Feminist fundamentalism - women against images - controversy over art censorship - Column

Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Carole S. Vance

Evidently panicked by the charge that some of the art works were pornographic or dangerous, student organizers immediately removed most of the videos from the installation-sight unseen, and without consulting or even informing the curator. What the students seemed to regard as a minor adjustment ("we agreed to take out a portion [of the show]"[10]) in fact eliminated the work of five of the seven artists.

The next day, curator Carol Jacobsen discovered that the videos were missing, when she learned the reasons for their removal, she objected strongly. "I told them they couldn't just pick out selected artwork and remove it from the exhibit, but they didn't seem to get it," Jacobsen told the New York Times.

They said it wasn't censorship; they were just trying to prevent people from getting their feelings upset. I said if they wished to censor any part, they would have to censor the whole thing. They came back and said, |Take it down.' And that's what happened."[11]

In the ensuing months, Jacobsen waged an uphill battle at considerable personal cost to compel the university to redress the censorship.[12] She demanded reinstallation of the show, as well as a campus forum to address issues of feminism, representation, sexuality and censorship. At first, officials suggested they had no responsibility for the law students, actions, although the university funded the conference which had commissioned the exhibition and the art was removed from a university-owned gallery. In crafting this argument, university administrators attempted to narrow the question to one of strict legal liability: did the university violate the First Amendment rights of the artists? This framing diverted attention from a second, quite separate question: did censorship occur at the university, and did educators have a responsibility to examine the circumstances and speak out about the event?

Controversy raged across the campus, with students, Jacobsen and MacKinnon weighing in; Jacobsen,s attorneys, disturbed at unauthorized reproduction and circulation of tile artists, videos by school officials and students, threatened to sue the university for copyright violation, while MacKinnon vowed to sue the ACLU for alleged defamation over their press release about the incident.[13] The faculty at Michigan, however, was largely silent about the case, including professors in art, law and women,s studies. The threat of legal action by the ACLU Arts Censorship Project, combined with widespread news coverage and a major protest by arts-advocacy, feminist and free-speech groups, led to a March 17 agreement between the university and the artists to reinstall the exhibition and sponsor an educational forum on sexuality and freedom of expression.[14] Months after the agreement, however, plans for the reinstallation and forum are proceeding at a snail's pace.

The incident suggests several startling similarities to recent fundamentalist campaigns against art and the NEA. Most striking is the use of the term pornography" to describe any material with a sexual content or theme of which the viewer disapproves. Since pornography" carries an unmistakably pejorative connotation, the use of this word to describe any visual image involving sex or nudity serves aggressively to demote the status of the image or art work and, with no overt discussion, to bias the viewer's ability to consider it. This rhetorical sleight of hand, too, suggests that sexuality per se is inherently pornographic, a contention many would question if it were explicitly stated.[15]