I don’t mean to
devalue the actual violent reactions of sexual assault victims to the statue. But
I seriously wonder if there have been such reactions, or whether the response
is more about the possibility of these reactions transpiring. I know Wellesley
to be full of conscientious people who bend over backwards not to offend. I
also know from personal experience that just because something has happened to
you, doesn’t necessarily mean each time you see something similar, a bad reaction
is triggered. Many of us are able to separate out our personal experiences from
things that are going on around us. And really, when you think about it, don’t we
have to do this to survive? We can’t expect life to accommodate all our various
issues.
I’m all for an
Ivory Tower education, but one cannot turn one’s back entirely on the real
world, and certainly not on the world of ideas. To censure artistic expression
attacks the very foundation of, not only of an institution like Wellesley, but
also of our free society itself.
The fact that the
statue is both ugly and portrays a nearly naked man is no doubt irksome to many
who chose Wellesley because of its Arcadian campus and commitment to women’s
education and issues, and I’m sure he’s a particularly offensive eyesore to Wellesley’s
Lesbian population. But is that a reason to justify censorship? And won’t this
become a non-issue as repeated viewings desensitize people to the statue’s
power to offend?
Naturally, Duane
Hansen’s name has come up in regard to Sleepwalker
and while Hansen who made a career out of depicting similarly unattractive people
in a superrealist way, with the exception of his earlier violent, socially
engaged tableaux, his work is rooted in a recreation and ironic exaltation of
the banal. Sleepwalker has an added frisson
that puts it in a different realm entirely. This comes partly from the fact the
subject is doing something completely out of the ordinary—the show it’s part
of, New Gravity, focuses on temporal
and spatial, and in this case, I would argue, psychic ambivalence. But of course, its real power comes from
the incongruity of its placement. Encountering it here on this women’s campus,
and a particularly beautiful one at that, is strange, startling and also darkly
funny. To not see the levity in
this piece is to miss a very big part of it.
To me the statue
is the opposite of menacing. This rather schlubby guy is depicted at his most
vulnerable. (All the more so in those first weeks of February when he was knee
deep in snow.) He’s bald, he’s got a paunch and he’s wearing droopy underpants.
He’s also asleep. Yes, he could be a zombie I suppose, but a rapist? He’s too
inert for that.
I’m not quite sure
how it’s conveyed, but there’s a comfortably middle class aura about him. Like
he’s a lawyer or accountant who sleep-wandered out of his nearby suburban
bedroom onto Wellesley’s campus. And more to the point, he’s a memento mori of sorts in this progressive
hothouse of women’s education, serving as a warning: if you do not work hard
and become the captains of your ship, I am your future.
You can dismiss
the statue as ugly or derivative all you want, but how can anyone dispute the
power of Sleepwalker given the
enormous contretemps it has generated? One thing’s for sure: it’s gotten people’s
attention and gotten them talking about art.
What has been noticeably
absent from the dialogue is Wellesley’s long and pioneering history in the
field of Modern Art. In 1926 Wellesley became the first educational institution
to offer an undergraduate course on modern art, "Tradition and Revolt in
Modern Painting," taught by none other than Alfred H. Barr, Jr. legendary
director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You have only to look at
Wellesley’s art collection and the building in which it’s contained to grasp
how deep this commitment goes. The museum, designed by internationally known
Pritzker Award winner, Rafael Moneo, is a stunning structure that could easily
stand in one of the world’s great cultural centers.
The students dressing
the statue up remind me of the child recently caught climbing the Donald Judd
at Tate Modern. It’s bratty behavior that would rightly get you banned from a
museum. This is an artist’s vision and deserves respect.
I had to laugh
when I read this part of the Change.org petition: “Further, we ask that in the
future, the Davis Museum and the College notify us before displaying public
art, especially if it is of a particularly shocking or sensitive nature.” As
if. Such high-dudgeon and youthful arrogance. I’m sure Picasso, Duchamp, Goya and Pollack are having a good chuckle about this in the great beyond.
I wonder, if the
protesting students have given any thought to how they will feel when they look
back on all this in thirty years time. Do they think they will be proud? Or,
will it strike the mature thems as misguided and even sophomoric? One thing I
know, the statue and the artist are not their enemies. There are much more
important fights to fight than this, and I hope they turn their attention to
those post haste.
