The Louvre Museum has cancelled to exhibit the Atelier van Lieshout's installation "Domestikator" as it explicitly evokes a "sexual content". The Atelier van Lieshout's art work was set to be displayed on October 19 in the Louvre’s Tuileries Gardens as part of Hors les Murs, a public art program organized by the Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC), but the Musée du Louvre cancelled to install the art piece at the last minute, according to New York Times newspaper. 

"This is something that should not happen," Joep van Lieshout, the founder of the Atelier van Lieshout, said in a telephone interview, says the article oof New York Times. "A museum should be an open place for communication. The task of the museum and the press is to explain the work," added Joep van Lieshout.

"The piece itself, it’s not really very explicit," Joep van Lieshout added. "It’s a very abstracted shape. There are no genitals, it’s pretty innocent."

Rotterdam-based sculptor and artist Joep van Lieshout first revealed its proposal in 2015, as part of the larger installation The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Good the Bad and the Ugly was a temporary settlement in Bochum, Germany that was designed for the Ruhrtriennale, a festival for theatre, music, dance and arts.

The 12-metre tall installation was designed to act as a totem, a temple and a beacon. "It symbolizes the power of humanity over the world and pays tribute to the ingenuity, the sophistication and the capacities of humanity, to the power of organisation, and to the use of this power to dominate the natural environment," said Joep van Lieshout, in his project description.

According to the same source, three committee members chose the art piece to be exhibited in the Tuileries Gardens within the framework of this year's Fiac. A total of 30 contemporary artistic installations will be presented in the Tuileries during this year’s Fiac festival, and even 20 pieces will publicly be on view for the many garden visitors.

Image courtesy of Lost at E Minor

But "the work 'Domestikator' was presented after these commissions," the spokeswoman said to New York Times, which didn’t allow for a discussion of the "presentation in the garden collegially."

The French newspaper Le Monde also declared the president of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez's statement in a letter sent to the FIAC on September 26, Jean-Luc Martinez, nevertheless justified his refusal by stating that "legends on the Internet circulate and attribute to this work a vision too brutal that may be misunderstood by our traditional audience of the Jardin des Tuileries."

The museum also raised its concerns about the installation of the Domestikator not to display it near a children's playground. "This is total hypocrisy," said Joop Van Lieshout. 

"In Bochum, whole classes came to see the Domestikator. People saw something funny but not decadent, and if children see something sexual, it is because they are old enough to see it," he added.

According to Julien Lombrail, co-director of the gallery Carpenters Workshop, FIAC and the City of Paris would have tried to find another location. "But it's too late ," he said. The work is imposing, it weighs 30 tons, and the delays too short.

All images courtesy of Atelier Van Lieshout, unless stated otherwise

> via NY Times/Le Monde