What you see is what you get
Laura Gascoigne believes that there should be more honesty in the art world Seeing the artist Jack Vettriano recently described in the Scottish press as a stalker set me thinking about the relationship between art and life and the nature of cen- sorship. Fife-born Vettriano (real name Hoggan) has made a lucrative career from painting photorealistic soft-porn pictures of women in — and half-out of — fetishistic clothing. Like Spanish film director Almod- ovar, he has a thing about high heels that he successfully exploits in paintings with suggestive titles, such as 'In Thoughts of You'. Harmless enough, you may think. His fantasies are not unusual: cross a Bond girl with a Raymond Chandler broad and add the back view of a Warren Beatty type in braces, and you get a picture with irre- sistible appeal to the Hollywood-educated male imagination.
In December, under the headline 'Mil- lionaire artist in sex-stalk shame', the front page of Scotland's Daily Record denounced Jack Vettriano as a 'sex pest'. A young Edinburgh businesswoman apparently reported him to the police for leaving obscene letters and pornographic drawings (featuring parts of himself that are 'not the sort of thing you show your mother') on her car windscreen. Vettriano, she alleged, had watched her from the window of his flat as she walked from an Edinburgh carpark to her office. It was her high heels, he told her in a phone call, that attracted him: he liked the sound of them clicking on the pavement. The police took no action.
Needless to say, the paper expressed out- rage that a famous artist should sink so low. But why? Vettriano's pictures are all about voyeurism.
He counts Sir Tim Rice, Sir Terence Conran and Jack Nicholson among his admirers — Nicholson has four Vettrianos in his collection — and two of his art posters are top of the British best-sellers. The week before the sex-pest story broke, New Yorkers had queued to buy his paint- ings at the International 20th Century Arts Fair, the first public showing of his work in America. The popularity of his pictures is no surprise: what you see in a Vettriano is what you get. What is surprising, perhaps, is that his pictures are considered respectable, while his behaviour is not.
Reverse this position and you have the story of another artist, Mario Minichiello, a political illustrator for the Guardian, who has spent three years on a series of large charcoal drawings documenting the life of Amsterdam's red-light district. He has done this at considerable personal risk, entering places where cameras are forbidden and which, if used, are removed by force by security. His sketchbook is tolerated in these places only because of the open way he operates, letting everybody see what he is doing and even inviting the girls to con- tribute drawings. The resulting work is sexu- ally explicit because that is the nature of the subject matter. What you see is what you get, as with Vettriano, but the absence of any whiff of wish-fulfilment stops it crossing the line from graphic to pornographic. The drawings are powerful testimonies to the human condition in the tradition of Goya, Hogarth and Grosz. As Minichiello puts it, `They are about daring to look; daring to examine one's own humanity.'
While the Portland Gallery, St James's, represents Vettriano (though declines to comment on his personal life), no gallery has until now offered to show Minichiello's drawings. The Saatchi Gallery thought they were good, but could not find 'an audience'; the Henry Boxer Gallery felt the themes were dated, as George Grosz and others had done it all before. Mike Goldmark of the Goldmark Gallery, Uppingham, which shows erotic art, including nudes by Josef Herman (and rather less tasteful prints by Rigby Graham), liked the idea until he saw the reality, which he rejected as 'not really erotic', so difficult to market.
In Britain we pride ourselves on our sexu- al liberation, yet the art world closes ranks against good work because the approach is too direct. In America, where Minichiello's work recently toured, the Amsterdam draw- ings attracted not just favourable criticism, but praise from New York feminists who found them sympathetic and even — aston- ishingly — used the word 'brave'.
So what's our problem: are we not the nation that gave the world Sensation? It seems that when art touches a nerve, rather than merely titillates or shocks, censorship kicks in. Sensation may have upset Mayor Giuliani, but his response, like the show's own shock value, was calculated. The work in Sensation does not pose a real threat. It is just an exercise in giving an up-front thrill that does not touch us on a deeper level.
I may be unusual in finding a Vettriano glimpse of stocking more shocking than a Minichiello full-frontal approach. But I can't help feeling that, in an art world that accommodates both peep-show voyeurism and up-front sensationalism, there should be room for a bit of honesty.
Mario Minichiello's Amsterdam drawings are now on show, with work by Steve Bell and Spike Gerrell, at Buckenham House Gal- leries, Southwold, Suffolk until 2 March. Jack Vettriano's paintings can be viewed on www.portland-gallery. corn Feeding Frenzy, by Mario Minichiello
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