The Censoring of an Artist
Minnesota 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 exposed breasts. On a gallery wall, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the slogan of Iran’s recent protests against the morality police, is written in neon in English and Persian.
When “Taravat” opened last month at Macalester College, a left-leaning school in Minnesota, some Muslim students felt it made a mockery of modest Islamic dress, and thus of them. They expressed outrage, and this month Macalester temporarily closed the show, and then, apparently unaware of the irony, surrounded the gallery windows with black curtains.
Those curtains astonished Talepasand. “To literally veil a ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ exhibition?” she exclaimed to me.
The uproar over “Taravat” was connected to a recent controversy at nearby Hamline University, where an adjunct art history professor, Erika López Prater, was fired for showing a 14th-century painting of Muhammad in an art history class. In January, Macalester — where Prater now teaches — hosted a discussion among faculty members and students, most of them Muslim, to address issues raised by the Hamline incident. There, some students described being upset by “Taravat.”
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 college’s response was still distinctly apologetic, demonstrating the anxious philistinism that can result when bureaucratic cowardice meets maximalist ideas about safety.
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, protecting passers-by from “unintentional or nonconsensual viewing,” in the words of the administration. A 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.
Some readers might object to dwelling on one instance of misguided sensitivity at one small college when America 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 the country is 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.
The novelist 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. 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.
I am 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 is no longer obvious, America has gone astray.
There is no right to be shielded from discomfiting ideas.