Danya Ruttenberg

During that pivotal era, Yenawine was director of education at New York’s Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) and one of the most powerful champions of controversial art that
few were willing to embrace. As head of the nonprofit Visual AIDS, he helped launch
both the now-ubiquitous red ribbon project and “A Day Without Art” (which is still observed by most art institutions each Dec.1). During the censorship/funding crisis of 1989 and ’90, Yenawine testified on behalf of the NEA before the House of Representatives, and later was an expert witness for the artist David Wojnarowicz when he sued the American Family Association for wrongfully representing his work as porn.

In a rare interview, Yenawine explains why protecting “freedom of expression” won’t
save contemporary art, and why it’s the art world that has failed the public — and themselves.

In your forward to “Art Matters,” you criticize the “dominant
conservatism of the art world” that made “museums, art historians, and
critics … very quiet” during the culture wars of the late ’80s/early ’90s.
Yet the “Sensation” controversy affects museums quite directly; how does the
response of these institutions rate this time around?

I think the silence of most museum people — their refusal to come to
support in any way — indicates the position to which museums have retreated.
It was the same story in the late ’80s — there’s too much self-concern.
This time around, it’s particularly egregious when even institutions that have no
city funding, like the MoMA and the Whitney, stay silent. [MoMA director]
Glen Lowry came up with an article last week, finally, but it’s very belated. Originally, he just sent out a statement refusing to comment. Museums are now part of the problem; they’re so disinclined to support each other.

[Cultural critic] Lucy Lippard pointed out that socially engaged art is the
first to get trashed, and the art world is the first to join in the chorus.
Underneath it all, the art world is basically quite conservative. Artists
will continue to make their work; they’ll never shut up. But it’s gotten
and will continue to get harder to find venues to show it. Thank God for
the effrontery of collectors, who don’t care which politicians they piss
off — because they can help preserve this stuff.

The differences are few — a lot of things haven’t changed. Some people in the
art world have spoken up more this time than in the past. What should
happen is that the people who care about this stuff should stop capitulating
to those that don’t. It’s not like acquiescing has produced great new sources of funding. The NEA got cut way, way back, and its budget is still low. As a result of [the art community's]
gutlessness, the pot of money from the government is smaller. If [former NEA
chairwoman] Jane Alexander had said, “I want to educate people, not capitulate
to them,” we might have seen some differences that now aren’t there. So the art world continues its outrage against philistinism, but does nothing to change it.

But really, what could the art world have done — then or now — to make a difference?

If museums had aggressively taken on the notion of art education in the
schools — to the point where it became a common understanding that art is
designed to make you think — we could have already seen an awful lot of
people coming out of school who see the stuff differently.

An attempt should have been taken to educate journalists — who have a chance
to pontificate, punditize — and there should have been massive re-education of
our legislators about what art is, what it does. It’s not to say we would
definitely succeed, but I know for a fact that no attempt has been made.
Let’s say the NEA wanted to tackle this problem — had brought together the
heads of major foundations like the Rockefeller, Ford and the Pew — and said,
let’s fund some really in-depth seminars somewhere irresistible, like at the
Aspen Art Museum — a lot of things could have changed.

If I had been elected chair of the Endowment, I would’ve called up people in
Hollywood who’ve made a serious commitment to contemporary art — Lily Tomlin,
Steve Martin, Madonna, David Geffen, Barbra Streisand — and said, Let’s do
something with insight, respect, humor, and get legislators and/or the
general public to see where the likes of [performance artist] Karen Finley
came from. Let’s look at where “Piss Christ” came from, not only in
terms of [artist Andres] Serrano, but in the history of the depiction of Christ.

That kind of thing would have been immensely popular on TV, too. There could have
been more effort to produce programs about art, and there’s nothing. I bet
there’s not one single program — besides Sister Wendy — devoted to contemporary
art. In the ’80s there were some, but it’s just gone by. There are plenty
of places where real change can happen, but no one, since ’89, has educated
people to start thinking differently about art. That’s first.

Most people seem to think that Mayor Giuliani’s just making
a calculated
political move with his battle against the Brooklyn Art Museum, that it has nothing to do with what he thinks of the art.

