Laid Bare

Women, gender, and sexuality studies concentrator Iman E. James ’12 is writing her thesis about porn. Granted, it focuses on the erotic writings of Georges Bataille and Anaïs Nin rather than the history of Hustler centerfolds, but James still identifies pornography as the subject of her work. James harbors no qualms about this. She considers pornography to be a serious art form that can address the same issues that more respected forms examine. For her, pornography is much more than a graphic means to a crude end. Her ideas about the aesthetics of pornography may not be shared by the general populace or even a discernable portion of Harvard students. “There’s not a huge community I can point to that talks about stuff like this,” James says. However, the Harvard community does not shy away from issues of sexuality in its artistic ventures.

It would be disingenuous to say that Harvard University is home to a thriving subculture of art that focuses on sex, but that’s only because the varieties of sex-based art at Harvard aren’t nearly as organized or stylistically similar as the word “subculture” implies. Indeed, there is an impressive amount of art about sex at Harvard. This incongruity stems from the fact that much of Harvard’s sexual art remains unseen, with exception of some works that engage with the subject tangentially. Interestingly, this lack of broad popular appeal seems to stem from the circumstances surrounding the creation of this art rather than any public or administrative bias against sexual content.

UNDER THE COVERS

Abby P. Sun ’13 and Samantha A. Meier ’12 have an acute sense of the magnitude of sexually focused art at Harvard, which makes sense given their roles as the organizers of Sex Week at Harvard. Sex Week, which begins on March 25, is designed to provide cohesion to the variety of workshops and events regarding sex issues on campus. Though not explicitly concerned with art, Sex Week will include some artistic events, including a public art display outside of the Science Center. Sun and Meier consider the material not only artistically valid but also of social importance.

“I think a lot of times people tend to think of art as depoliticized in some way or that the art community here at Harvard is disengaged from any advocacy,” Sun says. Examples such as Nayeli E. Rodriguez ’10’s “SEX, America”— a show that used materials from sex education classes to comment on the evolution of ideas about national views on sex—clearly contradict this view.

Sun and Meier describe a surprising range of the work they described. Some pieces, like Rodriguez’s, involved curation rather than creation. Others took a distinctly more hands-on approach. Sun and Meier recalled that several years ago, a student in the VES department tried to make a pornographic film as a thesis. What united all these efforts, aside from their sexual content, was the minimal exposure the final products received in the Harvard community.

Meier compares the obscurity of these works to the events that Sex Week is attempting to centralize. “I would say this sort of work tends to be under the radar…. [They] existed and people knew about them, but I wouldn’t say that the “general Harvard populace knows about them,” Meier says.

However, Meier attributes this to the circumstances of their creation; these works are generally produced in Visual and Environmental Studies classes and rarely exit that environment. “I think they tend to be kept in the arts community they’re produced in,” Meier says.

These sentiments were shared by Rodriguez. Though her thesis was unique for its curatorial approach, it was not well attended, as she readily admits. “It wasn’t underground, but it definitely wasn’t popular,” Rodriguez says. Like Meier, Rodriguez does not feel that this was due to the work’s sexual content. “Nobody had any problem who attended the show or advised the show or anything. If anything, they were interested even more just because it had a catchy title,” Rodriguez says. “[The low attendence] was partly a function of the budget I had to do marketing or promotion.” Ultimately, the visibility of the show was weakened not by its controversial subject matter but by administrative issues.

PASSION PIT

The most conspicuous intersection of art and sex at Harvard takes place onstage. When Sun and Meier listed Harvard artistic projects that focused on sex, the first thing they thought of was an HRDC production: this past fall’s “Spring Awakening” at the Oberon. There is a great deal of sex in  Harvard theater: Peter Shaffer’s ‘Equus” and Sarah Kane’s “Cleansed” were both produced last spring, in some way engage with sex. Some HRDC directors believe that theater and sex are intextricably linked.

