MICHELLE GOLDBERG
A Left-Leaning College Didn’t Want to Offend, So It
Closed Down Her Art Show
Feb. 13, 2023
Taravat Talepasand "The Physicality of Death" (Tullman Collection)
Opinion
Columnist
ST. PAUL, Minn. — The work of the
Iranian American artist Taravat Talepasand is cheeky, erotic and defiantly
anticlerical. One painting in her new midcareer survey, “Taravat,” incorporates
Iranian bank notes whose images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini have been dosed
with LSD. A graphite drawing, titled “Blasphemy X,” depicts a veiled woman
giving the finger while lifting her robe to reveal high heels and a flash of
underwear. There are sculptures of women in niqab face coverings with enormous
exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of
Iran’s recent nationwide protests against the morality police, is written in
neon in English and Persian.
When “Taravat” opened late last month
at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in St. Paul, Minn., with a focus
on internationalism,
some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus
of them. They expressed their outrage, and this month Macalester responded by
temporarily closing Talepasand’s show, and then, apparently unaware of the
irony, surrounding the gallery windows with black curtains.
Those curtains astonished Talepasand,
an assistant professor of art practice at Portland State University. “To
literally veil a ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ exhibition?” she exclaimed to me.
The uproar over
“Taravat” was directly connected to a recent controversy at Hamline University, a few
minutes’ drive away from Macalester, where an adjunct art history professor
named Erika López Prater was fired for showing a 14th-century painting of
Muhammad in an art history class. In late January, Macalester — where, as it
happens, Prater now teaches — hosted a discussion between faculty and students,
most of them Muslim, to address issues raised by the Hamline incident. There,
some students described being upset by “Taravat.”
“I invited them to share what emotions
they were holding in their bodies,” one faculty member wrote in an email, part
of which was shared with Talepasand. “They named ‘undervalued, frustrated,
surprised, disrespected, ignored, and it felt like hit after hit.’”
Ultimately, Macalester handled the
student complaints better than Hamline did. No one was fired, and after being
closed for a few days, “Taravat” reopened. But the administration’s response
was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that
can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.
In a message to campus, the provost,
Lisa Anderson-Levy, said that Macalester understands “that pieces in the
exhibition have caused harm to members of our Muslim community.” The black
curtains came down, but they were replaced with purple construction paper on
the gallery’s glass entrance and frosted glass panels on its mezzanine windows,
protecting passers-by from “unintentional or nonconsensual viewing,” in the
words of the administration. A content warning is affixed to the door. Next to
it, some students put up a yellow sign asking potential visitors to show
solidarity with them by not going in.
“There’s a lot of nuance and complexity
in these kinds of situations,” Anderson-Levy said in a statement when I reached
out to talk. “We believe that taking time to slow down and listen carefully to
the diverse perspectives across our campus community allowed us to create space
for conversation and learning.”
At least some
students seemed to be learning to approach contentious art cautiously. A senior
sociology major who’d visited the gallery with their sculpture class when
Talepasand was still assembling the exhibition told me they were thinking of
returning to see what had changed. But they worried that could be an act of
entitlement, and felt the need to reflect “on my place as a white person” who
is “not affected by the harms as much as others.”
Some readers might object to dwelling
on one instance of misguided sensitivity at one small college when the country
is in the midst of a nationwide frenzy of right-wing book bans, public school
speech restrictions, and wild attempts to curtail drag performances. But I
think this moment, when we’re facing down a wave of censorship inspired by
religious fervor, is a good time to quash the notion that people have a right
to be shielded from discomfiting art. If progressive ideas can be harnessed to
censor feminist work because it offends religious sensibilities, perhaps those
ideas bear rethinking.
In her excellent 2021 book “On
Freedom,” the poet and critic Maggie Nelson described how, in the 20th century,
the avant-garde imagined its audience as numb, repressed and in need of being
shocked awake. The 21st-century model, by contrast, “presumes the audience to
be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection.”
There is value in this approach. Mary
Gaitskill recently published a captivating essay about
two writing classes that she taught 25 years apart. Each included a menacing
male student obsessed with sadistic violence against women. In 1997, the guy
was named Don, and Gaitskill was struck by how enthusiastically his female
classmates seemed to respond to his imagined scenes of torture and murder. It
is only toward the end of the semester, after another student’s outburst, that
the young women express their fear of Don. Until then, surrounded by a culture
that valorized shock and darkness, they demonstrated a “seemingly bizarre
forbearance” that blunted their authentic reactions.
“But these days that breed of
forbearance is looking like an indulgence that we cannot afford,” Gaitskill
writes. “These days, niceness is looking pretty damn good; these days, the
darkness is just too overwhelming.” In her 2022 class, she writes, almost half
the class had spent time in mental institutions. Relentless demands for safety
can simply be a sign of how vulnerable people feel.
Still, to automatically give in to
those demands is to suffocate the arts. This becomes especially clear when you
see how easily the language of trauma and harm can serve reactionary ends. Just
last week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on a
school district in New Jersey that removed Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” a
frequent target of conservative censorship, from the freshman honors
curriculum. A parent had complained that exposure to the book’s “graphic images
of sexual violence” could be “emotionally traumatizing.” This, said Talepasand,
“is where the far left and the far right look very similar.”
I’m not naïve enough
to believe that if the left rediscovered a passionate commitment to free
speech, the right would give up its furious campaign against what it calls
wokeness. But I do think that if the left is to mount a convincing response to
what has become a wholesale assault on intellectual liberty and free
expression, it needs to be able to defend challenging and provocative work. Art
need not defer to religion. If that’s no longer obvious we’ve gone astray.