There is apparently something in the water in St. Paul, MN. How else do we account for the second story in a couple of months involving Islam, calls for the suppression of art, and St. Paul liberal arts colleges?
You will perhaps recall, Gentle Reader, the brouhaha at Hamline University when art historian Erika López Prater showed a couple of artistic renderings of the prophet Muhammad to her class on global art history. She understood that some Muslim students might object to viewing the images, and gave them fair warning, both in the course syllabus and on class day.
Still, a student who ignored those warnings, egged on by the advisor to the Muslim Student Association, claimed to have been “blindsided,” and the accusations of Islamophobia popped up faster than zits on prom night. The administration, being the perfect storm of stupidity, laziness, and cowardice, promptly sided with the student without as much as a real investigation, and López Prater was out of a job.
Ultimately, after nationwide humiliation and a lawsuit filed by López Prater, the university backed down. The faculty, who with one notable exception had earlier cheerfully capitulated to the violation of academic freedom, miraculously became vertebrates apparently overnight and demanded the resignation of the university president. No news on whether that will happen, although Curmie doubts it.
About a mile and a half from Hamline’s campus is Macalester College, a slightly smaller but considerably more prestigious institution. Curmie actually spent some time on that campus many years ago: the place Curmie was teaching at the time was in the same consortium, and he was one of his college’s representatives at some sort of colloquium held there (Curmie forgets the details).
Anyway, the college’s Law Warschaw Gallery opened an exhibition of work by Iranian-American artist Taravat Talepasand. Talepasand, to say the least, doesn’t shy away from controversy. She is overtly feminist and calls her art “unapologetic”; the blurb accompanying the exhibition says she “explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority.” Judging by what Curmie has seen of her work, both in articles on the exhibition and on her website, that would seem to be a fair description.
Among the items on display are the neon sign you see pictured above, with the words “Woman, Life, Freedom” written in both Farsi and English—this slogan became a rallying cry of the Kurdish independence movement, widely adopted by women’s groups worldwide to show support for women protesting in Iran. It came to particular prominence in response to the death of Mahsa Amini, who was beaten to death by Iran’s Guidance Patrol (“morality police”) for wearing her hijab “improperly.”
Other pieces, some of which you can see in the links above and here (note, by the way, the endorsement of Dr. López Prater, who coincidentally is now teaching a course at Macalester), are more overtly provocative. Curmie quotes here from the excellent article in Sahan Journal linked above):
One drawing shows Talepasand’s mother standing with the woman who funded her education. A phallic arch looms behind the women. The descriptive gallery label that accompanies the drawing explains that this arch represents the shadow of male power….
Some of the images are yet more provocative. One graphite and watercolor drawing shows a man beheading two women. An egg tempera painting called “Mohammed Meets Jesus” shows a teddy bear with a Ken doll, an allusion to the Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case.
And some graphite drawings show the bodies of Muslim women wearing hijabs or niqabs—clothing that is usually meant to preserve modesty. Two drawings, titled Blasphemy X and Blasphemy IX, show a niqab-clad woman pulling up her robe to reveal lingerie underneath. A series of porcelain sculptures show women who are entirely covered with a niqab, except for exposed, exaggerated breasts.
This is an exhibition explicitly designed to ruffle feathers, in other words. It did. In what is, alas, a predictable response, student Ikran Noor heard about the exhibition from a friend and then sought it out—well, sort of. She never went inside, viewing the images in the exhibition catalog. She then pronounced herself “degraded, dehumanized.” Give me a fucking break. If you’re that tender, perhaps a university (or indeed any place requiring adult interaction) isn’t for you.
Naturally, she plays the victim card: she’s one of the only students at Macalester to wear a hijab, for example. She whines that “At a predominantly white institution, when I’m looking at who’s attending the school, who’s walking into this exhibit, without understanding and nuance, then it’s quite harmful.” And who, pray tell, is “harmed,” and in what way? You didn’t like some of it. Fine. Look away.
Above all, don’t spew tripe like supporting the cause of Iranian women while simultaneously seeking to have the university take down some of the more explicit pieces. In other words, your argument is that if you agree with the politics of an artwork, it’s fine, but if you don’t, then no one should be able to see it.
Curmie hopes that some of his former theatre history students will recognize here the foundational philosophy of socialist realism. (For the benefit of everyone else: socialist realism was the literally Stalinist belief that only art that actively supported the Party could be allowed; even non-political art was derided as “formalist,” sometimes resulting in the artist’s receiving a one-way trip to Siberia... or worse.)
Anyway, the university caved, but less so than might be expected. They shrouded some of the work behind black curtains, installed frosted glass on some gallery windows, and issued a wimpy apology: “We… recognize community impact and understand that pieces in the exhibition have caused harm [there’s that word, again] to members of our Muslim community.”
Miraculously, however, for an institution as self-consciously international and liberal as Macalester, the line quoted above comes in the context of the announcement that the exhibition would re-open with a few relatively minor changes designed to “prevent unintentional or non-consensual viewing of certain works.” And they added a content warning.
Naturally, the complaining students believed that the university wasn’t listening to their concerns. Rather, the administration also listened to other Muslim students who staunchly supported Talepasand (as well as to other students, faculty, and staff), and acted about as appropriately as they could under the circumstances, except for the whimpering apology.
Noor and her supporters, all the while pretending to understand free expression, circulated a petition, citing alleged “targeting and harming an already small community” and “the deep pain felt by many of their students,” urging Macalester to close the exhibition. Even enlisting friends from outside the college, however, they mustered only about 80 signatures. The petition was posted on the door to the gallery, a decision Talepasand called a “violation.” It was, of course.
When Curmie was an undergrad, all student mailboxes were in the fine arts building, and you’d have to take a pretty circuitous route from most of campus to check your mail without walking past the glass-windowed art gallery. The theatre department’s scene shop, also with windows, was immediately opposite the mailboxes. This was all intentional on the part of the college, of course.
If Macalester has something like the same phenomenon—that students pretty much can’t avoid looking into the art gallery on their way to do other business—then the frosted glass and construction paper, blocking the view from the outside, make a fair amount of sense; so does the content warning. Offending people for the sake of offending people doesn’t play well in Curmieville.
It might be worth mentioning here that FIRE is predictably foam-flecked in their assessment, describing Macalester’s resolution of the issue as:
…a rather sinister way to define controversial imagery: not just as something that could offend or upset, but as something that violates an accidental viewer’s consent. It’s a comically bad lesson to teach students that they should expect the words and images they encounter through the course of their lives to be understood as an exercise of their own consent, and not another’s right to free expression. That it’s employed for a show that in part protests the violation of women’s rights is an added layer of absurdity.
This time, Curmie doesn’t agree with FIRE, or at least with this part of their screed. Their argument may be reasonable in legal terms, but it’s just daft in terms of real-world application. Macalester’s actions are simply the equivalent of telling a prospective movie-goer that this film is rated R, and why.
Shutting down even part of the exhibition because someone might be offended is deeply problematic, but requiring a patron simply to have to walk through an unlocked door to see it—a situation de facto demanded by the overwhelming majority of art galleries and museums across the country and around the world—doesn’t strike Curmie as much of a violation of free expression.
Indeed, since that brief shutdown, Macalester seems to have made good choices in both ethical and political terms. To say they handled their situation better than Hamline handled theirs is rather like saying that NBA centers tend to be taller than jockeys.
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