Eli Langer, the artist most famous for having beaten Canada's child-pornography law on a defence of "artistic merit," says he'd like to "pass the mantle on to some other artist, some other case."
After more than a decade of being the one everybody calls when threats of censorship erupt, he wants to stop "contextualizing myself within the dialogue of child pornography in Canada" and get on with his real life as a figurative painter.
Still, having tracked Langer, now 36, down in Los Angeles, I persuaded him to spend an hour talking about how he feels, from today's perspective, about his arrest and prosecution, art as a "public good," the "fear-mongering" of Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper and the difference between art and pornography.
Child pornography rubbed its horrific imprint on the public imagination last week when a statement was read in open court in which Toronto pedophile Michael Briere confessed to sexually assaulting, murdering and dismembering 10-year-old Holly Jones. Briere, a computer-software developer, stated that he had gone directly from downloading kiddie porn on the Internet to grabbing a little girl who happened to be walking down the street outside his apartment.
He told police that it was the pornography that made him do it, ignoring the fact that he was first and foremost a pedophile who had fantasized "probably forever" about having sex with children. It wasn't porn that turned him into a pedophile, but it did arouse his already perverted and sadistic urges.
Briere's court appearance inflamed an election debate about child pornography and turned it ugly. In the televised leaders' debate, Harper said he would use the notwithstanding clause to override the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to destroy "artistic merit" as a defence for possessing alleged child pornography. He has also publicly accused the Liberals, Liberal Party Leader Paul Martin himself, and the NDP of supporting child pornography because they opposed an opposition-led amendment in the last Parliament to delete even "public good" as a defence for possessing material deemed to be child pornography.
It has been more than a decade since Langer's debut show at Toronto's Mercer Union Gallery was raided in December, 1993, and he was charged with making, displaying and possessing obscene material -- all because he had painted imaginary children indulging in sexual activity.
What I remember most about that show was a painting dominated by a red-velvet curtain, behind which a diminutive person is trying to hide. The curtain hangs from the ceiling, but is too short to reach the floor or to conceal the skinny little legs shod in a pair of children's black-patent-leather shoes with a strap across the instep. This is a painting depicting a terrified little girl being stalked by a predator, a predator who we sense, as we look on helplessly in horror, is about to pull aside that curtain and grab her. It arouses fear, not rapacious sexual appetites.
"That series was my toughest work," Langer says. Since then, he has moved "into more subtle ways to represent danger, violation and vulnerability." While he doesn't recommend being arrested as a fun activity, he insists the experience didn't muffle his creativity, although it "definitely taught me a different way of understanding language and the implications of language," he says. "It was a learning experience but it didn't chill me.
"Some people were disappointed that I wasn't going to carry on making sensational works with little children," in subsequent shows at the Wave Contemporary Gallery in 1997, the Tableau Vivant two years later and the Paul Petro in 2001.
Looking back, Langer, still single, still childless, still sounding like the articulate 26-year-old "street kid with a roof over his head" that I interviewed a decade ago, now thinks the trial was a "good thing -- painful but necessary."
Not for himself, surely?
"It was outrageous, the extent of what I went through. Being charged by the police is something you can't imagine happening when you are making art." What was good about his ordeal, though, was that art and its interpretation became part of a political, legal and mainstream discussion. "This showed that art can be relevant."
Besides, compared with real crimes against women and children that are filmed and mounted on the Internet, what Langer endured doesn't register, as he himself acknowledges. Actual physical harm is where the public perception of art and child pornography collide in the debate that is raging among candidates in the federal election. That debate points to the galactic gulf between Briere, the consumer of child pornography, and Langer, the professional artist who exhibits his paintings in recognized galleries.
The fear is that if Langer can be charged, other bona fide artists are in danger of prosecution. Again there is a chasm between Langer's work, whatever you might think of its artistic merit, and Web-based pornography sites. Langer paints from his imagination based on his absorbed life experience and his acquired knowledge of the world. He does not use, or abuse, real children.
Actual photographs of real children being sexually assaulted is something else entirely. What worries artists, and even amateur photographers, is the fear that teenagers taking photographs or making videos of themselves with their lovers may arouse the ire of police and prosecutors.
A number of freedom-of-expression and civil-liberties organizations have written briefs exploring the dangers of an overly broad definition of child pornography, attesting that a restrictive law may not do anything to protect real children from harm, but may well undermine freedoms that we cherish in an open and democratic society. My own worry about substituting "public good" for a defence of artistic merit (in the Liberal government's child-pornography legislation that died on the order paper when the election was called) is that it puts the onus on the accused to demonstrate that the work under question serves a higher purpose, rather than on the prosecution to demonstrate harm. The effect is rather like making an accused prove innocence instead of requiring the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
For his part, Langer suggests that "public good," depending on how it is defined, may actually be more useful than artistic merit as a defence for artists working in non-traditional forms, such as video and performance art. "In my case, artistic merit wasn't a problem because I was making figurative oil paintings and there was a traditional facility involved in their production which was pretty obvious to anybody who stood in front of them."
Part of the reason that Langer has no urge for vengeance is because he was vindicated. He had his day in court, he won, and in doing so he inadvertently helped another artist settle a bitter and long-standing score.
Artist Ron Bloore, whose late wife, Dorothy Cameron, ran a gallery on Yorkville that was raided by the police in 1965 -- two years before Langer was born -- was called as a witness for the prosecution in Langer's trial.
In something that came to be known as the Eros scandal, Cameron had been found guilty of exhibiting seven obscene drawings in an exhibition called Eros '65, including works by Robert Markle and Fred Ross. Cameron appealed the conviction all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada but lost.
Thirty years later, Bloore was expected to denigrate Langer's work on the stand. He praised it instead, finding two of the paintings "particularly interesting."
Crown attorney James Hughes was visibly taken aback by this change about, recalls Langer. Then Hughes asked Bloore whether he thought society had the right to put limits on artistic expression. Bloore snapped back, according to a report in The Globe, "Adolf Hitler tried that, for example. It's pure fascism."
Langer says the Crown's jaw "dropped to the floor, he was so shocked." Langer was shocked too, but for a different reason. "My hair was standing on end. I was covered in goose bumps."
When Bloore stepped down from the stand, Langer and his mother approached him to say thank you for his support. Bloore, whose hands were shaking, grabbed the railing separating the court from the public gallery and said to them, "I've been waiting 26 years to get these bastards for what they did to my wife."
That was a moment Langer says he will never forget. "Being able to do that for that man and his wife," says Langer, made it all worthwhile. "Just for the feeling for what he was able to do up there, I would do it again."
Langer's experience has taught him that the only way to maintain democracy's virility is by confronting overreaching government agencies in protests in the streets or in the courts or by collecting petitions. Before you act, though, he argues, you need an event or a case to rally around. He's ready to respond to the call, but so far, all you have, he says, is a "desperate politician, mouthing off on the campaign trail."
Sandra Martin