While a performance art piece depicting a student playing
Russian roulette led to controversy at UCLA, it may not have
created a second thought on other campuses across the nation.
Some experts in the field believe that as a whole, the incident
has merely focused the attention of the UCLA community on issues
which were already recognized and existed in the larger artistic
community.
In the Nov. 29 performance, graduate art student Joseph Deutch
loaded and spun the chamber of what looked like a revolver, then
put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. When the weapon did
not fire, Deutch left the room, and a shot was heard.
There is an ongoing investigation as to whether Deutch violated
the student code of conduct. It is also unknown whether the object
he used was in fact a revolver.
Two UCLA art professors, Chris Burden and his wife Nancy Rubins,
retired over winter break partially because Deutch was not
suspended. They also said they had problems with budget cuts in
their department.
Burden is best known for such work as his 1971 piece
“Shoot,” in which he stood on stage while a friend shot
him in the arm with a .22-caliber rifle.
Other faculty have filled the teaching duties left behind by the
pair, who were scheduled to teach classes winter quarter.
The story has received media coverage from two of the
nation’s largest newspapers, with articles about it running
in both the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.
It was also the subject of a flurry of Web logs, commonly known
as blogs, which are online entries from interested parties across
the nation, many of which touched on issues such as gun control and
hypocrisy in art.
While the incident was publicized across the nation, Chris
Waterman, dean of the UCLA School of Arts and Architecture,
doesn’t believe the press coverage of the incident has
ultimately affected the department.
“Change in a department in any university is a natural
thing,” Waterman said.
The perception of UCLA’s art department by some players in
the art community doesn’t seem to have been affected either,
even within the University of California system. William Worthen,
UC Berkeley’s department chair and professor of theatre,
dance and performance studies, wasn’t aware of the incident
when he was called for comment.
An event that greatly impacts a campus can have little to no
impact in outer circles, said Ed Osborn, assistant professor of
digital arts at UC Santa Cruz.
“I only heard about it because I saw something in the
Chronicle of Higher Education,” Osborn said.
To the outside world, an incident such as this “could fall
into the category of a strange thing that would happen at a law
school,” Osborn said. “Sometimes campus concerns
don’t transfer to the real world.”
On occasion, contentious incidents happen at different art
schools, and sometimes they are picked up by the media, Osborn
said.
With reports from Richard Clough, Bruin senior
staff.