Lyric Pronouncements, the Cachet of the Offended Reader, and the Limits of "The Public Good"

ON JUNE 26 2002, EYELEVELGALLERY IN HALIFAX installed a video art piece by Toronto artist Lyla Rye, titled "Byte? "The video features Rye playing a game with her baby daughter: Rye sings into the baby's mouth and in response, her daughter bites Rye's lip. Tae game on the tape runs for eight minutes and includes over 40 manipulations of the same twelve-second clip. This clip is presented repeatedly with a variety of masks and effects applied to it, designed to draw the viewer's attention to different aspects of the interaction by concealing others. This video ran in the front window of the gallery, situated on Barrington Street, one of Halifax's busiest downtown strips. Two weeks after the show had been installed, on July lo, the Vice Squad of the Halifax Regional Municipal Police force swooped in and removed the video tapes from she gallery. A woman had seen she video as she was walking down the street and complained to the police that she considered the representation to be pornographic, Within days, the police bad received six complaints in total: three formal complaints and three verbal complaints. Never mind that the show had presumably already passed the litmus test of countless viewers who had passed by eyelevel's Barrington Street window as this young woman had done. Never mind that Rye's video was also on display at Ontario's Grimsby Public Art Gallery where no other viewers complained. And never mind that on July 5, five days before the ultimate confiscation, a police officer had visited eyelevelgallery and pronounced the video harmless (at least according to the "harm-based" provisions of Canadian pornography law (1)). In spite of all this, the confiscated tapes remained in police possession and eventually, when the Crown determined that it could make no case under the pornography law, Rye's video was assessed under the corruption of public morals section of the Criminal Code. "this section, article 163.2, states that "everyone commits an offence who knowingly, without lawful justification or excuse, sells, exposes to public view, or has in his possession for such a purpose any obscene written matter, picture, model, phonograph record or other thing whatever? In moving from the law on child pornography to the law on public morals, the Crown seemed to be looking for a loophole, some gap between pornography and obscenity. Still, no charges were laid. Yet, Rye's work and eyelevelgallery were not vindicated. Instead, the police used the public morals section of the Criminal Code to curtail public circulation of the image by issuing a threat. Rye and eyelevelgallery were put on alert: the police were not going to press charges, but when they returned the tapes, they warned "that may change" if the gallery persisted in showing the work. (2) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The police could not find any fault with the video according to the provisions of the pornography law: it did not constitute a "harm." And yet, presumably, six readers felt enough harm was being or had been done to warrant a complaint. But harm to what or to whom? If the video did not contravene the pornography law in the first instance, what could possibly make it obscene enough to offend public morals in the second? The answer is probably nothing. Not being charged under one law does not, of course, exempt one from being charged under another. However, if the obscenity in question were sexual in nature and the image were not sexually obscene under the pornography law, it seems unlikely that it would be obscene in any other sense. But this did not stop the police from threatening to apply the public morals law to eyelevelgallery. "[he effect was unofficial censorship. The police openly threatened to lay charges against the gallery that provided the viewing context and, more insidiously, Rye herself. (3) What they wanted was for the gallery to stop showing the tapes. Publicity itself was the problem. It may well be the case that the police should not have insisted upon testing Rye's video against the public morals section of the Criminal Code. …