Freedom of expression: the SFAI controversy
Last week, the
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) suspended, and then ultimately cancelled a controversial exhibition by artist
Adel Abdessemed. The show, entitled, “Don’t Trust Me” included video of animals being slaughtered with a sledgehammer. The artist claims that the images are a social critique about food production and the contrast between the industrial. In a
statement about the exhibition, SFAI President Chris Bratton explained, “Abdessemed participated in an already existing circuit of food production in a rural community in Mexico. The animals were raised for food, purchased and professionally slaughtered. In fact, the central point of the controversy is that Abdessemed, an artist, entered this exchange, filmed it, and exhibited it. “
Animal rights groups, including PETA and the SPCA, argue that the images are shock art and snuff film. One of the groups’ central arguments for the closing of the exhibition is that it is partially funded by taxpayers. Indeed, SFAI receives about $80,000 in hotel taxes each year that helps fund its public exhibitions and visiting artist lecture series. In a statement to the
San Francisco Chronicle, Jan McHugh-Smith, director of the San Francisco SPCA said, “The San Francisco Art Institute used poor judgment in supporting ‘shock art’ in San Francisco. To take this type of brutality against animals, call it art and use tax money to support it is deplorable.”
I did not see the exhibition at SFAI, so I can’t comment on whether it’s ‘shock art’ or has artistic merit or glorifies animal abuse. (I am inclined to think, however, particularly after the recent
Westland/ Hallmark slaughterhouse scandal that spawned a massive beef recall, a slaughterhouse film could only further animal rights and would in all likelihood not, as Eliot Katz of In Defense of Animals contended, “send a terrible message to Art Institute students that it's OK to go out and do similar things.”) That said, it’s dangerous to argue that a controversial exhibition should be shut down because it’s partially, or even entirely, funded by taxpayers. Remember that Giuliani tried to do this from the other side of the political spectrum in 1999, threatening to shut down
“Sensation”, a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that included work critical of the Catholic Church.
Throughout history, from the early depictions of the crucifix in the twelfth century to Goya’s Los Capricios to Degas’ Ballerinas to Picasso’s Guernica, art has challenged authority, societal norms, and accepted standards of decency. This is part of the role of art and the artist; art should engage the viewer; it should provoke thought. Sometimes the artist asks us to think about perspective or color or the nature of painting, and sometimes he asks us to contemplate more difficult subjects: death, the inconsistencies of certain organizations or religions, the cost of war. When we ask that public funds be rescinded for artistic statements that are offensive to some group or critical of some aspect of contemporary society, we are asking the government to fringe upon the artists’ First Amendment rights.
There are those that argue that rescinding funding for these offensive/ critical/ challenging works is not the same as saying that they can’t be made or shown; they simply shouldn’t be made with government funding, or shown in institutions that receive taxpayers’ dollars. This isn’t censorship, they say. Yet, if we do this, we cause self-censorship. Artists and arts organizations and institutions will forgo riskier, controversial endeavors in favor of safer, less critical projects that will more readily receive funding. When this happens, we risk cultural atrophy. Indeed, this was/is the fate for many of the communist nations that practiced such censorship, including East Germany, Romania, Poland and Russia.
Furthermore, where would such censorship stop? Public libraries are funded with taxpayers’ money. Should controversial books be removed from them? Several cities are working to provide free and low-cost internet connections to their entire municipality. Should they be allowed, or even obligated, to block connections to offensive imagery, artwork, critical thought, etc, in the way that
China blocks YouTube videos and filters the results of search engines like Google and Yahoo. It is, after all, taxpayers who are paying for this dissemination of information. They are not paying to be encountered with offensive material!
Indeed, such a notion sounds ridiculous in the United States, a democratic nation founded, in part, upon principles of free speech. Yet, over the last thirty years, there have been several battles regarding the restriction of arts funding based upon content, beginning with the 1989 amendment to the National Endowment of the Arts funding that NEA required all grant recipients to certify in advance that none of the funds would be used “to promote, disseminate, or produce materials which in the judgment of the NEA … may be considered obscene.” After several court battles, this amendment was struck down as unconstitutional and in 1998 with
The NEA v Finley, the law was most recently redefined to state that the government is not required to subsidize controversial or offensive work. It may (but is not obligated to) consider public decency standards when funding work. However, once funds are provided, it may not withdraw them because it disagrees with the message of the work. To do this would be to censorship.
Be wary of encroaching upon another's civil rights, no matter what your cause is.
