NO HOLDS BARRED

These assignments hint at a radical teacher—one who was “fearless to the point of naïveté,” according to her former colleague Lisa Wainwright—but they’re only half the story. DeGenevieve was known to destroy her own work with a hammer in class, while urging students to do the same. She once taught a course called Body Language, nicknamed Porn 101, which was exactly what it sounds like; students had to sign a waiver to enroll. She hosted marathon critiques at her house that lasted all night and occasionally turned boozy, everyone avoiding the fact that the only bathroom in the place had no door. 

Even now, a decade after DeGenevieve’s death from cancer in 2014, people talk of her the way you talk of a particularly charming drunk: half in love, half in disbelief. Anecdotes abound. There was the time the local alt-weekly erroneously reported that auditions for the porn class would be held on campus during parents’ weekend. School administrators panicked, imagining leather daddies with hard-ons prowling the halls. Or the time, in a study-abroad class, she flicked the penis of a student who made a gloryhole as his project. How many tenured professors can claim a letter in their personnel file admonishing them not to touch students’ genitals?

DeGenevieve was a provocateur, but she was also a rigorous thinker. Her syllabi are a roll call of heavyweights: Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jack Halberstam, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan. She straddled high and low, screening videos by Bruce LaBruce and William E. Jones alongside clips of Jerry Springer and body horror. Her methodology pushed impressionable young minds to the brink, as when she showed her class lynching photographs or footage of beheadings. “I’ve always thought there should be a sign above the entrance to art schools that says ‘Warning—Inside these doors you will encounter difficult ideas and many naked bodies, neither of which is life threatening,’” she wrote. That credo that guided both her teaching and her artmaking.

DeGenevieve emerged from the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s, that poisonous era of AIDS hysteria, evangelical dogma, and arts defunding, which have now been renewed, albeit with new agonists and agendas. In 1994, her own $20,000 NEA grant was rescinded, along with those of Merry Alpern and Andres Serrano, ostensibly because the work lacked artistic merit. DeGenevieve’s large-scale mixed-media pieces—combining photographs, sequined fabric, and sometimes explicit text—were transgressive enough to fluster bureaucrats in DC. Some of the works’ unofficial titles, such as My mind lives in a hot wet hole in my body, suggest an illicit inner monologue that elsewhere caramelizes into quasi-sadomasochistic confession: Someone’s flesh is under my fingernails. 

In the early 2000s, she upped the ante on her political incorrectness in a trio of captivating lo-fi videos. Steven X and Barbara C, 2000,features a split screen of two talking heads: a middle-aged man recounting his recent sexual encounter with a twelve-year-old girl, and a middle-aged woman (played by DeGenevieve) reminiscing about her youthful sexual hijinks. Desperado, 2004–2006,is an endearingly playful mockumentary that chronicles DeGenevieve’s real-life affair with a Cajun trucker named Daryle; in one scene, she gives him a blow job in a parked car. And in The Panhandler Project, 2004–2006, her most controversial outing, she pays five homeless Black men $100 to strip and pose in a hotel room. Many critics denounced the video as exploitative, but, watching it now, I’m most struck by DeGene-vieve’s rapport with her subjects, which evinces a mutual trust elastic enough to accommodate good-natured teasing and, from the men, an earnest desire to deliver. Early in the video, a subject named Gordon props himself up in bed and asks DeGenevieve with the urgency of an aspiring starlet: “What do you want me to be? Serious? Romantic? Lovable?” Behind that question thrums an assertion of multifariousness and self-creation that counters more one-dimensional representations of homelessness.  

These and other works were recently on view in “In Your Face: Barbara DeGenevieve, Artist & Educator,” a lavish and lovingly produced retrospective at the SAIC galleries, curated by Alan Labb, a longtime friend and colleague, with support from Wainwright. The show celebrated DeGenevieve’s risky vision while also acting as a salvage operation for her legacy. Since her death, much of her work has languished in a storage locker, dusted off only for a small local exhibition in 2015. DeGenevieve was an ambitious artist, but not necessarily a careerist. She didn’t always conserve her work well or indicate which versions were final. Perhaps more troublesome for curators, she remains thorny: politically and ethically volatile, willfully perverse, tonally fluid. Whatever its dense conceptual and theoretical underpinnings, her work is ultimately a big fuck you to the status quo. She exhorted her students to define “problematic,” appreciate abjection, and flout knee-jerk proprieties. In her art, she deploys sex as a metaphor for the outlawed desires and cheap fictions that rot America from the inside out, the dank recesses of the national id that she called the country’s “soft underbelly.”

