Paris’s High Court has found artist Deborah De Robertis not guilty of exhibitionism. The Louvre accused her of public exposure.
Photo: Fabienne Costa, Deborah De Robertis
The performance My Pussy My Copyright took place on September 24. The artists defended herself at a trial on October 18. She said to artnet.com: “The court has no legitimacy in deciding what is or is not art. But it has found that my work can not constitute an offense of sexual exhibitionism because of its political, activist and artistic dimension.” The court said the artist wasn’t guilty due to the absence of “the material element of the crime”: museum goers couldn’t see the artist’s genitals because of her pubic hair, so her actions did not constitute public exposure. The artists said: “I show the genitals of women as they are, hairy and natural, and my nudity is not sexual because it refers to the pictorial nude.”
Photo: Deborah De Robertis
The artistic message of Deborah De Robertis’s provocative performance questions the place of women in the history of arts, in which they have appeared as nude models rather than as artists. “Instead of looking at my vagina, look up and look around: where are the women? See if they appear on the canvas or on the wall text. Who tells you that Mona Lisa did not paint?”
Deborah De Robertis’s artworks deal with nudity, politics, women’s rights and problems of contemporary society and art. In February 2017, she was acquitted on charges of indecent exposure for her performances at Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Musée des Arts Décoratifs. In January 2016, she was arrested at the Musée D’Orsay for lying naked in front of Edouard Manet’s Olympia.
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