Since the letter that Professor Anita Moskowitz, Chair of the Art Department, wrote to President Kenny on April 28th following the events that took place on April 16th at "Unbound" and April 24th at "Who is Asia America," on Friday, May 9th, the day after the Town Hall meeting about the budget crisis, a meeting took place consisting of art faculty and administrators selected and agreed upon by both President Kenny and Professor Moskowitz, to discuss the problems with university procedures and establish a committee that grants permissions for art installations in certain sites on campus so that in the future art and artists will not be as endangered by the flaws of the system that can quickly become vicious.
Professor Moskowitz wrote her department reporting the following details that resulted from this meeting with the President regarding the future committee and discussion of procedures:
"The committee will include the following members: Barbara Chernow (Chair and VP for Administratoin), Linda Merians (Assistant VP of President, serving as co-cordinator), one graduate student, two art department faculty (Nobi and Stephanie), Karen Kernan (Director URECA), someone from Student Affairs, and if needed, Donna DiDonato (of Undergraduate Affairs). [...]
A site plan will be developed by Chernow's office, which will indicate locations of pipes, drains, etc., etc., and which will mark out areas that can be considered, on an individual basis, for installations, taking into account underground obstructions, egress requirements, safety and liability issues. It was agreed that public installations will be juried by several members of the Art Department, who are not necessarily on the committee. A time frame for submission of proposals will be established.
It was also noted that maps on which specific installations are indicated would be given to campus police in order to enhance security and hopefully prevent the vandalism that took place during the Unbound exhibits."
As written here, the details of this meeting underline the intervention into the arts festival on the parts of the Administration as strictly being over concerns of legal liability, and seem to underscore Kenny's resistance to the term "censorship" in this context, as noted in my article, What Lies Beyond the Pale?... They also call attention to the importance of this issue in that the April 28th letter from Professor Moskowitz to President Kenny and the events of the week before were responded to with haste.
While the term censorship itself was used as an impulse almost in being used regarding Kenny's response to the installation and performance mentioned in the prior article, as its proximity to works of art is always tight, that it is inaccurate should not overdetermine stating that what happened around this festival was an infelicitous and irresponsible set of events.
It is important, in my mind, to emphasize to the campus community that, separate though within this broader narrative, vandalism is a part of this string of responses to/affronts on the art installations of this festival. One work was, in fact, later discovered in a dumpster. No doubt, as Professor Moskowitz stated in my interview with her on May 1st, everyone has the right to like or not like, that is, to form a response to a work of art, to a concept's fulfillment, but it is disturbing, to say the very least, when such acts of destruction take place particularly on a university campus, certainly within an already controversial event.
Within my critique, while vandalism of artwork may not be an immediately imagined sign of procedural breakdown, such as, for example, a building manager communicating approval for an installation to an artist or her mentor without being aware of the thickness of that which calls itself proper procedure which disapproves the installation and will override the situation with that disapproval, it is within a broader discourse of those who feel variously emboldened to remove, delete, rather than make a more civil, or intellectual, proposition of debating, discussing with words the ideas surrounding a work of art. There is a concern over anti-intellectualism and violence that presses through all of this conversation of formatting, bureaucracy, and vandalism.
Legal language is a self-legitimating entity. To say to an artist, as one in a position of power, that one must put a stop to and alter said performance or curtail an installation because of liability concerns, and that this becomes totally unquestionable or totalizingly valid is, in my mind, a different sort of concern over a different order of accountability. It must be asked why a bear weighing some 40 pounds hanging over a pool is more of a liability than many things already in that building or incidental to that building or other exhibits that have taken place there already. What are the differences? Why can that language be uttered in a public space and become overridingly more demanding and effective than a lot of other language that preceded that moment of enunciating the word: liability. One must critique harshly, not conciliatorily, approaches which are permissible, real, active, effective in the displacement or disqualification of art's being inside of certain spaces regardless of important and necessary moves on the parts of administrators.
Vandalism cannot be verified absolutely, with eye witnesses and documented testimony, though it is the assumption for why something on display in one place found its way into a dumpster. Dr. Kenny's "tastes" may be irrelevant to Polar Bear's hanging in the Wang Center, and before the scheduled wedding therein, as alluded to in my other piece, but it is part of the text of this situation, and could have something in the world to do with the time-frame that Kenny offered for Polar Bear to remain in the Wang Center. That two days were being allowed, from Wednesday the 16th until Friday, April 18th, for the installation to remain begs the question if liability concerns disappear in those two days, or does that set of days, this grace period for the work of art, possibly allow for other implications to be considered, since the wedding in the Wang Center was paid for to take place on Saturday. If "procedure" and "permissions" and "the law" are the terms which validate a work of art's presence, its being, being viewed, out, doing the work that it does, then despite the fact that President Kenny has made this a priority in responding to and meeting with members of the Art Department, these terms' very constitutions, their (self) legitimateness, are subjects which should be questioned. Their easy enunciation that overpowers should be questioned.
We should be vigilant always to the possible manifestations, certainly in the business of academe, of the recurrent impositions of the University's, the State's, the Corporation's overlaid yet fractured structures of power and how art, artists, humans and their productions, our praxis and poiesis, become beholden to things, forces who impose their wills (legal, in the case of the Administration or possibly political or mischievous in the case of vandals) and validate destruction or abrupt re-ordering by policy or invisibility.
At the end of all of this, one installation was not shown as it had been conceived by the artist. Another had to be shown by video rather than performed live as conceived by the artist. Another was torn from its site and thrown away like trash. Accountability, liability, answerability-if not a re-ordering of space that allows for the conceived-of displays to happen-to these realities is just as real as answering to the law.
I again thank Professor Moskowitz for her willingness to share such important information with the magazine.