DeGenevieve understood that political correctness often muzzles whatever it is that makes us uncomfortable or anxious or ashamed, and she seized on this dynamic as a source of potent image-making.

DEGENEVIEVE WAS BORN Barbara Cywinski in 1947 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a coal town already in decline. Her parents, Genevieve and Walter, were working-class Polish Catholics who ran a sandwich shop called the Sub Base. (Her mother also worked as a telephone operator.) The family wasn’t Norman Rockwell material. “Until she died, my mother routinely told me I was vulgar,” DeGenevieve wrote, and the artist had a low opinion of her navy-vet father. In Family Portrait, a John Baldessari–esque collage from 1986, her parents’ faces are whited out, while the young DeGenevieve’s head floats above, estranged in its own rogue orbit. Underlying it all is xeroxed text that appears to be the dictionary entry for regret.

DeGenevieve was the first in her family to attend college, earning a bachelor’s from Wilkes College (now Wilkes University), then a master’s in arts education from Southern Connecticut State University. In 1970, she married her high school sweetheart, Paul, who was then studying chemistry at Yale. DeGenevieve got a job teaching art to underprivileged children in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The young couple seemed destined for a respectable suburban life when, in 1978, DeGenevieve discovered Paul’s affair with her best friend. Divorce ensued, and DeGenevieve headed out west, where Van Deren Coke had just established an MFA program in photography at the University of New Mexico. At some point she changed her last name to DeGenevieve in honor of her mother.

From the beginning, her work raised hackles. At a night market on Central Avenue in Albuquerque—the first time she publicly exhibited—she showed a photograph of a father and his two young sons, all of them nude. A pack of roving Baptists suddenly materialized and began chanting, “Pornography is sin.” DeGenevieve got into a shoving match with what she later described as a “rather substantial redheaded woman from the church group.” Police and news vans were dispatched. DeGenevieve realized that what had offended the Bible-thumpers wasn’t the fact that her subjects were underage but the trio of exposed penises. “What has been so problematic . . . are the naked men that have populated much of my work since graduate school,” she mused in 2012. “It’s a dick thing. Even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that pesky, protruding, uncontrollable external organ is still not ready for general public viewing.”

Dicks are rife even in her early images, pressed into service as beleaguered punctums or as flaccid riffs on all the breasts and mounds of Venus that swell throughout art history. The Artist and Her Models, a photo from 1978, depicts a fully dressed DeGenevieve lounging with three naked men, one of whom reclines on the floor in a coquettish pose cribbed from Titian or Courbet or any number of other male oglers. In The Four Graces, a photograph from the same year, a quartet of naked men form a lineup of blunt dong: tender, thatched, and of varying size.

Weaned on second-wave feminism and the anti-porn rhetoric of firebrands like Andrea Dworkin, she only gradually embraced what might be called the revolutionary potential of smut. 

In 1980, Coke worked his Rolodex to get DeGenevieve hired at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. One of the series she produced during this period, “True Life Novelettes,” in which all works were dated 1979–82,deepened her explorations of gender and sexuality, while adding infusions of autobiography and wit. In True Life Novelette #2, DeGenevieve leans into the camera, advertising lusciously overblown lips—a cartoon kisser—while the handwritten caption reads: Dear Ann Landers, I have seen the phrase “oral sex” several times these last few years. Does it mean all they do is talk about it? Or is there more? Confused in Wilkes-Barre. In #3, a feminine hand cups a naked man’s genitals from underneath. The text: She was always strangely curious about the function of a jock strap. In #5, a dejected everyman examines his nubby dick in a hand mirror: He looked at himself quite often and always with the magnifying side of the mirror.

