{"id":317,"date":"2013-12-05T09:48:39","date_gmt":"2013-12-05T17:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=317"},"modified":"2013-12-05T09:48:39","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T17:48:39","slug":"art-within-bounds-when-is-it-censorship-and-when-is-it-simply-saying-no-thanks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/12\/art-within-bounds-when-is-it-censorship-and-when-is-it-simply-saying-no-thanks.html","title":{"rendered":"Art Within Bounds: When Is It Censorship, and When Is It Simply Saying “No Thanks?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"censorship.anvil-unisex-value-fitted-tee.white.w760h760\"<\/a>In September, in advance of an Americans for the Arts training at the Sundance resort in Utah, I visited Salt Lake City for the first time and met with Caryn Bradshaw of Visit Salt Lake and Karen Krieger from the Salt Lake City Arts Council.\u00a0 We toured the city a bit, and what we saw forced me to confront a bias that I didn\u2019t realize I was harboring\u2014I thought that Mormons must be anti-art.<\/p>\n

My relationship to the Mormon Church is at once one of long distance and of great personal confrontation.\u00a0 For most of my life, Mormonism didn\u2019t register on my radar at all\u2014I grew up in Connecticut and mostly viewed Utah from above as we flew over it on the way to visit my grandparents in California.\u00a0 When I first began learning about Mormonism, it was through the hearsay of kids talking to other kids about polygamy.<\/p>\n

And then in November 2008 my life was quite personally affected by the Mormon Church\u2014a group who had funneled lots and lots of money into California in an ultimately successful attempt to pass Prop 8 and temporarily ban gay marriage.\u00a0 In that moment, what crystallized for me was a feeling that people who would push so fundamentally against my happiness and my rights could not share my passion for anything\u2014that they must have so tilted a worldview as to be my entire opposite.\u00a0 And though I didn\u2019t know it, that reaction settled in me, and became rolled into my overall view of what Mormonism\u2014and Salt Lake City\u2014must be like.<\/p>\n

Turns out not so much.\u00a0 In fact, a possible heretical story goes that when the Mormons got to Salt Lake, before building most anything, before building a seat for a government, before even completing the Temple itself, they built a place for the choir.\u00a0 It turns out this chronology is only sort of true, but what is<\/i> true is that Mormons have, for the nearly 200 years the religion has been around, embraced art for what one scholar terms \u201cthe significant role art plays in enlightening and inspiring Church members.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

There\u2019s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which is world-famous, but there is also the Church art museum, the financial underwriting of art projects, the annual sponsored art competition, the admonishment to develop personal practice \u201cso that they can tell the story of the Church in art.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 Art is everywhere in Salt Lake\u2014in the architecture, along the streets, in the rows and rows of galleries, performance venues, restaurants.\u00a0 According to Caryn and Karen, it pervades the lives of many people in Salt Lake, who cultivate personal practice in a variety of forms.\u00a0 While in Salt Lake, I was taken to a small public art garden nestled between residential buildings.\u00a0 The garden was started informally by some of the surrounding residents and has grown to include an incredible array of sculptures, mosaics, poetry, etc.\u00a0 There\u2019s a whole lot of art in Salt Lake.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s interesting is what that art is\u2026and what it isn\u2019t.\u00a0 The plethora of art in Salt Lake exists, almost exclusively, inside what might be called a strict PG boundary.\u00a0 In the galleries I visited, there were landscapes and street scenes and paintings of cute animals, but there were no nudes, no confrontational pieces, no graffiti or street-art inspirations.\u00a0 Caryn and Karen pointed out to me as we passed the \u201cedgy\u201d theater venue in town, housed on a university campus, which was producing either Spring Awakening<\/i> or Rent<\/i> (I can\u2019t remember), and which had been a source of controversy.\u00a0 In talking with Caryn and Karen, which involved more than a little fumbling through my personal misapprehensions about both Mormons and the amount of Mormon influence in Salt Lake, what became clear was that the vibrancy and strong integration of art in much of Salt Lake\u2014into the daily lives of the mostly-Mormon inhabitants, into the passions and habits of folks who likely would never call themselves artists\u2014is able to exist largely because of how well and deliberately that art sits inside the values system of that community.<\/p>\n