I think Giuliani would have backed down if it had been a ploy to lure
voters; he learned immediately that New Yorkers are horrified by his
actions. There is a kind of knee-jerk aspect to this. Giuliani, in a lot
of ways, represents where most people are with contemporary art — he knows
enough about art to know it’s supposed to be comfortable, tradition-based
and beautiful, and acts as if the artists we love today have never had a
history of controversy. There’s a particular kind of American male who
takes the know-nothing stance and defends it to the barricades, never
thinking about the fact that this has happened before and will happen again.
It’s willful ignorance.

The point the art world hasn’t gotten across is that even great art of the
past is meant to be looked at and thought about — not just glossed over. Art
has spent too long living in the ivory tower, and there has been no serious
attempt to educate people about how it functions, or about the history of
aesthetic challenges that date back to the Renaissance.

What’s been missing from the media’s discussion of the current
controversy?

There has been more of a clamoring from voices in the art world, but most
enjoin freedom of expression, rather than defending the artist’s right — not
just to free speech — but to the thoughtful reinterpretation of whatever
subjects they choose.

[New York Times art critic] Michael Kimmelman has been rather
patronizing; he, like a lot of the media, makes it out as if artists are
overgrown adolescents whose only intention is to shock. Really, almost none
of them are in it for the shock value; the art that they make is full of
information — about both the real world and … all the art that came
before.

Americans — even those who should know better — disparage contemporary art and
artists almost categorically. We’re so used to the 6 o’clock news, to
predigested information, that we balk whenever anything actually asks something of us.

Even just hearing about Chris Ofili’s work — I’ve never actually seen his
stuff — offers up some really thought-provoking stuff. What is it about
representing the Virgin as African that’s so compelling? What about the notion
of her sexuality, which has not been left out of the equation? How does
this version of sacred/profane play into the classic Madonna/whore dichotomy? How does his take on the Madonna/whore thing refer back to literature, or to feminism? Each one of these questions could keep me busy for a while. What is it that we haven’t communicated to people, that the fun we [could] have grappling with these issues never occurs?

When the editors of the 1995 anthology “Solitary Pleasures: The Historical,
Literary and Artistic Discourses on Autoeroticism” placed a call for
papers, they found that “the mere mention of the word ‘masturbation’ still
raises eyebrows and evokes titters at a time when most forms of sexual
activity have been talked into banality.” Dr. Vernon Rosario, co-editor
of Solitary Pleasures, explains such reactions as a perfect illustration
of his work’s value. “They’re embarrassed by things that they’re personally
uncomfortable with in an academic setting,” he says.

In other words, most people still can’t talk about touching themselves.

“No matter how bizarre or complex we make it, sex is really just about
a muscle spasm,” notes Earl Jackson Jr., professor of comparative
literature at UC-Berkeley. “Human beings need constantly renewed meanings.” And those meanings, according to these scholars, become the ways by which our culture becomes “socially constructed”; that is, we reinvent our definitions of
everything — food, religion, sex, beauty — to suit the needs of our
particular time and place.

This line of thought transformed the study of sexuality; Michel Foucault’s
work on the history of homosexual love in the 1970s paved the way for a widely
respected field of queer studies. Deconstructing usually began with a look at
what once was. For example, in ancient Greece, sexual roles were determined
by social status: The “top” was a land-owning male citizen, and the “bottom”
was a foreigner, young man, slave or woman. In some Native
American cultures, the gender of one’s partner was determined by the work
he or she did for the community. Today, on the other hand, sexual categories are
based on an assumed preference for the opposite or same sex. New ideas, as
history goes.

Now, that same kind of analysis is being taken from intercourse to
solo-course. By studying the history of masturbation, academics probe where the myth of “hairy palms” comes from and other social inventions. According to
UC-Berkeley history professor Thomas Laqueur, autoeroticism was unremarkable
until the 18th century, when it became transformed into “the first secular
source of guilt” with the development of modernism. “Self-government,” he
says, “becomes critical — when the power of the government of nature,
natural restraints and a seemingly natural hierarchical political
order seem to be waning.” In other words, if we allow ourselves to want
things we don’t need and waste valuable time on limitless entertainment, we’d spend all of our time masturbating and maxing-out our credit cards at Wal-Mart.

Laqueur’s work is primarily concerned with the ways in which sexuality and
desire are constructed — how historical forces have affected how we see the act. Many of his contemporaries work on the other end of the theoretical spectrum: how the construction of masturbation plays out in the many aspects of everyday life.

