“Présumés Innocents: L’Art Contemporain Et L’Enfance”
ArtForum's international news digest.....Jennifer Allen reports that they're still fighting the battle.
"When curators Marie-Laure Bernadac and Stéphanie Moisdon organized the exhibition “Présumés Innocents: L’Art Contemporain Et L’Enfance” (Presumed Innocent: Contemporary Art and Childhood) at Bordeaux’s Centre d’Art Plastique Contemporain in 2000, they likely did not imagine becoming part of a legal case that would last close to a decade. After the opening, the children’s-protection agency Association La Mouette filed a legal complaint that the exhibition included child pornography, among other alleged offenses. Bernadac and Moisdon were then called on to explain their curatorial choices before an investigating magistrate—by some accounts a legal first in France.
The show took place in 2000 from June 8 to October 1 with two hundred artworks by eighty international artists, including Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Garry Gross. Twenty artists in the exhibition, whom La Mouette claims were “corrupting minors,” are not going to be charged.
In March 2008, the public prosecutor seemed to bring the affair to a close by calling for a dismissal of the case. But now, according to a report in Agence France-Presse and a press release from the lawyer for Bernadac and Moisdon, a trial will be taking place. Instead of following the public prosecutor, the investigating magistrate decided that the case should be heard in a correctional court. While the case charging the curators with corrupting minors has been dismissed, other charges still stand, including the distribution of pornographic images of a minor as well as the distribution of violent, pornographic, and degrading images likely to be seen by a minor. According to their lawyer, the two curators will continue to defend freedom of expression and contemporary art in the court. Henry-Claude Cousseau, currently the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (and then in 2000 the director of the Bordeaux museums), is also being sent to court with the curators."
Above: Dumas, included in the exhibition, with one of her "obscenities." Photograph: Martin Godwin.
"When curators Marie-Laure Bernadac and Stéphanie Moisdon organized the exhibition “Présumés Innocents: L’Art Contemporain Et L’Enfance” (Presumed Innocent: Contemporary Art and Childhood) at Bordeaux’s Centre d’Art Plastique Contemporain in 2000, they likely did not imagine becoming part of a legal case that would last close to a decade. After the opening, the children’s-protection agency Association La Mouette filed a legal complaint that the exhibition included child pornography, among other alleged offenses. Bernadac and Moisdon were then called on to explain their curatorial choices before an investigating magistrate—by some accounts a legal first in France.
The show took place in 2000 from June 8 to October 1 with two hundred artworks by eighty international artists, including Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager, and Garry Gross. Twenty artists in the exhibition, whom La Mouette claims were “corrupting minors,” are not going to be charged.
In March 2008, the public prosecutor seemed to bring the affair to a close by calling for a dismissal of the case. But now, according to a report in Agence France-Presse and a press release from the lawyer for Bernadac and Moisdon, a trial will be taking place. Instead of following the public prosecutor, the investigating magistrate decided that the case should be heard in a correctional court. While the case charging the curators with corrupting minors has been dismissed, other charges still stand, including the distribution of pornographic images of a minor as well as the distribution of violent, pornographic, and degrading images likely to be seen by a minor. According to their lawyer, the two curators will continue to defend freedom of expression and contemporary art in the court. Henry-Claude Cousseau, currently the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (and then in 2000 the director of the Bordeaux museums), is also being sent to court with the curators."
Above: Dumas, included in the exhibition, with one of her "obscenities." Photograph: Martin Godwin.
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