I would have thought that seeing Stephen Harper naked would be yucky. But actually, I quite approve. And not just because I love nudie pictures. 

Making the headlines today is Kingston artist Margaret Sutherland's Emperor Haute Couture: a portrait of Prime Minister Steve that appropriates Édouard Manet's 1863 Olympia to retell Hans Christian Anderson’s 1837 fairy tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes." 

Here's an image of the painting linked from Sutherland's website:

HuffPost's Michael Bolen speculates that the portrait is just making headlines now, after being out and about for a few weeks, because it comes at the same time as Heritage Minister James Moore's criticism of a sex education exhibit at Ottawa's Museum of Science and Technology. Facing public criticism as well, the museum was pressured to raise the minimum age of attendance for the exhibit from 12 to 16. As reported in the Globe and Mail yesterday, the Heritage Ministers criticisms were summarized by his spokesperson:

Mr. Maunder said its president was contacted because its mandate “is to foster scientific and technological literacy throughout Canada.”

“It is clear this exhibit does not fit within that mandate,” Mr. Maunder said. “Its content cannot be defended, and is insulting to taxpayers.”

Fuck biology. That shit's for pussies and art fags. Display more fighter jets (we could buy you some...)! Develop a new partnership with industry (or we'll cut your funding...)!

Getting Steve naked might not help the Museum of Science and Technology much – and in fact, they better watch out, before they find themselves up on the Conservatives’ culture and history chopping block – but I’ll let the HuffPost speculate, and add some contextualizing links of my own between Naked Steve and Steve Who Is Fucking Up Our Country.

But should Steve’s naked body really be the focus of a political critique?

As Rebecca Tushnet writes, sexualization is widely-practiced as a method of parody. In fact, a parody that uses sexualization (usually of women) is more likely to be judged a “fair use” by U.S. courts than is a parody using any other method. (Tushnet argues that, rather than limiting the sexualized copies we consider fair use, we should be critical of the sexism manifested by the system as-is while also working against it by expanding and better understanding definitions of fair use.) Even in supposedly “original” works, it’s not like female nudes are an unfamiliar, or unproblematic, sight.

But this isn’t just any body, this is Steve’s body. Does being a political leader automatically make it our business? I have no sympathy for Steve. I don’t want to hear about his right to privacy, his bodily autonomy, his objectification-free existence. You know why? Because Steve doesn’t want me to have any of that shit. He’s well known for his personal positions against civil rights for homos and, much more dangerously, against reproductive justice rights for women. He promised not to re-open those issues, but parliament debated abortion rights as recently as last month.

So fuck you, Harper Government. Can’t keep your hands out of my vag? Then I’m gonna gaze at your wang.

While he is lacking all the usual trappings of power in Emperor Haute Couture – and is especially underdressed compared to his suit-clad entourage – Steve's confrontational gaze, like the original Olympia’s, speaks to power, not to submissiveness or subordination. Manet's painting -- itself an homage to Titian's Venus de Urbino, though it was taken by some as a parody (Williams) -- was shocking in its day. Described by Mary Elizabeth Williams, the reaction to its exhibition was fierce:

Olympia meets us eye to eye. It’s an ingenious and unsettling device, a bit of artist’s revenge. The image in the frame is the one doing the sizing up, and it is we who are left feeling appraised — and potentially rejected. The critics, unaccustomed to having the tables so turned on them, were quick to serve up rejections of their own. They hated the subject matter. They hated the flat, primitive style. They hated everything about it.

Steve's bedroom eyes, like Olympia's, draw the viewer into the scene as a potential participant. Coupled with the absence of Olympia's jewelery and decorations, Sutherland's painting suggests that Harper's status doesn't need to be constructed -- his presence is enough indication of his intentions -- and that he's not the one about to get fucked in this relationship.

The reaction to the image of Steve hasn't been tainted with quite the same whorephobic misogyny as the reaction to Olympia, but it has caused its fair share of complaints. Emperor Haute Couture has seen some censorship, both at the Kingston Public Library, where it is currently on display, and in news media reporting on the exhibition. As the Huffington Post reports, at the library, because the room it's in is sometimes used for children's events, staff risked damaging the painting by taking it down, until the artist got fed up and gave them a cloth to cover it. In news media, poor, naked Steve has been afflicted with a series of crotch blurs and blackout shapes, which I can only assume are the symptoms of some horrible, unbearably itchy, incurable sexually transmitted infection. Too bad about those cuts to reproductive and sexual health research (among others), eh? (Oh wait – women’s health funding doesn’t affect Steve. Those are just dumb photoshop moves by the newspaper editors. Damn.)

But putting Steve on display makes total sense. His central role in relation to his minions is a whitewashed rewrite of Olympia’s racist presentation of Laura, a black maid, as anonymous background decor and feminizing “tonal contrast”. It is also a real thing (I was looking for the news article I saw about how he has an entourage run beside his car, clapping, every morning, but ah well); Steve's minions are as much his personal fan club as they appear in the painting. And he loves to be on display: didn’t he rename the Government of Canada the “Harper Government”? Didn’t he swap out portraits of past Prime Ministers for portrait after portrait of himself? Maybe he’ll buy this one, too. Steve is all about putting himself in the centre and on display (as long as it’s on his terms only), surrounded by carefully selected supporters.

That Sutherland’s painting has been censored in the library to protect the delicate eyeballs of children is an especially poignant irony, since in the fairy tale, it’s a child’s unaffected innocence that allows him to say what everyone else can already see: that the emperor is naked.

While Sutherland’s two most prominent citations are Victorian cultural productions, she also appropriates that icon, that trademark (really) of corporate Canadiana: the Tim Hortons coffee cup. It’s appropriate. Tim Hortons is really important to Steve. In 2009, he skipped discussing "nuclear proliferation, global peace and climate change" at a United Nations general assembly (a habitual absence) to throw a "welcome home" party for Tim Hortons, which had just transferred back from U.S. to Canadian ownership.

But for the rest of us, the replacement of Olympia’s luxurious gift of flowers from a lover with the stuff of “ordinary” Canadianness is a reminder of the mundanity of the display. We’re so shocked to see Steve’s nakedness here, but he puts it on every day: with election fraud, austerity, wild prison and military spending, devastating environmental policy, cruel anti-immigration and criminalization bills, and every other major WTF moment we’ve had since Steve came to power. It’s all-Full-Monty-all-day here in Canada, with Steve the Naked Emperor.