ART : ‘Feminist View’ of Art Censorship Challenged by UCI Professor : Complexity and conflict have been replaced ‘by a stripped-down sound bite in which middle-class white women are represented as the moral guardians of society,’ Constance Samaras says.

Constance Samaras, a newly appointed assistant professor of studio art at UC Irvine, has written a provocative article in the November issue of Artforum magazine, in which she argues that certain views about censorship in art virtually have been drowned out by voices that do not represent the full spectrum of feminist thinking.

“Standing in place of complexity and conflict is a stripped-down sound bite in which middle-class white women are represented as the moral guardians of society,” Samaras writes in the article, called “Look Who’s Talking.”

Among the voices she cites is that of legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, who a decade ago promulgated the opinion that pornographic images actually violate women’s civil rights by showing them in degrading positions.

Samaras links this position with the decision of Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art in Washington, to remove a photograph that was “degrading and offensive to women” from an exhibition earlier this year.

The photograph, by contemporary artist Sol LeWitt, shows a nude woman seen in progressive close-ups through a series of peepholes until only her bellybutton area is showing. (Broun subsequently restored the work to the show after exhibition co-curator Jock Reynolds demanded “Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography” be closed rather than be subjected to Broun’s act of censorship.)

In a couple of rambling interviews on the UC Irvine campus, Samaras attempted recently to explain how such viewpoints do not represent the attitudes of all feminists and how the media has ignored the complexity of pornography-related issues.

It is only due to “a kind of cultural baggage we bring to images,” Samaras said, that we view images of women’s nude bodies as sexual in the first place. “ Male nudity is read as heroic or athletic,” she observed. “What (MacKinnon’s) anti-pornography arguments play into is really a traditional image of woman as the moral guardian” of society. “For the mainstream media, that was an easy image to latch onto.”

But even liberal-minded art critics commenting on the Broun case have failed, Samaras said, to perceive how the “civil rights” argument--that pornography is bad because it harms women--has been co-opted by the conservative voice of officialdom, most notably in the 1986 report issued by the Reagan-appointed Meese Commission on Pornography.

Samaras maintains that conservatives don’t believe there’s much point anymore in attacking perceived pornography purely on the basis of “morality or sin,” so they’ve switched to talking about protecting women’s civil rights.

Other observers might argue that the “morality” issue has provided tons of mileage for Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Rev. Jerry Falwell and other demagogues of the Far Right. But in any case, Samaras believes that such a seemingly humane and up-to-date expression of concern for the welfare of women is not to be taken at face value.

“If you look at the record of the Reagan Administration,” she said, “there is not a concern with women’s rights, women’s issues, any sort of social services relating to child care or reproductive rights or economic issues.”

Samaras’ negative opinion of the presumed moral “protection” of anti-obscenity statutes also pertains to last month’s flap over photographs of a partially nude 12-year-old girl made by a Laguna Beach photographer at a Sante Fe workshop. (The photos were turned over to Irvine police by a photo processing laboratory. The photographer, a woman, ultimately was not charged with violation of the California Penal Code.)

“The issue of child pornography is a red herring, used to really intimidate people,” Samaras said. “It’s very emotionally charged. Child pornography and child sexuality are not really the issues at hand. They are used as tools of social control to prevent diverse representations of sexuality. They are used to close down dialogue--to take a socially charged issue and limit it to a single point of view.

“If people were really concerned about children, we wouldn’t see all the cutbacks in government funds for poor mothers and prenatal care. . . . (Child pornography rings) are presented as an epidemic, but they don’t exist on that scale. We do have an epidemic of poverty among children, but we deny the problem. . . .

“Artists are a very easy target because there are a lot of misunderstandings about what their role is, and whether artists really have a role in society. The whole issue of moral panic, which we’re seeing now, not only involves artists but also academics and health-care workers. It’s a smoke screen for the serious problems (we face), like the state of the economy.”

To those who would accuse her of straying from her topic, Samaras insists that all the subjects she raises are intimately related.

“Anti-censorship laws always have been used against women, to prevent the dissemination of birth control imagery, for example. . . . When you say, let’s talk about this, I’m saying No, you have to talk about this and this and this and then you dialogue.”

Samaras, 41, says she has “always been involved with society-changing movements.” For her, art is a way “to frame social issues.” It pleases her that art today “is becoming less and less art-referential and (more likely) to refer directly to people’s lives. It’s not made with a traditional (art) audience in mind.”

