As the building, then dwindling, though persistent, storm of conversation, gossip, frustration, mixed with the misreported words of the recent article, "Art Exhibitions Pulled From Arts Festival; Students Call it ‘Censorship' Based on Aesthetics," in The Statesman continued to roll through personal emails, onto listservs, into conversations about the circumstances of not only morale but even a sense of viability of individuals and their scholarship on Stony Brook's beautifully landscaped but prosaically hierarchic campus, I sat with the Chair of the Art Department, Professor Anita Moskowitz, to ask basically four questions about the outcome of the art installation, "Unbound," and the separate event, "Who is Asia America." Sponsored and co-sponsored, respectively, by the Art Department, these events featured the work of some of the University's most promising students of art. Both of which met with not only interference but imposed reconfiguration (that is to say, the removal of one installation piece and the restraint of a performance) because of liability issues presented by the President and her Office after the commencement of these events.
Below are the questions with which I entered the interview, though they became conversational almost immediately because of Professor Moskowitz' candid, precise, and thoroughly concerned style of engagement with the implications of these happenings for her department, faculty and students. For the reader to have a sense of the directions of the interview itself, the main desire being to develop agreed upon narratives surrounding these two art shows' curtailment, and to bring to light "facts" concerning the things that have transpired since, below are the questions after their being fleshed-out further by Moskowitz' knowledge of the different striations of these circumstances. I recom(pose) them to readers as this interview becomes an essay to think on how these events factor not only into life at Stony Brook, but more broadly into patterns of the North American University today.
Question 1: Do you have any corrections to the existing narratives about the events on April 16th? Julianne Gadoury's case has been the most incendiary, in which her installation of Polar Bear (conceptualized within questions of global warming, and supported by various departments in the Humanities and the Sciences) suspended a few feet above a pool in the Wang Center was instructed to be brought down (because of liability issues) but was given two days to remain on display after President Kenny saw the work for herself. Though by 7pm that same night, Gadoury had chosen to take down and dismantle the large piece before a crowd of about 50 people.
Question 2: What are your thoughts on the uses of the terms "aesthetics" and "censorship" in The Statesman article, and in public conversation. In my reading and listening, they seem to be articulated both in The Statesman article and in broader conversation without acumen, contextualization, or definition, basically, without understanding the historical, social and legal gravity of these signifiers.
Question 3: Regarding the following constellation, do you see a direct connection between elements of it and the actions taken by the President regarding the aforementioned festival's artworks: Faculty and now Graduate Student Petitions declaring loss of ACADEMIC confidence in President Kenny; at least two responses in Newsday to the piece "Crisis on Long Island Campus" which reduce the petitioners to a few disgruntled people in the Humanities and otherwise magnify Kenny's fund-raising developments and continued support of the "Hard" Sciences, as well as new programs such as Journalism, the Manhattan campus, yielding more and more undergraduate students (though some of them make it through their degrees without having had a single Professor teach a class), none of which are inherently bad things, though these ecritures reverberate with the incomplete idea that in this University there is not an important if not essential interconnection and respect across these divisions that is lacking which would make for healthy and productive overall campus life, morale, productivity; the unrest among continuing graduate students who are being cast as begrudging of the incoming students' stipends rather than responding to a another manifestation of "The Administration's" generally disinterested responses to the needs of those already employed, working as TA's and junior scholars, the financial circumstances that have been inadequately fixed for many years, again revealing the university's bias toward one side of the campus over the other in that the stipends of students in the sciences are incomparable to those in the arts; and now this bumbled handling of both the art works at the "Unbound" installation, April 16th, and "Who is Asia America," on April 24th, a separate show that also ended with Administrative interventions in the work of the performance artist, Elizabeth Heifferon?
Question 4: Has there been any dialogue with the Administration, particularly with the President, about the events sponsored by the Art Department or about the many rumors that have spun since?
As these questions are not really separate in their construction, they became fluid in the conversation with Professor Moskowitz who was very interested in articulating her readings of this situation through the field of accuracies and inaccuracies in regard to these shows, the positions of the artists whose works were compromised, removed, or prohibited from proceeding as conceptualized by the artist, and offered several important responses.
To question three she did not see a connection between the removal and prohibitions placed on the artists and their works based on procedural and legal liability arguments, and the other elements that I brought together in my constellation. Though these things exist in recent printed discourse surrounding Stony Brook life, and with their emergence into daily conversations I argue that life here has reached a particular sense of imbalance, Professor Moskowitz states that, "I believe there is no relationship between the issues raised by the petition regarding financial issues in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the events connected with the Kenny arts festival." Regarding the issue of stipend increases for incoming graduate students, Professor Moskowitz, "understood the necessity or at least the motivation for offering higher stipends to attract the best students, just as new faculty conventionally are offered higher pay than those who have been hired earlier, in order to get the best people in an increasingly competitive academic marketplace." There is, indeed, a clear and important correlation between being competitive in yielding the best quality of student or professor and the amount of money that a given department can offer. There is also a correlation in the productivity, quality of life, and success of students becoming junior scholars as they advance into the more demanding stages of their work on a dissertation, and their economic situation and health care.