“[Sex] is one of those perennial themes that always keeps popping up in Harvard theater. There are always going to be plays that deal with sex. Frankly, a lot of very well-written and interesting plays are about these subjects, because they’re very relatable facets of the human experience,” says Matt C. Stone ’11, a former HRDC director and Crimson arts editor. Several of the plays that Stone directed at Harvard—in particular, “Cleansed” and Jean Genet’s “The Balcony”—serve as notable examples. Though both of the plays take a darker view of sexual relations, “relatability”  is a very plausable reason for sex’s appeal to playwrights and, in turn, for Harvard productions.

Joshua R. McTaggart ’13, a Crimson arts editor who is directing Ella Hickson’s “Hot Mess” this semester, says that the play attracted him due to its contemporary look at love and sexuality. “It deals with emotions that affect people of my age. It’s about how it feels to be 24, 25—still exploring what it means to be in love or have sex,” McTaggart says.

This relevancy may be one of the reasons why these plays are attended by students, but it doesn’t necessarily distinguish the plays from their less visible counterparts in the VES department. Rather, the biggest difference lies in the way the theatrical productions use sex; instead of focusing on sex in and of itself, these plays use it to discuss other issues.

The play’s suggestive disclaimer on the HRDC website perhaps alludes that “Hot Mess” contains copious amounts of sex. But when asked about the play’s use of sex, he bristled a bit. As it turns out, the disclaimer wasn’t as subtle as the play itself. “It’s not a play about sex, but it’s a play that involves sex,” McTaggart says. Though he acknowledges that the play contains many sexual elements, McTaggart ultimately feels it was more distinctive for its frank treatment of ideas surrounding sex—the reality of falling in love and maintaining relationships.

The idea of a play involving but not dealing exclusively with sex, however, is important.  In many HRDC productions, sex is not so much the subject of the work as a tool. “[Sex] is a physical way of embodying and performing love, and I think that’s most often how it’s treated in [‘Cleansed’],” Stone says. “To me, it’s more a play about love than sex.”

Yet this tool also contains the potential for abuse. Though sex is the basis for a number of great plays, as Stone notes, not all works engage with the topic in a substantial manner. For this reason, student directors must take pains to avoid exploitation in shows that involve sex. These concerns are especially important for Katherine L. Price ’14, the director for HRDC’s spring production of “Hair.” Upon its Broadway premiere in 1968, the musical’s use of nudity caused much controversy and is still one of the most salient aspects of “Hair.” “People can use [nudity] to create more of a spectacle,” Price says. “I’m pretty much going to let my cast decide what they’re comfortable with.” Though Price considers the nudity in “Hair” an important part of the play’s ’60s philosophy, she acknowledges that elements such as nudity may be overused. “It’s done a lot at Harvard, which is why I’m tentative about it in ‘Hair,’” Price says. “I think at Harvard we all want to do something different, so oftentimes people want to do the most daring pieces, which typically involve nudity.”

McTaggart agrees that nudity can be overused, noting that full frontal nudity is not the only or the best way to represent sexual intimacy onstage. “Hot Mess” will only feature a brief moment of partial nudity. “It’s not a prudish thing, just a poetic thing,” McTaggart says.

ABSTRACT SEX

McTaggart and Stone’s opinions create the impression that sex’s universality is what makes it such a durable subject. However, Patrick W. Lauppe ’13, fiction editor of The Harvard Advocate and a Crimson arts editor observes that many of the short stories published in The Advocate make use of a distinctive sort of sex. “Lots of our pieces tend to be about incest for some reason,” Lauppe says. “It just comes up a lot.”

Lauppe’s insight may have some depressing implications about the sexual habits of Harvard students. However, Lauppe made it clear that the incest was employed not to evoke familiarity but to challenge accepted norms. “It’s focusing on deviancy as a theme,” Lauppe says. “They’re [ironically using] the classical model of the love story or the love poem by focusing on something that would be recognized as sexual deviancy.”

