, when it was defaced by yellow paint.
This time, the long cone of steel, which the artist has
presented in an interview
as representing Queen Marie-Antoinette’s vagina, and the rocks surrounding it,
have been covered by hateful and anti-Semitic phrases painted in white, such
as: "La reine sacrifiée, deux fois
outragée", "SS Sacrifice Sanglant", "Le deuxième VIOL de la
Nation par l'activisme JUIF DEVIANT", "Le Christ est roi à Versailles"
[“The sacrificed queen, twice outraged, " “Bloody SS Sacrifice",
"The Second Rape of the Nation by JEWISH DEVIANT activism, "
"Christ is king at Versailles."]
Anish Kapoor has decided the offensive inscriptions will not
be deleted, as it would not erase the fact that such vandalism took place. He wrote on his Instagram account:
“The vandalised sculpture now looks like a graveyard, the stones are now
gravestones marking the ruinous politics of fundamentalist bigotry. Dirty
Corner allows this dirty politics to expose itself fully, in full view for all
to see.”
“As the artist I have -for the second time- to ask myself what this act
of violence means to my work. The sculpture will now carry the scars of this
renewed attack. I will not allow this act of violence and intolerance to be
erased. Dirty Corner will now be marked with hate and I will preserve these
scars as a memory of this painful history. I am determined that Art will
triumph.”
The artist had
already written on his site, after the June attack:
“Should the paint that has been thrown all over the sculpture be
removed? Or should the paint remain and be part of the work? Does the political
violence of the vandalism make Dirty Corner “dirtier”? Does this dirty
political act reflect the dirty politics of exclusion, marginalisation,
elitism, racism, Islamophobia etc. The question I ask of myself is: can I the
artist transform this crass act of political vandalism and violence into a
public creative aesthetic act? Would this not then be the best revenge?”
Both of these statements are well worth being read in full.
Under French law, such vandalism is a crime,
punishable by two years in jail and a 30 000 fine, and is also a tort.
These tags also violated the integrity of the work, and thus violated Amish Kapoor’s
moral rights over the sculpture, as protected by article
L. 121-1 of the French Intellectual Property Code, under which the author
has the perpetual right to respect for his work.
Also, tagging anti-Semitic messages is a crime, as, under article
32 of the French Press law, religious defamation is a crime punishable by one
year in jail and a 45 000 Euros fine. However, the artist’s decision not to
delete these messages is not itself illegal, even though it perpetrates an
illegal publication. Anish Kapoor , by stating that that the heinous messages must
continue to be seen, does not condone
them, but wants the public to be able to see the face of hate, and thus to “transform this crass act of political
vandalism and violence into a public creative aesthetic act.” As such, one can
argue that tags have now become an integral part of the work, while its original
significance has shifted, and that the artist has made a sovereign decision
which must be respected lest to tramp over his moral right.
This decision, however, has not been
met with unanimous approval. Jonathan Jones urged
the artist to reconsider, arguing that “[h]e is giving bigots the oxygen of publicity
and letting them ruin a beautiful work of art.” U.S. law considers
generally that the answer to hate speech is more speech. Justice Holmes
famously wrote in 1919 in his dissent in
Abrams v. United States, in which Justice Brandeis concurred, that the best test of truth is the power of the
thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market” and in
1974, Justice Powell wrote in Gertz v.
Robert Welch, that “[u]nder the First Amendment there is no such
thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for
its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the
competition of other ideas.”
Dirty Corner will be shown in the Versailles garden until
November 1, as originally planned. Let’s hope that, at this time, the perpetrators
of this crime will have been arrested.
UPDATE: A French elected official from Versailles has just filed a complaint against Anish Kappor and Catherine Pégard, President of the Château de Versailles, for racial defamation, and public insults.
UPDATE: A French elected official from Versailles has just filed a complaint against Anish Kappor and Catherine Pégard, President of the Château de Versailles, for racial defamation, and public insults.
Image of Dirty Corner
(not in Versailles though) is courtesy of Flickr user Silvia Sfligiotti under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
license.
2 comments:
Kapoor denies having described the sculpture as representing Marie-Antoinette's vagina, as a search of UK news media will easily demonstrate.
I would recommend to anyone his interview on BBC Radio 4's today programme this morning at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p031x54n
Thank you for the link John. Amish Kapoor is on record in the French press, and I am not sure if he later changed his mind, or was misquoted by almost all the major French newspapers.
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