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"Here is nothing, we are sorry to say, but the desire to attract attention at any price."

-- Theophile Gautier, critiquing Edouard Manet's "Olympia" in the Moniteur Universel, June 24, 1865, cited by Jacques Letheve in ARTnews Annual, 1959

"...what an idiotic project.... A night in the slammer probably caused him at least as much fear as he caused straphangers."

-- Michael Kimmelman, critiquing Clinton Boisvert's site-specific project for the School of Visual Arts in the New York Times, December 18, 2002

"We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2002 The Dance Insider

As alumnus Eugene O'Neill once wrote, Princeton University is a tradition-bound place. It was still that when I arrived about 70 years after O'Neill, and I frequently felt the need to overtly demonstrate that I was a non-conformist. One afternoon in 1984, this took the form of deciding to wear a white cowboy mask for the day. My rounds included a visit to the bank and, well, you can guess what happened. The police were very nice about it, simply advising me that it's not a good idea to wear a mask into a bank. My classmates put it more bluntly: How could I be so stupid?

In my case, it was I who was not thinking, and it was the bank employees who were reacting as they should to a customer with a mask. However, the case of Clinton Boisvert, a freshman at the School of Visual Arts, is another matter altogether. Responding to an assignment for his Foundations of Sculpture class that he make a site-specific work, Boisvert last week reportedly painted 37 Fed Ex boxes black, scrawled the word "Fear" on them, and attached them to girders and walls in the Union Square subway station. Not having seen the work, I can't say with 100 percent certainty that it taps into the post 9/11 NYC zeitgeist. But from reading numerous reports in the local media, I see nothing that warrants a) the charge of reckless endangerment with which, if one can believe the New York Times -- a big if -- the District Attorney intends to prosecute him, or b) the condescending crucifixion with which Times critic Michael Kimmelman attempted to lacerate the courageous artist in yesterday's paper. But then, it wouldn't be the first time in history that an artist was working beyond the comprehension of a critic.

"As the saying goes, art this bad ought to be a crime," Kimmelman writes. Is this the best 'criticism' a chief art critic of the New York Times can come up with? Well...no! He then goes on to cite, approvingly, an even higher critical authority -- the NYPD. (This would be the same NYPD who busted an artist of an earlier era, tapping into an earlier cultural zeitgeist, when Anna Halprin's troupe was arrested for dancing nude at Hunter College in the 1960s) "'The kid is clueless, basically,' a police official said on Monday," Kimmelman continues, "demonstrating remarkable acumen as an art critic." Well, actually -- no. At best, what the police demonstrated, in responding to Boisvert's installation by closing off the subway station for several hours and calling in the bomb squad, was a circumspection understandable from law enforcement in a post-9/11 New York. Never mind that, as even Kimmelman acknowledges, many New Yorkers had already guessed that the 37 boxes were an art project and not a security threat; a reasonable argument could be made that it is law enforcement's job to err on the side of caution. One might also argue that it is their training to recognize even the slightest possible threat to public safety, and that they are not trained to recognize art projects.

An art critic, however, should be able to make this distinction. However, it seems to elude Kimmelman, who writes of Boisvert:

"Trying to imagine what he intended, I can only guess that he might say the boxes bearing 'fear' were meant to make tangible, as sculpture, what New Yorkers have felt since 9/11 -- to give physical form to prevalent emotion. But that's art mumbo jumbo. By provoking fear, the work trafficked in emotional violence."

What a stunning statement for a supposed art critic to make! Not all, but much art is MEANT to provoke emotional response. And not just of safe emotions. It is meant to hit us where we live. Cutting the NYPD the slack for actually removing the boxes -- unlike Mr. Kimmelman, it's not the cops' job to recognize art -- where, exactly, is the basis for charging him with 'reckless endangerment'? Was there something inside the boxes they're not telling us about?

And speaking of boxes: Also at Princeton, I had a professor of Russian literature named Ellen Chances. With her raven hair, pallid complexion and taste for old-fashioned dresses, Professor Chances looked like a heroine straight out of Tolstoy. Every session, she would write on the chalkboard elaborate charts explaining the literary and social context of that week's assignment. One afternoon, Professor Chances did not show up for the beginning of class. When she strolled in 20 minutes late, she was wearing, for the first time ever, pants -- blue jeans. She commenced to talk about boxes: The boxes we put things in, literal and figurative. And when she was done, with fifteen minutes left to go before the class normally concluded, she abruptly left.

In the United States right now, there is a big, huge box labelled FEAR. Can you see it? The Bush Administration grabs Iraq's declaration on weapons before anyone else can see it not, of course, to edit out references to the numerous U.S. corporations and government agencies alleged (according to a German newspaper which claims to have obtained copies of some of the deleted pages) to have aided its weapons' programs over the years, but because the excised portions might help others construct weapons of mass destruction. Yup, put that one over in the FEAR box, my fellow Americans. Trust us. We know what you should fear.

Much of the coverage of Mr. Boisvert's project has emphasized that he just arrived in New York three months ago, the inference being that he's just a rube from the Midwest. I would draw a different lesson here: Plopped down in an alien mileau, Mr. Boisvert is, perhaps, able to see things -- big picture things -- that New Yorkers (or many, anyway) cannot see about themselves. I could WRITE a thesis about this, but in painting that one word and those 37 boxes and placing them in a subway station, Mr. Boisvert has made much a more eloquent and communicative statement. I encourage his professors at SVA to affirm that he has a special gift. He didn't "cause" the fear, as Mr. Kimmelman would have us believe; he identified it, as only an artist can. Mr. Kimmelman didn't have to like the results, but he could have at least have had the eye to recognize the intention, and to reveal it to his readers, instead of abdicating his critical responsibility to law enforcement. But it's not the first time in history a visionary artist has been pilloried by a tunnel-visioned critic. Mr. Boisvert, you have arrived.

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