The "Aspiring" Artist
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed the phrase “aspiring artist” being used to describe the young MFA’s who populate Philadelphia, Jersey City, and some of New York’s seedier neighborhoods. For example, on NPR’s
Fresh Air, author
Richard Price spoke about the aspiring artists living in New York’s lower east side. He goes on to further describe them as “Would-be artists working in restaurants…a wave of MFA’s.”
I take exception to the use of the word “aspiring” before any young person who strives to make his or her living through art. Aspiring: hopeful, would-be, wannabe. The word either conjures images of optimistic naiveté-- a cherubic, Heidi-like girl-woman who paints watercolors from her easel in the woods, and dreams of moving to the big city so that she can sell her paintings and “make it,” or it feels like a sarcastic snort aimed at slacker hipsters living off an allowance from their parents as they claim to make art, but actually spend most of their time shopping for albums and vintage t-shirts, and drinking PBR at Williamsburg bars.
Yet, to describe someone who has invested time and money in a fine arts education as aspiring is insulting. It’s particularly derogatory when it refers to someone who has received an MFA, a terminal degree in the visual arts. Is a PhD of Early Christian Art an aspiring scholar? Is an MBA an aspiring businessperson? Is a JD an aspiring lawyer? We are not aspiring artists; we are artists! We may aspire to be well known, even famous, but we need not aspire to be artists. For that, we need to continue to engage in creative pursuits, to make art.
Indeed, today, that is all one needs to do in order to be an artist— make art. Historically, one had to apprentice to be an artist. Now, that craft is not viewed as integral to art (in fact, it’s often looked down upon), there is no real requirement for calling oneself an artist. This is further complicated by the fact that “What is art?” remains one of the great philosophical questions. Hence, although we can get undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, new media, and other fine art genres, these degrees are not technically requisites for the artist; artmaking is the sole qualifier for an artist, and we’re not even sure what that is.
So, perhaps artists are to blame for allowing anyone with a pair of scissors, a glue stick, some glitter, a found object, and some free time one Saturday afternoon to stake claim to our profession. But the artist who lives her life in pursuit of creativity, as a researcher, a thinker and a maker is not aspiring; she is.
The Artist's Workweek
Last week, on
WHYY’s Radio Times, Marty Moss-Coane spoke with Jerry Jacobs and Laurie Granieri about the workweek in America. Granieri, a journalist at Central Jersey’s
Home News Tribune newspaper, has recently garnered attention for her decision to stop working at 5:00pm each day so that she “can see the sunset.” Jacobs, a professor of sociology at Penn talked about the pressure for professionals to work long hours, often well beyond a forty-hour workweek. The discussion focused on the work expectations for white-collar, salaried workers such as lawyers, investment bankers, and business people, but it got me thinking about the typical artist’s work week, and the time commitment that an artist feels obliged to give to his or work.
Most artists are unable to support themselves solely with their artwork. Unfortunately, there are few landlords who are willing to barter paintings for rent, and even fewer electricity, gas, and cell phone service providers willing to do so. What’s more, the present weak economy does not inspire many people to purchase art. And, even if an artist does regularly sell his or her work, the income from such sales is still usually not enough to sustain oneself.
Thus, part of the artist’s workweek is often spent working some other job or jobs. Artists clamor for low paying employment that is in some way related to a creative field, if only peripherally. Lifting art, or cataloguing it into a database still allows us to maintain some closeness to the art world. “I moved a Louise Bourgoise today,” someone will brag. Or, “I catalogued a new Takashi Murakami.” I still talk with pride about the day I got to gather twigs in Riverside Park for William Kentridge to use as drawing tools.
Indeed, artists are art movers and handlers; we are adjunct professors; we are framers; we are museum ticket takers; we are gallery admins; we are assistants for other, more prominent artists. Most of these jobs are not fulltime and do not offer benefits, so we often work two, or sometimes three of them. Or we’ll search for odd jobs and the occasional opportunity to be the subject of a medical research experiment for some extra cash.
And then, in the evenings or mornings or weekends or Wednesdays or whatever time we have to ourselves, we must cook and clean and do our laundry, just like most Americans, but we must make our art too, for that is what makes us artists. We feel guilty about any free moment that is not used to make work. Still, we also have to make time to remain knowledgeable about our field-- to visit museums and galleries, to read art publications, to go to conferences, to watch
Art:21 on PBS.
Even then, our jobs as artists are not done. We also spend hours each week on
NYFA,
Transartists,
CAA and even
craigslist searching for grants, residencies and exhibition opportunities. Still more time is spent putting together packets and applications, most of which will ultimately be rejected.
