Or, the good, the bad, and the perverse.

God help me, I find myself siding, albeit obliquely, with the conservatives and wowsers in a debate about art. The debate is over whether authorities were right to remove Nan Goldins’ photograph “Klara and Edda Belly Dancing“, showing two young girls dancing, one naked and one half-naked, from an exhibition in London. The link is to a censored version of the image, and I’m even uneasy about posting that, which gives you a pretty good idea of what I think, not of the picture as a picture, but of displaying it, and even of taking it in the first place.

The police seized the photograph on the grounds that it was possibly child pornography. They then decided that it wasn’t–too late to save the exhibition, which had been closed at the request of Sir Elton John, owner of the collection of which “Klara and Edda” was a part. Much of the debate around the picture, which has been exhibited before without incident, concerns whether it’s pornography or art.

I don’t think that’s the only question which needs to be asked, but when I do ask it of myself, I can’t in any way see the image as pornography. It wasn’t taken with pornographic intent. It’s actually a fascinating picture. Those who are defending it as art seem fond of calling it an image of “innocent play”, which is a naive catchphrase, and, I think, a censored reading of it, and of the stage of life we call childhood. Children’s play is by no means always innocent, either in the sense of being devoid of a sexual element or of violence, power play, manipulation and exploitation. We have no idea what is going through the minds, or through the bodies, of those two girls in the photo. We don’t know what fantasies are in their heads. Possibly none. But those who defend the image by saying that only a pervert would see something sexual in it are ignoring the fact that the place between one’s legs and the organ between one’s ears don’t suddenly become sexual at the age of 13. They have their moments virtually all through life. Speaking personally, by the time I was eight or so I was having sexual fantasies, some that I recognised as such, some that I didn’t recognise until I looked back later, although I instinctively felt they were thoughts I should keep to myself. I think the photo invites us to remember our own childhoods and re-connect with childhood sexuality and early fantasies that may have helped shape us. I get bittersweet nostalgic feelings from the picture, and uneasy but lovable memories of early sensual thoughts and events. So far, so good.

However, the image also makes me recall how embarrassed I was as a child by photos of me naked–particularly one my mother took when I was about 18 months old. In it I’m sitting naked on the bathroom scale, a look of manic glee on my face, legs bent back, looking for all the world like I’m humping the scale. My mother thought it was a cute, innocent picture. Even when I was very young I thought it was beyond the pale. I begged her to destroy the photo. I can’t remember whether she actually did. Apparently the parents of Klara and Edda gave permission for their photo to be exhibited. But were the girls themselves asked? And are children that young capable of giving informed consent for the public display of private images?

The picture challenges our taboos about the privacy of genitalia. I was about five when I learned that not everyone has the same ideas on that subject. Some hippies lived down the road from us, and I used to play with their kids. One hot day, the female hippie turned on the garden sprinklers for her sons and me to play under. She urged me to take off all my clothes, which I wasn’t happy about doing, since by then I’d been taught that nudity was strictly for the bathroom. But I’d also been taught to do as adults asked me, so I stripped. Then she brought out ochre paints and painted the three of us as “Aborigines”. I remember her painting a design on my genital area. I was mortified. I’m sure that she had no abusive intentions and saw the whole thing as an Eden-like, idyllic experience of play. I saw it as a violation of my privacy. The point is, we don’t know how a child sees her body. She doesn’t necessarily have the language to explain it to us. We don’t even begin to give her the language. We tell her the mechanics of sexual intercourse and reproduction, but we don’t say, “You know that tingly, excited feeling you get when you watch that TV show, or when you play with your cousin, or sometimes even when Mummy spanks you, well, that’s called being aroused.” We, the adults, own these secrets. Whether our reasons for not telling them to children are sound or not–and I don’t feel qualified to have an opinion on that–by not telling, don’t we delay a young person’s understanding of, and therefore conceptual ownership of, her own body, thus placing ourselves as trustees of children’s bodies? Therefore, shouldn’t we err on the side of caution in how we treat those bodies, not only physically but in all ways?

The puritans argue that such an image shouldn’t be displayed because, whether it’s art or not, some people will look at it and be turned on, and may be stimulated to commit crimes against children. I think they actually have a point. I hate censorship. I’m all for letting it all hang out every which way. But with the rule that all participants in the great hangout will be consenting persons of legal age. That aside, however, what intrigues me is why any of us who aren’t sexually interested in children still think we have a right to peek into all private worlds, whether the people in them are naked or clothed, child or adult, just because the images thus presented to us have artistic merit. The idea that porn=bad, art=good, is simplistic. Art can be exploitative, trashy or just plain godawful and still be art. Art doesn’t come with a built-in halo any more than children do. Art can deliver a range of experiences from the beatific to the vile, all of which can be interesting and in one way or another worthwhile. But it’s unfortunate if, in our lust for these experiences, we don’t question their real-world provenance.

I must be more than old-fashioned; I must be positively primitive. I’m not about to suggest that cameras steal souls, but don’t they steal something? I very rarely take photos of unsuspecting people. When I do, I feel like an intruder and a thief, as if I’m taking something I ought to be paying for. This is tied to the idea of ownership of the body and, by extension, images of the body. I have a strong visual memory and can often feel that I own something just by having a mental picture of it. Some childhood games have the quality of secret ceremonies, and an adult can’t always tell which ones. Anthropologists these days are careful not to make public images and records of things the people they study deem to be secret. Why shouldn’t we therefore respect the secrets of our own children? That they sometimes enact these secrets under our noses doesn’t mean much. We know how good they are at pretending we’re not there. And if it is true that to take photos without consent is to pilfer from the stock of the subject’s ownership of their physical self, it seems particularly rapacious to do this to children, who own almost nothing but their own bodies, and hardly even those. The bodies of children are forever being herded around, told what to eat, what to wear, how and where to sit and stand, ad nauseam. When they play, without our interference, they temporarily claim ownership of what is properly theirs. A photograph like “Klara and Edda” seems to assert the right of the adult gaze to go absolutely anywhere. I’m not sure it should have that right, which so easily reduces children to “seen and not heard”.

As a sort of tangential end to these thoughts, in Japan I found books by artists, such as Koitsukihime and Kayuli Hiina, who use ball-jointed dolls, posed in photographs, to candidly explore childhood, particularly girlhood. I found even some of those images confronting, since one can obviously go further into perverse imagery with a doll model than a real child–yet not one of those pictures was alien to me, and I found many of them moving in the degree that they matched secret memories of my own inner world. I like these artists’ work–if I’m reading it correctly–partly because it bravely shows that childhood is not unvisited by Eros and Thanatos, those two human embarrassments–though why they are embarrassing, I don’t know. I remember a lot of darkness and strangeness in childhood; a lot of anxiety, a lot of secrets, and a lot of conscious effort to wear a mask. It does no good to imagine a wall around childhood, wherein all is imagined to be innocent in an inhuman degree. Children grow up to be us. They are us. That is something one seems to be told by “Klara and Edda”. But because they are us, and not lambs or rabbits or fish in an aquarium, shouldn’t we treat them with all the courtesy due to human beings, which includes–in an ideal world I’ve conjured up–a respect for privacy?

So, should the image be exhibited? I think the permission of the original two models should be sought first–and perhaps it has already been obtained, but I haven’t been able to find that out.

I’ve rewritten this post three times, and I really want to sit down for about a day, hash these thoughts out and rewrite again. I’m struggling to explain gut feelings that even as an adult and a writer I have trouble articulating. If anyone can be bothered analysing my arguments here, you’re welcome to tell me if I’ve made errors of logic or contradicted myself.