Our new guardians of morality flex their mental muscles: 

University of Iowa (UI) students, faculty, and administrators are speaking out in support of the censorship of a statue created and displayed on campus by visiting professor Serhat Tanyolacar that they say constitutes “hate speech.” Tanyolacar’s piece comprised a seven foot tall sculpture of a Ku Klux Klan member whose robes are crafted from newspaper articles about racial violence. Many members of the UI community, however, ignored the intended anti-racist message of the piece and instead demanded that the university take action against what they perceive as a racist display — and the university is complying. 

The statue, which survived unmolested for a mere four hours, can be seen here. Yes, it’s crummy, but not, I think, a basis for fainting with rage. 

Tanyolacar erected the statue last week on an area of campus called the Pentacrest with hopes to “facilitate a dialogue with a community on a college campus,” responding to the controversy over the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But students judged the piece to be racist and offensive, and within hours, university police instructed Tanyolacar to take his piece down.

The article, by Susan Kruth, notes the similarity with a bizarre and sorry episode from 2008, in which a janitor and part-time student named Keith John Sampson was found guilty of “extremely poor judgment” and “racial harassment” – and threatened with “serious disciplinary action” – for quietly reading a history book in his own time. The book in question, which is available in the university’s own library, is an account of a notable defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in 1924. If Mr Sampson’s treatment by the university’s Affirmative Action Office doesn’t sound sufficiently Kafkaesque – a reminder that the absurd and the sinister aren’t mutually exclusive – take a few minutes to watch the video. If it makes you a little angry, maybe that’s no bad thing. And remember, these are the mental horizons of our self-imagined betters. A model for us all. 

Update: 

More on the farce at the University of Iowa from Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason: 

David Ryfe, director of UI’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, has different ideas, however. “If it was up to me, and me alone,” he told The Daily Iowan, “I would follow the lead of every European nation and ban this type of speech.”

By “speech” Mr Ryfe presumably means Professor Tanyolacar’s unimpressive artwork – and by implication any number of other things that he may find uncongenial. And note, this is the view of the director of the university’s journalism school. 

Update 2:

The psychodrama rumbles on unimpeded by reality or a sense of proportion. Apparently, students and faculty aren’t feeling “respected and safe.” Some are “traumatised.” Because of all the art. The campus is now abuzz with pretentious apologies, meetings, demands for more committees, more meetings, a “detailed plan of action” and enhanced sensitivity training. Counselling is of course being offered to “anyone negatively affected by the incident.”

Yes, it’s time for more of that lovely performance art. Today we bathe in the radiance of Mr Joseph Ravens, a fearlessly non-conformist artist who uses the medium of “action and movement” to “project energy and images with abundant focus.” Not just that, of course. Mr Ravens also “devises highly stylised situations in which images and actions coalesce to produce decidedly poetic, often conceptual, narratives.” It’s decidedly poetic. He says so himself. 

Naturally, all this decidedly poetic energy projection is harnessed to “touch on subjects such as materialism, insatiability, conformity, and alienation,” with works presented in “hay fields, school buses, closets, and [on] rooftops.” “My images and ideas are designed to have impact,” says he, “while at the same time embracing depth, resonance, and artistic integrity.” Pondering his own efforts to awe and enlighten, Mr Raven adds, “Only a short time ago I realised that in much of my work I am expelling something from my body. I often produce objects from my mouth, my anus, or compartments within my sculptural costumes. For me, these objects represent creation and the creative impulse.” I’ll just leave that one there, I think.

In the following piece, titled Ravenous and performed in 2012 during the Venice International Performance Art Week, Mr Ravens projects his energies, poetically, with the aid of a marker pen, feathers and a small metallic groin cup. Go on, taste the art. 

“The only adhesive used in his work is gravity.” 

Stone balancing. By Michael Grab. 

