43 "KIDS" L'enfance de l'art / L'art contemporain et l'enfance : intimité, ambiguïtés, tabous, censure et répression…
Robert Mapplethorpe, Rosie, 1997
The name of Robert Mapplethorpe has become synonymous with censorship of photography. ln 1987, eight of his images were the subject of a lawsuit against Dennis Barry and the Cincinnati Museum of Art for exhibiting the retrospective The Perfect Moment, which purportedly contained obscene images. ln 1989, a hundred members of the U.S. Congress criticized the National Endowment of the Arts for supporting his retrospective organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. AIso in 1989, The Perfect Moment exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. was closed down. Ever since, his work has been at the center of the censorship conflict known as in the U.S. as the Cultural Wars. The Senate passed an amendment banning funding for the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and the lnstitute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia for five years, in reaction to their showing Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe respectively. The amendment was later discarded but the NEA budget was cut by $45,000, the cost of funding the Serrano and Mapplethorpe retrospective. Mapplethorpe's work has also been censored beyond U.S. borders. This photograph, Rosie, was arnong several censored from an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1996. What is more, according to the New Statesman, the Mapplethorpe estate denied the periodical permission to publish the image in their article on the censorship of the exhibition. This 1996 article, published alongside a blank space where the photo would have been placed, states that the subject of the photo, Rosie Bowden, was pleased with the photo and that she intended to hang a copy on the wall of her restaurant in Notting Hill, " It is a very, very sweet picture, taken on a hot day spent around naked ", she told the lndependent on Sunday. " The only unnatural thing about that photo was that l was wearing a dress ". Dena Ellen Cowan, in "Censored / Censurados ", Exit, n°8, novembre 2002 - janvier 2003, p.132