I had planned on writing about all of this a while ago and got distracted, but it popped back into my head in a big way when I read Howard Sherman\u2019s<\/a> two posts<\/a> about the cancellation of a production of Rent<\/i> at Trumbull High School in Connecticut.\u00a0 Trumbull, as it happens, was maybe a half-hour away from Ridgefield, the town where I grew up, and as many of the towns in Fairfield County are, it was, at least then, a highly homogeneous place\u2014mostly white, mostly wealthy, well-educated.\u00a0 The attitude in Fairfield County, by and large, was not so much conservative in the traditional sense as what I now understand to be a unique combination of libertarianism and WASPish buttoned-upped-ness.\u00a0 There were rules, things you spoke about, things you didn\u2019t, and somehow those rules pervade\u2014an overarching propriety that was only oppressive in the very end, as I awoke a bit to the world, and in hindsight after I left, and that in the moment felt simply safe, calm, and perhaps slightly boring.<\/p>\n

In my senior year in Ridgefield, I was the co-editor of our literary magazine.\u00a0 I graduated in 1999, the year of Columbine, and at some point prior to the shooting that year, we had as a collective voted into the magazine an angst-ridden first-person fiction piece about a kid shooting up a school.\u00a0 In the aftermath of Columbine, with our once-a-year publication already designed, laid out, and about to hit the presses, someone higher up in the administration got wind of the piece and we were told to take it out.\u00a0 We got into an argument with the school board, made our case, lost, and we ran two blank pages and a letter explaining what was supposed to go there instead.\u00a0 At the time, I felt righteous that someone would have forced me to take down art that we felt had sufficient quality to exist, that someone would have censored <\/i>us so, and the letter we wrote said basically that.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m older now. Littleton had seemed a million miles away in 1999, but Newtown is 30 minutes away from Ridgefield.\u00a0 I have a kid now.\u00a0 I have gained empathy.\u00a0 And I understand that sometimes the righteousness of art, the pushing of boundaries, is not the right response.<\/p>\n

In the case of Trumbull and Rent<\/i>, of course, there is no gross tragedy looming behind the decision to cancel the production.\u00a0 There are cries of censorship, of the oppression of ideas.\u00a0 There seems to be a tremendous amount of suspicion that the community, or the players in that community directly involved, might have shut down the piece because of personal values\u2014homophobia, Puritanism, whatever.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t know whether that\u2019s true or not.\u00a0 And I should say that Rent<\/i> had a profound impact on me, and I was lucky enough to see it many times, and it changed how I viewed myself forever\u2014so I\u2019m not knocking the importance to a closeted kid in Connecticut to see that up on a stage.<\/p>\n

But perhaps simply because I grew up very near there, very near a place that (having now lived quite a few places) is extremely peculiar in its protection of a sort of Mayberryesque perpetual lull, I actually find what the principal wrote as justification very interesting and perhaps even progressive.\u00a0 You should read it<\/a>\u00a0(bottom of Howard’s post), and I think it\u2019s important to understand that the letter itself may be spin rather than true intention, but taking it at face value, it sounds like the director of the production decided to produce it without really talking to anyone about it, that Trumbull, like Ridgefield, continues to have a faction of people who find some of the themes in the show inappropriate, and that the principal\u2019s reaction was (and I hope I\u2019m reading this right) basically \u201clet\u2019s shut this down now, and let\u2019s figure out how this can be produced later with a lot of context-making activities and conversations to help people understand why it\u2019s being produced then.\u201d<\/p>\n

