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Feminist fundamentalism - women against images - controversy over art censorship - Column
Art in America, Sept, 1993 by Carole S. Vance
Pursuing a censorious campaign against sexually explicit imagery, legal scholars clashed with video artists over an exhibition at the University of Michigan.
The seeming resolution of an art-censorship case at the University of Michigan Law School last spring has done little to quiet artists, fears about the new directions that attacks on sexual imagery are taking. In the midst of a four-year furor over National Endowment for the Arts funding of "offensive" images, antipornography feminists have now stepped into the fray, adopting tactics that strongly parallel those employed by conservatives and fundamentalists. By piggybacking their own views onto notions put into wide circulation by right-wing groups - for example, that virtually any visual imagery about sex is "pornographic" - antipornography feminists managed to shut down an art exhibition focusing on the work of women and feminists and to redefine notions of pornography and free expression.
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The flap started late last fall when critics assailed a multimedia exhibition about prostitution, claiming that the installation was "pornographic" and a "threat." This time, opponents wasted no time in disputes about art funding. Instead, they physically removed the offending art, and ultimately closed down the entire show. The censors were feminists opposed to pornography and law students who claimed they weren't engaging in censorship; their goal was to protect viewers from videos which made people "uncomfortable" and "created feelings of anxiety"[1] and from images "used to get men pumped."[2] The dean of the law school, a specialist in First Amendment law, initially seemed to agree, suggesting that the students were merely exercising their First Amendment rights by removing art from a gallery. The startling incident in Ann Arbor signals the fluidity with which sexual panics move around the culture, here spreading far beyond federal agencies and moral-conservative pressure groups.
What visual images set off such a ruckus? The works were part of an exhibition called "Porn'im'age'ry: Picturing Prostitutes," curated by feminist artist and videographer Carol Jacobsen, and featuring documentary photography and videos by seven artists, five of them women. The show included the work of Paula Allen, Susana Aikin and Carlos Aparicio, Carol Leigh, Veronica Vera, Randy Barbato and Carol Jacobsen. The work was diverse, including Allen's Angelina Foxy (1986-), an ongoing photo-text essay documenting the life of a Jersey City prostitute; Aikin and Aparicio's The Salt Mines (1990), a critically acclaimed documentary about homeless transvestite hustlers in New York City; Jacobsen's Street Sex (1989), candid video interviews with Detroit prostitutes just released from jail; and Leigh's Outlaw Poverty, Not Prostitutes (1991), an activist video chronicling prostitutes, international organizing to improve working conditions.
The exhibition was commissioned as part of a two-day conference called "Prostitution: From Academia to Activism" held at the University of Michigan Law School Oct. 30-31, 1992. Sponsored by the law school and by its new publication, the Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, the conference gave center stage to the views of leading antipornography theorists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, the latter a professor at the law school; they regard both prostitution and pornography as central - and interrelated - causes of women's inequality. Because feminist opinion on these questions is quite divided,[3] student organizers initially wanted the conference to explore diverse perspectives, and the exhibition was part of this approach. They soon found, however, that antipornography advocates - following a now-familiar maneuver - refused to appear if feminists holding different views were invited.[4] "Some of the key anti-prostitution people accepted on the condition that they wouldn't speak if there were people from the other side there," conference organizer Lisa Lodin told the New York Times. "We agonized about it, because we felt we were being manipulated, but we went ahead anyway."[5] The successful attempt to restrict the content of the conference soon spilled over to the art exhibition with more mixed results.[6]
The complete installation was on view for no more than a few hours on Oct. 30 before some conference speakers, objecting to sexual imagery in the show, complained to MacKinnon, who conveyed the complaints to the student organizers.[7] Reports have variously identified those objecting to the show as John Stoltenberg, antipornography activist and close associate of Dworkin, and Evelina Giobbe, director of an antiprostitution group in St. Paul and a longtime member (under the name Evelina Kane) of Women Against Pornography in New York.[8] According to law student and conference organizer Laura Berger, some speakers had "expressed fear for their personal safety. Some speakers had attended prior conferences where pro-pornography groups had shown pornography to incite groups of people to protest alternative views. Such protests had resulted in the harassment of speakers in the past."[9]