Lauppe connects this usage of incest in The Advocate to greater trends in both modern and postmodern literature; in these forms, deviant sexuality has been employed as a way to challenge societal norms. Indeed, this method of provocation has even surfaced in artistic projects at Harvard—namely, James’ thesis on pornography. “Pornography is a way of potentially challenging what we’re used to. It can confront someone with the things they’re scared of, and it provokes self-analysis,” James says. This is particularly true for Bataille, a French surrealist and Marxist author, who James considers as one of the main figures in her thesis. Bataille’s erotica is transgressive, exploring the breaking of societal norms in shocking and explicit ways. His writing frequently examined the complex relationship between sex and death, a theme that comes up in one of the short stories James is writing for the creative aspect of her thesis.

This short story, which is modeled on the aesthetics of pornography James observes in Nin and Bataille’s work, is particularly interesting because of how it displays another element of pornographic writing: a distinct attention to subjectivity. In James’ story, this is emphasized by the fact that some of the sexual episodes take place during dreams; the characters’ carnal experiences are the product of their own consciousness.

For English professor Matthew B. Kaiser, who teaches English 154: “Literature and Sexuality,” this subjectivity associated with erotica is practiced by many contemporary authors. “Because modern literature is invested in representing the machinations of modern subjectivity to readers, and because sex is so central to modern subjectivity, it therefore follows that representing sex is at the heart of so much of modern literature,” Kaiser wrote in an email.

For Lauppe, the stylistic implication of this subjectivity is the reason sexually focused writing rarely appears in The Advocate. “There’s a precedent set by post-World War II writers like John Updike to use the sex scene as the place where you really deal with extended subjectivity and put into practice modernist techniques where they elsewhere might be frowned upon. Heavy experimentation and even egotistical stylization can occur,” Lauppe says. “But The Advocate isn’t really looking for modernist projects.”

Lauppe’s emphasis on the stylistic pitfalls of this type of fiction is representative of the larger predicament of sex-based art at Harvard. Similar to the visual art projects that aren’t widely seen due to their lack of dissemination outside of the VES community, sexual artworks fail to gain an audience not because of their actual content, but because of the circumstances surrounding their creation. The fact that art about sex does not attract students by its very nature is intriguing.

SHOWING AND TELLING

That reality of Harvard life—that sex is not enough to guarantee an audience—can be seen in the plight of the now-defunct sex magazine H-Bomb. The magazine, founded in 2004, was already experiencing financial difficulties by the spring of 2005. James, who wrote for the magazine as a freshman, feels that the magazine can only experience a resurgence if it rethinks its approach towards sex.

“H-Bomb needs to envision a future where it’s not a sex magazine that just talks about sex as if no one else is talking about sex,” James says. “We’re in college, and tons of people have sex, and it’s not that big a deal. It’s about talking about sex in a way that matters.”Sexual art, ranging from Stone’s “Cleansed” to Rodriguez’s “SEX, America” to James’ thesis, are committed to engaging with sex in a critical fashion. Yet there is another obstacle to widespread attention on campus—the simple fact that, aside from theatrical productions, the many artistic events on campus receive little attention.

Rodriguez, whose senior thesis lacked a wide audience, might be seen as exemplifying this trend.  At the same time, she does not necessarily consider the show’s attendance a grave failing. Though she remains proud of the show, she does not believe its status as an artistic thesis makes it inherently more attention-worthy than a thesis in any other concentration. “Just because VES students work in a visual medium that is made to be seen doesn’t mean it’s different than anybody else’s homework. Some people might be doing really flamboyant experiments in chemistry,” Rodriguez says.

Indeed, it is not very often that an exceptional problem set answer gains a wide audience. Even so, it’s odd that such provocative and relevant artwork lacks a wider audience. They don’t quite constitute a subculture, but indifference from the student body does keep them underground.

—Staff writer Petey E. Menz can be reached at menz@college.harvard.edu.