Following these events on the 16th and 24th, and after meetings with faculty and students about what was known, seen, heard, said surrounding these occurrences, Moskowitz wrote a three page letter to President Kenny and her office by "mandate," the letter notes, of the voiced results of these meetings. I have been given permission to quote from this letter. Though I will mention first, and by way of indicating the response to question four, that President Kenny's response to this letter reveals a tone of regret for the manner in which things were handled on the 16th and 24th. She emphasized that the freedom of speech and symbolic speech were of utmost importance to her, that the system had failed to meet the needs of the students, but that censorship was not a defensible term, stating, "I'm not sure why anyone would want to censor a sustainability message [at S.B.] anyway." According to her, these works were not censored given the legal prism of implications, but removed or curtailed because of liability issues in the Wang Center, further underlining that the student-artists' good intentions of getting approval for their installations from various sources, though apparently not the ultimate ones, were undermined and eventually overruled by an inchoate stance on and communication of protocol.
Below are a couple paragraphs from Moskowitz' letter, which she, and I agree, believes sufficient to clarify not only some of the inaccurate reporting, but also as a representative feeling of many in the Art Department incensed by these events' outcomes, to the point that there was initial talk of contacting The ACLU which evolved into what is the primary impetus of the letter: to institute and document protocol, clear and necessary procedures for the display of art work on campus in the future. Having said this, as there is a response option on this article, I encourage those who were part of these events to post accurate comments, additions, etcetera, as no document can be totalizing in its ambitions.
From the letter written and emailed to President Kenny and cc'd to Provost Kaler and Dean Staros on April 28th, after meetings with faculty and students:
"After voicing my objection to requiring Julianne to pull down her installation [Polar Bear], I explained the rationale for its Wang Center site with its stated mission and function. I refer now to the Center's web page: ‘The Charles B. Wang Center initiates and collaborates with academic departments, student groups, community organizations, and individuals in presenting the public with a multifaceted, intellectually sound, and humane understanding of Asian and Asian American cultures, and their relationship to other cultures. The Wang Center is also a presenting venue for events of cultural, professional and intellectual caliber that are initiated by and involve the various components of Stony Brook University, Long Island communities and organizations as well as other regional, national, and international constituencies. The Wang Center is non-partisan and non-sectarian, and upholds the values of pluralism, democracy, and equality.' The student and her advisor reasonably believed that issues of global warming and sustainability were concerns that had a legitimate venue in the Wang Center.
Julianne had been told that the problem was liability: the installation could fall and damage the pool. At one point you implied that you did not like the image and since artworks contribute to the public image of Stony Brook, it seemed inappropriate. Finally, it emerged that the work could remain on site until Friday because a Saturday wedding was to take place in the Center. This certainly gives the impression that financial considerations (the renting out of the space) took precedence over issues of liability or freedom of expression. All this, on the one hand, led to outrage and very poor morale among both faculty and students of the Art Department; on the other, it has mobilized and unified students and faculty to raise objections to censorship, lack of freedom of expression, and extremely poor protocol in dealing with the hierarchy of permissions, and the precipitous and non-negotiable directives after the fact."
I quote these two paragraphs particularly, near to the close of the letter and just before an analogy was drawn by Professor Moskowitz between this and a recent happening to a Yale undergraduate performance artist which also suffered the heaviness of the university's contradictions, because they serve not only to emphasize important details of the progression of events, to complicate the scene around the pool in the Wang Center, but also because they speak to all intellectuals of shared concerns within debates and conversations of globalization restructuring effects on the American university with its increasingly unabashed and traceable yieldings to outside business deals for ‘support,' be they with an individual renting out a space or a corporation offering money on certain and anti-intellectual conditions. Artworks by students on campus do say something of Stony Brook's "image," as does the call to attention that has created resistance on the parts of faculty and students to defend art's place on campus.
The title of this piece, the question, means to open itself to several possibilities. A pale is a barrier, a boundary, its denotative meaning in this expression's context implies that there is a societal boundary that, once crossed, becomes a symbol for the threshold between what is and is not unlawful, what is within and beyond acceptability. While "Unbound" was conceived as a play on boundaries, designated spaces for art, it seems to have come up against far more than it had bargained for: the eminence of the language of insurance and the law. Not these two entities of themselves, but the power that lies in enunciating, saying these words. Then again, from a certain angle, displacing works and actions of art without offering another venue for them to perform in the next breath after uttering, "but, liability...," to display themselves, should also be considered beyond the pale, all legal considerations of the Wang Center's pillars and pools taken into account.
Julianne Gadoury, the artist of Polar Bear, has already composed a corrective letter to The Statesman writer, and I encourage readers to see her Artist's Statement online to have some sense of her piece's thinking of itself. See, also, Emily Churilla's interview with her available in this month's SBGradMag.
I thank Professor Moskowitz for her time and care in having this conversation with me and the magazine.
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