Indeed, artists work well beyond the traditional forty-hour workweek, even beyond the sixty, seventy or eighty hour workweek that many professionals bemoan. We do so not for any great financial compensation, but simply in the spirit of creativity, of making, of some belief that the world needs art.
Artists' Obligations
I've recently made a decision to attempt to make work that is more overtly political. For some time I've been very aware of the materials I use to make my work-- where they are made, where they are purchased from, or whether they are purchased at all or instead recycled from old work or found materials. Yet this is not immediately, or perhaps ever, obvious to the viewer who looks at my work. And, as someone who obsessively reads the editorial pages of the NY Times and Washington Post, who listens to NPR podcasts rather than music on my long runs, who subjects her friends to rants about corporate socialism, environmentalism, and the myriad present social injustices, I've begun to feel that not making a more explicit statement with my artwork is irresponsible.
In fact, do artists have a responsibility to make work that critiques, protests, or even simply comments on actions that have led to a world that is being suffocated by carbon dioxide, people fighting in a war that began with false pretenses, major health crises, government sanctioned oppression of groups of people, government sanctioned torture, the list goes on. Should art have a social message? I’ve often postulated that the personal is in the end the universal, which is in some way political. Thus, it is only necessary to create works that have meaning for the artist; the rest flows naturally.
Yet, certainly there is precedent for great political art—Goya’s
Los Capricios, Picasso’s
Guernica, Judy Chicago’s
The Dinner Party, and more recently, the work of
William Kentridge about apartheid in South Africa, and
Daniel Heyman’s prints and installations about the Iraqi detainees and the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Still, art remains a useless commodity. That is, after all, what makes it art; it has no function other than to be admired, and perhaps to engage the viewer, to make one think. Great art will please the viewer multiple levels: it is interesting superficially, and, for some, it will also inspire closer inspection—research, study, reflection, action that will ultimately lead to a more enriching experience.
Indeed, as makers of a useless commodity in a world of rapidly depleting resources, artists need to make work that engages the viewer, even arouses him or her to learn more, to take action. We have enough vapid escapes from reality in the form of television, video games, ridiculous YouTube videos, and our other passive forms of entertainment. Art does not need to offer an escape.
I take some solace in the belief that simply choosing to be an artist is a political statement. In a culture that places a high value on corporations, superficial scandal and anti-intellectual beliefs, the artist’s actions say that there is worth in creative pursuits. There is value in studying art, in studying how to make art, in examining the philosophy that drives art; there is value in learning and in making.
I continue to accept that the personal becomes the universal, that the individual is key to ultimately accessing the collective unconscious. Yet, particularly now, shouldn't the political be what we are personally interested in? In order for art to remain relevant, valuable, and not simply a beautiful yet vapid commodity, art needs to be about something that matters.
Spencer Finch at Mass MOCA
I recently saw Brooklyn based artist, Spencer Finch’s show,
What Time Is It on the Sun? at
Mass MOCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts. The show is an investigation of nature—of light, color, wind, and gravity-- that is both conceptually and visually interesting.
The exhibits included are Finch’s sometimes obsessive and often poetic attempt to capture ephemera, the results of exercise in experiential study. For example, in order to create
Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), Finch worked with a flashlight in a parking lot in the Painted Desert, mixing colors to match the color of the sky. He then weighed the physical mass of each pigment in the mixture and calculated the molecular ratio of each color in the combination. Each of the 401 incandescent bulbs of varying sizes is then used to create electrified models of each pigment’s molecular structure.
CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) uses stained glass filters to transform the day light into the color of candlelight, as determined by a colorimeter.
Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA August 28, 2004) uses a specific mixture of florescent lights to replicate the Massachusetts sunlight in Emily Dickinson’s yard on a late August afternoon. A cloud is then depicted with a mass of translucent blue, gray and violet filters that are held together with clothespins. As they walk around Finch’s cellophane cloud, viewers can then experience the precise light conditions made by the passing cloud in Dickinson’s yard.
Particularly interesting and unexpected is Finch’s choice of materials; they include cellophane, florescent light bulbs, incandescent lights, fans and artificial turf—synthetic materials that Finch manipulates to describe the organic or natural phenomena.
Pictured are:
Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004), CIE 529/418 (Candlelight) and Sunlight in an Empty room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA August 28, 2004)
Residency
I'm presently halfway through a six week residency at the
Women's Studio Workshop, in Rosendale, NY, which is just past New Paltz, in the Hudson River Valley.
I just installed my show, entitled
Pollinators: Bees and Bats in their gallery. Pictured are images from the show.