I find very little wrong with that sentiment, assuming it\u2019s accurate.\u00a0 I don\u2019t, for example, find it censorious \u2013 I find it, given the climate, rather liberal.\u00a0 In a town like Trumbull, I\u2019d imagine that a high school musical Rent<\/i> without appropriate context would serve a much smaller and more incendiary purpose than it might if placed in a larger conversation, where more people could have more nuanced conversations about what it means, why it\u2019s relevant, and where the artistic desire to push outside of comfort aligns with the community\u2019s desire to adhere to certain values.<\/p>\n

Diane Ragsdale recently wrote a(nother) amazing piece<\/a> about want and need on her Jumper blog.\u00a0 Reacting to it, Scott Walters wrote, on his Facebook page, about how many of the comments seemed to be knee-jerk reactions against what Diane said\u2014which was, basically, about whether it\u2019s always necessary to be working from what the community \u201cneeds\u201d (which is often interpreted as what the artist thinks the community needs) versus what it \u201cwants\u201d (which is often interpreted as safe and within bounds).\u00a0 What Scott said (and he and I are, it turns out, rarely in agreement, but this is one case) was: \u201cHint to artists: it’s not about you.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that one of the big, big problems we have today in terms of arguing for the value of art to society is that much of the art that is created is presumed to have value for the fact that it confronts society.\u00a0 And I should said I don\u2019t have anything against art that confronts me, confronts my beliefs, makes me think and engage, makes me upset.\u00a0 But I also am a particular kind of person.<\/p>\n

We have a conservative problem in the arts.\u00a0 In the Bay Area, per the research I did for the Arts Diversity Index<\/a>, 15.5% of the total population identified as Republican and only 2.2% of audiences did.\u00a0 Daniel Jones has written<\/a> quite eloquently<\/a> on Howlround<\/em> about the lack of conservative voices in theatre.\u00a0 And before simply writing conservatives off (either political conservatives or something folks who are more conservative in the general sense), we need to understand that both from a service perspective (the desire to serve all) and from the pragmatic perspective of someone who would love a little less political will to be directed against<\/i> publicly-funded art in America, this population that is not being respected represents a huge chunk of the total people in this country.<\/p>\n

Being a censor, like being a bully or being a racist or being a bigot, is a charge that comes with a huge stigma.\u00a0 It implies malice, intention, and a strong desire to oppress.\u00a0 I have to believe that there is a gradation between that level of intention and one that says instead, \u201cDid we think about what this community wants from its art?\u00a0 If we go outside of that context, did we provide a bridge for them to follow?\u00a0 Did we do our due diligence to help a community with certain values to see our<\/i> point of view, or did we simply get frustrated when our art wasn\u2019t welcomed?\u201d<\/p>\n

What if it hadn\u2019t been Rent<\/i>?\u00a0 What if instead it had been a religious play, or a play about gays burning in Hell, or a play celebrating the Nazis or the KKK or whatever group doesn\u2019t represent a hyper-liberal world view? \u00a0I mean, for all of its incredible messages and its uplifting structure, Rent<\/i> is a play about sex, drugs, poverty and death.\u00a0 I\u2019ll tell you, rightly or wrongly, that those were four things that went on the zip-the-lips list in the years I lived in Connecticut.<\/p>\n

How can we say that we\u2019re interested in creating a culture where art is celebrated for what it can be at its best\u2014something that both reflects and stretches a society forward\u2014if we don\u2019t allow that sometimes a piece of art might just not fit into the values, mores, and beliefs of a particular group of people?\u00a0 What is the point at which it is better to not be invited to the party than to tone down the colors?\u00a0 What are the consequences of that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In September, in advance of an Americans for the Arts training at the Sundance resort in Utah, I visited Salt Lake City for the first time and met with Caryn Bradshaw of Visit Salt Lake and Karen Krieger from the Salt Lake City Arts Council.\u00a0 We toured the city a bit, and what we saw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":318,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,12,7,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-317","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-change","9":"category-language","10":"category-main","11":"category-research","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}