretive material, while abundant, distracts the viewer from the object.
The strength of this truly collaborative interpretive program is what led Donald Cosentino to quote the labels and text panels at a key point in his African Arts article on Ofili, to show how beneficially the museum’s collection informed Sensation. Thanks in part to exemplary staff work on a collection reinstallation from four years earlier, the museum’s case was now being advanced by the art history community as well.
We may think of joint interdepartmental ventures between curators and educators as a relatively recent development in museum practice, but Siegmann and his colleagues were already working this way more than a quarter of a century ago.
The Play of the Unmentionable
The interpretive work in the 1995 African gallery reinstallation leads me to pursue that era at the museum a bit more. Let me conclude my remarks by going back just a little further into the period at the Brooklyn Museum before Arnold Lehman’s directorship began in 1997.
Lehman makes it clear that among his top priorities in bringing Sensation to Brooklyn was to make a statement about how the museum was changing under his leadership — about how, as he bluntly puts it, “I had shaken the dust off the museum.”
Still, was the pre-Lehman museum really so dusty?
Answering that question takes us again to W.J.T. Mitchell’s article “Offending Images” in the Unsettling “Sensation” volume. In his closing, Mitchell made a modest proposal:
I conclude, therefore, with a proposal for a blockbuster exhibition called “Offending Images,” one that would gather all the most egregious offenders into one place. . . . It might aim at tracing the long history of offending images across many cultural boundaries. . . . It would explore the very nature of offensiveness.
In daring to propose a blockbuster exhibition of “offending images across many cultural boundaries,” what Mitchell overlooked, however, was the fact that the Brooklyn Museum had already created precisely such an exhibition, back in 1990, seven years before Lehman became its director.
The show was called The Brooklyn Museum Collection: The Play of the Unmentionable. When the companion book came out later on (published after the fact, so as to include numerous installation photographs), the title was adjusted to The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum.
In her Introduction to the companion book, then-curator of contemporary art Charlotta Kotik, who was in charge of the museum’s Grand Lobby installation series, describes the genesis of the show:
When [Conceptual artist Joseph] Kosuth outlined his idea for an installation with the theme of the censorship of art as exemplified in various cultures and ages, curators from The Brooklyn Museum’s departments of African, Oceanic, and New World Art, American Painting and Sculpture, Asian Art, Decorative Arts, Egyptian, Classical, and Middle Eastern Art, European Painting and Sculpture, and Prints and Drawings began a series of meetings to discuss the feasibility of the proposal. . . . the urgency of the main theme — the defense of creative freedom — prevailed, and the curators devoted countless hours to sifting through their records to identify works that were once considered controversial to the powers that be.
The Play of the Unmentionable became one of the museum’s great successes in the effort to address contemporary issues via the permanent collection. Few museums are able to create such a comprehensive presentation exclusively from their own holdings. Many exhibition visitors, myself included, were unaware that the Brooklyn Museum contained so many challenging objects that might have given offense over the centuries: from Ptolemaic Egyptian sculptural groups of intertwined copulating figures to Larry Clark’s quasipornographic photographs of naked, cavorting teens; from racist porcelain figurines made in England in the eighteenth century to Andres Serrano’s Caged Meat; from such high-art surprises as an unexpectedly explicit Henri Matisse etching on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Afternoon of a Faun to a Mughal watercolor of inebriated ascetics; and much more — all arrayed in the museum’s capacious Grand Lobby, where you could step back and take in the whole historical sweep, and then close in on individual works.
Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times:
It is a remarkable show, rich, accessible and rewarding, and it tackles issues that are both imminently topical and as old as time. It has happened because the artist, realizing that his installation would be paid for in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, as all the museum’s lobby projects are, decided to address the controversies that have recently afflicted that organization. But the installation that Kosuth has wrought, with a lot of help from the Brooklyn Museum’s curators, transcends its immediate situation to touch in myriad ways on the eternal pressures of life upon art. It illuminates both the positive pressure of the human urge toward self-expression and the less positive pressure of society’s frequent need to restrict what art expresses. In essence this is an exhibition about power, freedom and above all the diverse ways art resists — or doesn’t — such pressures as iconoclasm, state censorship, racism, prudery, misogyny and imperialism. . . . At certain points the exhibition might be subtitled “Censorship Through the Ages.”
For many of us, The Play of the Unmentionable remains an all-time favorite Brooklyn Museum show. It demonstrated that a museum could indeed present an exhibition full of difficult, even offensive art without actually giving offense.
Epilogue
The Sensation crisis finally ended when the city, finding itself in an untenable legal position, signed an agreement to cease all hostilities and refrain from future retribution against the museum.
After arriving at this moment of triumph, Arnold Lehman ends his book with an Epilogue alternately serious and funny. It’s a lengthy list of where-are-they-now updates.
The updates concerning Rudolph Giuliani are, as might be expected, chilling.
But on the lighter side: the Metropolitan Museum’s then-director Phillipe de Montebello — who at the time of Sensation castigated its participants as “artists who deserve to remain obscure or be forgotten” — toward the end of his tenure authorized a three-year showing of Damien Hirst’s shark piece at the Metropolitan, in 2007-10. In the press release announcing the presentation, de Montebello now called the work “iconic.”
And the focus of the crisis, Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, just a subway ride away from the Brooklyn Museum.
(September 2021)