Disturbing image?

 

Crevice. Digital image with text. Julie Clarke (2011)

I recently entered this image in an upcoming 'mail art' exhibition to be held in Western Australia. It was rejected by the curator as 'too confronting' for their audience. My intention in making this work was to set up a distinct relationship between language and the body, to use the natural formation of my skin folds as substitute for a letter; in this case the letter V. I find it difficult to comprehend how this image could confront in light of the fact that nudity is ubiquitous throughout art history and Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du mond (1866) hangs in the Musée d'Orsay (the painting was previously owned by the famous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan) as an example of exemplary technique, beauty and eroticism. My digital image follows from those I exhibited in Aut(o)ptics(o)ma in which landscape images of my body were photographed in order to make them look erotic (when in fact none of them were taken of parts considered so), whereas this image associated with eroticism and sexuality was modified to look like a crevice in a rocky landscape. I am interested in human perception and what acts on our mind to make us see things in particular ways. We are confronted (almost nightly) with televised images of violent death and accident (virtual and actual). We are allowed to see the open wound on an others body, cut and bleeding flesh, the torture of innocent animals, people weeping in boats not permitted to land on our shores, surgical operations that modify people's bodies, graphic open heart surgery in documentaries, animals tearing the flesh off another animal, soldier's  bodies damaged and disfigured by war;  images of children born deformed because of  radiation fallout decades ago, and other images that disturb for various reasons; but art audiences and the general public are protected from seeing images like mine? Disturbing. I find this kind of censorship utterly disturbing!