The Larry Rivers Tapes : Open Thread

Talk about a taboo topic and conundrum. Today's New York Times reports on the efforts by Larry River's daughter to get back tapes of her from the archive of her father's work. In the videos he reportedly photographed his two daughters over a number of years naked and talking about the development of their bodies. On the surface it would seem easy enough to say, Rivers' actions were debased and no one has any business insisting that the traumatizing videos aren't the rightful property of their subjects. But then there's the obligation of the foundation to protect the artist's work. Here's the Times account:

The archives of the proto-Pop artist Larry Rivers, who died in 2002, will arrive at New York University in a few weeks, filled with correspondence and other documents that depict his relationships with artists like Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol and writers like Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery.

But one part of the archive, which was purchased from the Larry Rivers Foundation for an undisclosed price, includes films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.

One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.

“I kind of think that a lot of people would be very uptight, or at least a little bit concerned, wondering whether they have in their archives child pornography,” said the daughter, Emma Tamburlini, now 43.

Ms. Tamburlini said the filming contributed to her becoming anorexic at 16. “It wrecked a lot of my life actually,” she said.

Her older sister, Gwynne Rivers, declined comment.

N.Y.U. has agreed to discuss the matter and has already, at the urging of the foundation, pledged to keep the material off limits during the daughters’ lifetimes. Two years ago Ms. Tamburlini asked the foundation to destroy the tapes, but it declined.

The Rivers Foundation’s director, David Joel, said that he sympathized with Ms. Tamburlini but that he could not agree to destroy the tapes.

“I can’t be the person who says this stays and this goes,” he said. “My job is to protect the material.”

The article goes into a lot more (disturbing) details about the videos and what might have prompted Rivers to shoot them. It also notes how the situation resembles the case of artist Jock Sturges whose photographs of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls in “naturist” communities (shot with their parents’ consent) led to an F.B.I. raid of his studio. (A grand jury declined to indict him.)

Reading how the videos made his one daughter in particular feel makes me want to side with them that they should receive them to dispose of as they see fit, but there's no doubt that Rivers saw the edited videos as a work of his art:

In 1981 Rivers edited the footage into a 45-minute film that he planned to show as part of an exhibition. The girls’ mother, Clarice Rivers, who also appears in parts of the film, intervened and stopped him.

The hardest part of reconciling my feelings about this is my hard-held opinion that no subject matter is, as a subject matter, immoral (see my post on the Art:21 Blog for more in-depth discussion of that position), even though actions taken to explore certain subjects might be. Does asking his daughters to do something that clearly made them uncomfortable qualify as an immoral action? I would say it does. Does that make the resulting video something immoral? I can't see how. It's a document, not the action. Would I sleep better if everyone agreed to give the daughters the tapes and they disappeared off the earth? Probably.

Consider this an open thread on whether the resulting art from immoral actions should be destroyed.