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Around the corner, out of eyeshot from the front door of Toronto's Gallery 44, a large latch-hook rug replicating a picture from Playboy's on-line website covers an inside wall. The shot of the reclining nude woman can't be mistaken for anything other than soft-core porn, from her de rigueur beyond-the-shoulder blond hair to her (always a little incongruous) high heels and her uncomfortably arched back. But the well-respected photographic gallery wasn't worried about whether the piece, entitled Soft Porn, objectifies women, or whether it might be too explicit for some (or too crassly commercial), or whether gallery-goers unexpectedly strolling in off the street might be offended. No, the only thing that almost stopped the exhibit from being shown was the fear that Playboy could sue for copyright reasons. Nudity and exploitation may still be talking points. But these days, it's the worry that a major corporation could take legal action for displaying copyrighted images that instills the fear of God in the art community. With artists and galleries increasingly facing new liability issues, particularly the ill-defined line between what publicly available digital images can or cannot be used in works of art, Gallery 44's experience is telling. Whitney Lee, a 25-year-old artist based in Austin, Tex., who is beginning to gain wide attention, started replicating soft-core pornographic images through the tedious, grandmotherly craft of latch-hook rug-making. The work is a comment on the two extremes in which women are depicted -- as sexy, slutty types or homebound, craft-making women. The images on Lee's rugs are blurred, a little like a pointillist painting or like looking at a TV screen too closely. Lee enlarges the pixels of the actual image from Playboy's website, and once the picture is blown up, she then programs a palette of yarn into her computer which matches those colours to the myriad pinpoints which comprise the pixilated image. The effect is wondrously vivid. But because everything is blurred, it makes the viewer re-evaluate the experience of seeing the pornographic image since, as Lee says, the naughty bits are gone. Which is the reason people view pornography in the first place. The rugs lose the detail of the actual woman, but not the overall message of the pornographic shot. This surprisingly creates more empathy for the woman who can no longer be fully seen. The uniformity of the blurred faces in Cyber Girls of the Week, 2003, a panel of 52 33-centimetre-by-33-centimetre rugs showing just the faces of Playboy's on-line models, makes them seem like sad mug shots, although each panel individually is a vibrantly beautiful depiction of each woman's face in yarn. Another piece, along a third wall in the Gallery 44 exhibit, is a series of even smaller rugs hung in a row showing completely blurred shots of a woman turning around and taking off her underwear. It's almost comic in its blurriness. When she started her rugs, Lee, who describes herself as a product of feminism, admits she had many negative preconceptions about Playboy models. But that has changed, and she's now more empathetic, particularly after some models have contacted her and said how flattered they were by her work. As Lee later learned, the model in Soft Porn is Sydney Moon, the pseudonym for a soft-core model, now 29 and living in Northern California, who has worked as a stripper and nude model for 12 years, but who also has a master's degree in clinical psychology. Moon read about Lee's work in the feminist pop-culture magazine Bust, and the two have since corresponded regularly and plan to publish an article about their conversations and the issues that the artwork raises. Of course, none of this would have been possible if Playboy had taken legal action and prevented Lee from showing her work anywhere. "I was very flattered that she had used my picture," Moon said. "My reaction was 100-per-cent positive, and I immediately wanted to seek her out because I felt I had a kind of connection with her because of it." The gallery's board originally rejected the idea of showing the rug, along with two other works by Lee, that all use images from Playboy's website. The gallery's exhibition co-ordinator, Katy McCormick, consulted the gallery's lawyer, who said that Gallery 44 could soften a possible legal case against it by pre-emptively holding an educational discussion panel at the gallery to talk about the images and, more generally, about artists' use of copyrighted images in their works. By emphasizing its educational intentions, Gallery 44, a small non-profit, artist-run co-operative, could demonstrate that it wasn't exhibiting the work for commercial purposes, but simply for artistic reasons. "[The lawyer] suggested that we were certainly liable, but that in certain circumstances, we could prove that we were doing this in order to raise questions, create dialogue, create a critical and educational context," McCormick said. But it wasn't until Lee, the rugs' artist, told the gallery that Playboy was already aware of her work and didn't seem interested in suing that Gallery 44's board agreed to show her work. Shortly after the exhibit opened in late September, the gallery held its Saturday-afternoon panel discussion, which was open to the public. The show's title, Download, and the essay in its program emphasize the theme of appropriating digital shots off the Internet, rather than nudity or objectification. Also in the exhibit are web-cam photos captured by Toronto artist Daniel Ehrenworth from an on-line forum. Ehrenworth's work is perhaps more controversial as these are images of ordinary people who had chosen to broadcast their image on an Internet forum to be seen potentially by thousands of viewers. Ehrenworth, a 26-year-old photographer, has taken these images -- at times confrontational and sexually graphic -- and turned them into a photo essay. But Gallery 44 was less concerned about any legal issues surrounding these amateur images. The people had already chosen to make these images public (even if they might not have known they would wind up on a gallery wall). And Ehrenworth is adamant that he would remove any image if the person in them somehow found out about it and asked for that image to be removed. He also makes an effort not to reveal much information about the forum to prevent the people's identities from being traced. Still, any legal challenge from those individuals worried Gallery 44 much less than the possibility of Playboy's lawyers coming down hard. As it turns out, Playboy is indeed already aware of Lee's work. Cyber Girls of the Week had been exhibited at the Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, and that gallery even invited collectors who buy artwork for Playboy to the exhibit. Although it showed some interest, Lee said, Playboy didn't purchase her work. The women who are portrayed in the work are shown on the Playboy website, and they tend to be models who don't make the cut for a magazine spread. That was one reason the company was less interested in the artwork, Lee said. Most importantly, though, the company didn't turn around and take legal action against Lee. "I'm not actively concerned, but it does hang over my head," Lee said, "and it would be very sad to me if I felt like I couldn't show the work any more. I don't believe Playboy to be a litigious company. And with other artists that have appropriated their images, I think Playboy takes an interest in . . . [being] a cultural phenomenon and a subject of intellectual discourse." |
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