The contemporary performance artist is, as we’ve seen, a supremely political creature, forever troubled by acute socio-political sensitivities, with insights and perceptions far beyond the ken of mortal beings. Should any of you dare to question that sensitivity, I steer you to the ever-twitching antennae of the performance artist and educator Marilyn Arsem, specifically her description of her own immensely subtle piece, U.S. Domestic Policy II:

My performance was on November 3rd 2010, the day after the elections that brought back a majority of Republicans to the Congress. While the news was not unexpected, it nevertheless gave me a sinking feeling when I awoke that morning to read the election results in the newspaper. I couldn’t help but do a performance called U.S. Domestic Policy as a result.

But of course. What other response could there possibly be?

With the help of an intern, I purchased quantities of beautiful ripe fruit – plums, oranges, kiwi, and a bag of red peppers, as well as a hammer and a water glass.

At this point you may have some inkling of where this is going.

The performance was a systematic act of destruction. I sat at the table and first raised a line of red peppers into the air. Then I methodically destroyed the tableful of fresh ripe fruit. 

Uncanny, isn’t it? You must have the gift of mentalism. 

I started with the hammer, but quickly began using only my bare hands. It took a surprising amount of time to crush each piece.

Behold the artist at work. 

Juice spread over the table, and the smell of oranges permeated the room. I continually swept the detritus to the floor as the pile of fruit was reduced, until only a tall glass of water remained on the table. After taking a long sip of water, I carefully set the glass down, and slowly, excruciatingly slowly, inched the glass of water across to the far side of the table, where it hovered for several moments half off the edge, before finally crashing to the floor.

That sound you hear is your mind being expanded as political consciousness rushes in to fill the void.

For newcomers, more items from the archives. 

Something About the Tone.

Urban Studies lecturer Peter Matthews worries about the unequal distribution of litter and suggests bulldozing Belgravia. For the poor.

Our postcode class warrior links to a report fretting about how to “narrow the gap” in litter, how to “achieve fairer outcomes in street cleanliness.” But neither he nor the authors of said report explore an obvious factor. The words “drop” and “littering” simply don’t appear anywhere in the report, thereby suggesting that the food-smeared detritus and other unsightly objects just fall from the clouds mysteriously when the locals are asleep. And fretting about inequalities in litter density is a little odd if you don’t consider how the litter gets there in the first place. Yet this detail isn’t investigated and the report can “neither confirm nor reject the idea that resident attitudes and behaviours are significant drivers of environmental problems.”

Please Don’t Dump Your Garbage on the Roadside. 

Performance artists Katy Albert and Sophia Hamilton hit each other with pillows, thereby sharing their radicalism with the unthinking proles.

One has to wonder what our creative betters’ long-term plan is. How, exactly, were they hoping to entice employers and repay the cost of their extensive education? Is incongruous pillow flailing – sorry, “strategic refraction” – a skill in demand? Is it something the public cries out for and will rush to throw money at? What do the ladies plan to do when they’re, say, forty, or fifty? Given the improbability of such people being self-supporting in later life – at least in their chosen line, the one for which they’ve studied – do they have wealthy parents who will indulge them indefinitely? Or do they expect their talents, such as they are, to be rewarded with other people’s earnings, confiscated forcibly by the state and redistributed as artistic subsidy? And is self-inflicted dependency a thing to encourage and applaud? I ask because the ladies say they want us to “think critically.”

The Cupcake Menace. 

The Guardian’s Matt Seaton rages against tiny cakes, which are apparently exploitative and mentally debilitating, at least to womenfolk.

After telling us at length just how terrible and mind-warping these tiny fancies are, Mr Seaton adds, “I don’t want to ban cupcakes.” And yet he feels it necessary to say this, as if banning miniature sponges would be an obvious thing to consider, the kind of thing one does. And after banning them in his own office. An accomplishment that a fellow Guardianista, the daughter of the paper’s editor no less, regards as confirming Mr Seaton’s moral credentials: “I used to bring cakes into the office a lot, and Matt put a ban on it because he was worried about how much sugar we all ate. Practises what he preaches this man.” Come work at the Guardian, where the party never stops.

There’s more, should you want it, in the greatest hits. And tickling the tip jar is what keeps this place afloat.