For example, Paula Bennett’s primary concern is with the relationship
between solitude, autonomy and creativity. She argues that Emily
Dickinson, one of literature’s so-called purest little virgins, saturated
her poetry with stock 19th century sexual symbols — revealing thus her dirty
mind and rich fantasy life. She scandalizes us all with lines like:

Forbidden Fruit a flavor has

That lawful Orchards mocks

How luscious lies
within the Pod

The Pea that Duty locks

For Victorian women, Bennett
asserts, “‘cerebral masturbation’ was just, if not more, dangerous than
the ‘real thing.’” She regards masturbation as “a form of sexual behavior
tied to creativity. I’m concerned less about the act itself than the
thoughts that go with it.”

Is Bennett really then writing about masturbation? In many ways,
one-hand lovin’ has become an overinterpreted, empty vessel into which
theorists can pour their every inspiration. For Jackson, circle jerks are
really about voyeurism and the age of AIDS. For Duke grad student Greg
Tomso, the issue lies at the intersection of sexuality and illness. For
Rosario, masturbation is about the ways in which the medical profession
has affected our notion of the erotic.

There’s no essential problem with the fact that these folks use the same act
to talk about vastly different issues, but only a few of them have actually
said a damn thing about masturbation itself. Sure, it’s a bit like
thinking, it’s a bit like reading or writing, it’s a bit like intercourse
– but, ultimately, it’s none of those things. And while parallels are
sometimes relevant, they can get taken too far in an attempt to understand
an issue that is, by its very nature, very difficult to perceive through an
academic lens.

Masturbation is a fairly easy target for academia’s linguistic hooey; even
more than theorizing, it’s the ultimate in solitary acts. It’s universal,
it’s antisocial. Of course, one could well argue that our thoughts and
fantasies are socially constructed, but it’s nonetheless difficult to
interrupt the circle of brain to body and check the pulse on “meaning.”
It’s like getting in the middle of someone else’s mirror-gaze — is it
possible? But that ambiguity may be why the act is so attractive to study
in the first place; there are many conceivable readings, and not much to
dispute a lot of them. Masturbation as ritualized prayer? Sure thing. How
about psychological self-therapy? OK! A representational enactment of
suicide? Why not?

Now this is not to say that studying the historical, sociological and
literary context of self-pleasure — if done responsibly — is an empty pursuit. Our body of knowledge is constantly being re-written, and it’s necessary to question the validity of our assumptions. Sometimes these scholars have agendas, sometimes they don’t. Bennett is upfront about her “feminist
purpose in helping women open up their creativity and erotic lives,” and
Jackson’s ACT-UP politics are manifest at first glance. Laqueur, on the
other hand, is just in it for the intellectual quest. “I wish I could say
I had a political agenda, but I don’t,” he says. “It’s more direct for me:
The old readings are wrong.”

But whatever the intent, the scholarly investigation of sexuality has been
heavily employed by non-academics to further the mission of liberating sexuality. In this vision, our weird hang-ups, inhibitions and generally funky feelings about sex — as well as the popular misconception that bedroom stuff is actually important — are societal inventions. If we read some good theory and understand that hang-ups are silly, then perhaps we can then become
comfortable with our own perversions, be less threatened by sexual
diversity and — heck, have some fun in the process.

Theories about the construction of desire have drizzled subtly into the
pop culture of the gay ’90s in little bits and pieces. Every
young adult who says, “I think sexuality is really kinda, um, fluid.
Like, I’m attracted to the person, not the gender, you know?” is verbalizing some of Foucault’s most revered philosophies — even if she simply liked the “I Kissed a Girl” song that was on the radio a few years back.

And, of course, professors do more than just write papers. Arianne
Chernock, a grad student under Laqueur, asserts that theory-spinning is only
the beginning. “I think that the real impact happens with teaching. The
classroom opens up a space for students to think about the issues; academia
can be a way of entering into the personal. It’s very liberating for some
undergrads to know that Plato talked about homosexual relationships.” Maybe with a professor demystifying the history of masturbation, students can
begin to likewise transform their relationship to their own bodies.

Perhaps someday the true history of one-handed love will become as much
a part of our cultural consciousness as Pamela Anderson’s breast size.
Then again, this academic focus of creative interpretation could become
obsolete next week; it’s possible, after all, that our academics could actually
get bored on the hamster wheel of constructed proto-sexuality and self-reflective erotic dialectics. And then they can
return to theorizing about really important things — like Quentin
Tarantino movies and Barbie dolls.