After experimenting over the years with various media, she found that photography and video offered her “the language best suited to what I wanted to do.”

Several years after earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico in her native Albuquerque, Samaras left for graduate school at Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, where the art department was strong in conceptual, performance and video art. But it wasn’t until 1980, the year she earned her master’s in fine arts, that she resolved to break her admitted “phobia” about mastering the technology of photography. There was no point, she felt, in accumulating any more advanced degrees, so she signed up for a basic photography course at a community art center.

Samaras subsequently found work as a commercial photographer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and then switched to teaching photography in the art department. That led to a visiting appointment at UCLA, where she was in her third year when UCI wooed her away a few months ago.

One recent work of hers, “Paranoid Delusions,” has been shown in Detroit and at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies. The piece consists of large photo collages--grids of images taken mostly from television--and hand-written texts which she calls “elaborate fantasies dealing with sexuality, gender race and class.” As she writes in a forward to the piece, the texts freely mingle fiction and fact “in an effort to mimic the way the media often conflates the two.”

In the section called “The Anti-Abortion Movement,” for example, one suggestion is that the movement “is actually a plot to guilt trip white women into having unwanted babies . . . used to supply adoption centers run by profiteering conservatives.” Another revolves around the notion that the familiar “Missing Children” campaign “is geared to make (working) women feel guilty that they are not at home with their children . . . (while) ‘sexual deviants’ are stealing and mutilating our children in epidemic proportions.”

Samaras currently is working on an as-yet untitled photo-and-text piece which is, she said, about “correcting the representations of Earth culture sent into outer space in the late ‘70s.”

She said she is fascinated by the phenomenon of UFOs and the language used to describe them. It intrigues her, for example, that the first flying saucer was sighted in 1949, early into the Cold War. Current science fiction frequently “relates to great fears of ecological disaster and being rescued from it,” she said. “Some people believe there are spaceships waiting to take us away from the planet.”

Aren’t these people just crackpots?

“Yes, but it does kind of tap into people’s fears. Sci-fi films are so popular. Film critics have said that ‘E.T.’ speaks to middle-class white people’s desires to escape suburbia.”

The images sent into space--copies of which are in a JPL library in La Canada-Flintridge--were meant to give a picture of life on Earth. But they “completely erased all social change movements,” Samaras said. The images of black men showed “savages hunting in the bush with spears.” A white man was depicted as a painter with a woman at his knee offering him a cup of coffee.

Samaras’ piece, she said, has to do with “the shifting of power” that occurs when a dominant culture is supplanted by others--as in Southern California, where the majority of the population soon will be non-white. She is replacing the sexist, racist imagery in the time capsule with her personal version of life on Earth, made from a frankly feminist, Lesbian perspective that incorporates her dreams as well as statements by people she knows.

While she describes her previous work as “taking apart conservative agendas and (inserting) a feminist voice,” she views the current piece as a more personal exploration, full of “wild Utopian imaginings.”

As an art professor, Samaras said her goal is to “help students identify their interests and . . . (develop) their critical facilities. Most students do not have contact with feminist theory. First of all, I make it clear to them that the debates are complicated. There are lots of different ways of thinking. It’s important to make them question hierarchies that seem ‘natural,’ to make them question their assumptions.

“What I try to do is present a lot of different practices and ideas to students, and the historical and cultural information that inform those practices. . . . I’ve yet to see any students not benefit from being asked to think more deeply about their work.”

She pointed out that when students enter college they tend to be influenced by media conventions they’re not even aware of. “If you say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. That looks not unlike a Calvin Klein ad,’ it’s not like that’s bad, but (it’s important to understand) why and how that (image) infiltrated (into the student’s work) and what that means.”

Samaras is unperturbed that students may find most of their inspiration in pop culture, however. (“What I try not to do is say, ‘Go look at this because this is high art.’) Anything can be fodder for art, in her view, so long as the artist demonstrates critical thinking.

But what if some of her students have more traditional art interests or don’t feel particularly motivated to investigate feminist or other socially engaged perspectives in their work?

“I have had incidents when that happened,” she answered. “But the environment of the classroom has been a good one. People really dialogue.” One former student of hers made art with an anti-abortion message, which generated lively conversations “among the younger women in the class. It’s hard, but you can’t impose your views. . . . Hopefully, they’ll move on to other things. (Art) is always in the process of being redefined.”