"And what sort of “obscenity” is the Arts Council prepared to defend?

Suzanne Santoro and the censorship of For a New Expression

Abstract

In 1974 Suzanne Santoro (New York 1946), an American artist living in Rome, published with Scritti di Rivolta Femminile Per una nuova espressione /Towards New Expression. In the small book accompanied by a short introductory text, the author isolates and juxtaposes images and anatomical details of the female sex with ancient statuary. Two years later in 1976, an act of censorship was carried out by the Arts Council of Great Britain in the context of the Artist's Book exhibition at the ICA in London, where Suzanne Santoro’s book was included in the catalog, but excluded from the exhibition. The small publication, which was interpreted as pornographic, was censored from an interpretation far from the intentions of the artist, whose purpose was to re-surface an iconography suppressed over the course of history. This essay aims to explore the issue of the censorship of images and artistic representation from a transnational perspective starting with the exemplary case of the reception and circulation of this artist’s book. The Italian context will also be compared with the Anglo-Saxon context and the positions of key figures in art criticism such as Rozsika Parker in the pages of the activist magazine Spare Ribs and others such as Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti. With her publication Suzanne Santoro proposes and embraces a polysemic and utterly original language so radical that it becomes itself a definition of female subjectivity and a new expression.