In April 1985, DeGenevieve’s mother—then a widow of six years—was set to remarry. On the eve of her wedding, she committed suicide by overdosing on pills. “She perceived herself as being powerless and increasingly invisible,” DeGenevieve wrote, adding, “My refusal in my work to be the good girl my mother struggled all her life to be, is my refusal to die as she did.” DeGenevieve floundered for more than a year. Her breakthrough came via cliché verre, a nineteenth-century photographic process that involves transferring an image from a glass plate onto light-sensitive paper. The pieces in this series are dark—literally and thematically. Motifs of hands, mouths, and eyes recur, along with little collaged hearts and brains, implying a disconnect between intellect and emotion. DeGenevieve scratched the glass plates, lending the prints a disturbing tactility evocative of claws or feverish redaction. Fragments of her mother’s suicide note serve as collage material; Portrait of the Artist and Her Mother, a large mixed-media work from 1992, actually incorporates a snapshot of her mother’s body in an open casket. Other works make use of psychology texts about adolescent sexuality. (DeGenevieve, whose MFA thesis incorporated Jungian universality, was an aficionado of such analyses.)

If her mother’s suicide pushed DeGenevieve in a more introspective direction, the loss of the NEA grant in 1994 radicalized her to bare it all. This was apparent not only in the art she produced, but in the classroom, where she began to articulate a theory of pornography. “[T]here’s a necessity to explore the disorderly and slippery spaces of desire and pleasure, to jump into that big dark hole, face or fist first, into something as profoundly intellectual as it is physical and visceral,” she wrote about the Porn 101 class. “These are spaces of radical resistance—the spaces in and around the body.”   

This thinking indicated a drastic break with DeGenevieve’s previous attitudes. Weaned on second-wave feminism and the anti-porn rhetoric of firebrands like Andrea Dworkin, she only gradually embraced what might be called the revolutionary potential of smut. Once she went in, though, she went all in. In 2001, she and a friend from California launched their own porn site, ssspread.com, featuring “lesbians, dykes, butches, femmes, trans men and gender queers of infinite variation.” (For what it’s worth, DeGenevieve had sexual relationships with people of all genders.) She shot a scene every week for the next three years, producing approximately 150 videos and more than 13,000 images. She considered the site the “project that changed my life perhaps more than anything else I’ve done.”

Paralleling her “no subject is taboo, nothing is sacred” ethos was a more pointed repudiation of political correctness, especially within academia. DeGenevieve accused the left of the same tyranny of “behavior modification” that the right sought to impose. Her colleagues, she charged, aimed to “confer honored victim status on everyone who has ever been wronged.” They maintained a blacklist of subjects deemed inappropriate for art: “the homeless, body manipulation seen as self harm, [and] anything to do with animals,” among other topics. And they dismissed pornography as a valid field of inquiry. Such invective, coming from a saboteur with firsthand experience of institutional prudishness, put DeGenevieve in a paradoxical position: that of a professor who, because she was tenured, had the luxury of deriding her own ivory tower. That paradox made her work do double duty as fine art and self-consciously performative discourse.    

This segues into a nearly minute-long interlude of DeGenevieve and Daryle performing various sex acts in a shower, shot through an opaque and sudsy door, overlaid with a soundtrack of “Sin Wagon” by the (Dixie) Chicks. The song is a cheeky touch, but also a nod to Daryle’s milieu: a lowbrow America of swamp tours, chain motels, and motorcycle shops.   

In The Panhandler Project, DeGenevieve further challenges audiences to see her subjects as men with their own agency, capable of existing outside the protectionist frameworks that well-meaning liberals ascribe to the unhoused. Many critics at the time bristled. “Few exhibitions in recent years have been quite so callous in the treatment of their subject matter or tailor-made to intentionally court and confront directly the art-going public’s sense of moral outrage,” wrote a reviewer at the Chicago arts publication Newcity. More recently, the scholar Keren Moscovitch questioned whether DeGenevieve’s project isn’t “just another manifestation of an attempt to alleviate white guilt via the red herring of consent and the appearance of pleasure.” The implication is that consent and pleasure are illegitimate or inauthentic when they coincide with homelessness, perhaps because, in the liberal imagining, unhoused people are de facto victims. DeGenevieve anticipated and deflected these criticisms. She noted the hypocrisy of academics declaring themselves ideological bouncers determining the rules of engagement for a community that existed, for them, only as abstractions. As she argued in a 2007 lecture, “Most problematic for me is the apparent belief that this segment of the population as a group needs special treatment and protection by (and perhaps from) the art world—ostensibly because they are unable to give informed consent about the use of their image. This condescending and infantilizing attitude reflects its counterpart—indifference toward anything other than the theoretical implications of representation.” 

In retrospect, consent was likely a smoke screen for the brasher provocation of depicting unhoused men as nude, occasionally aroused, and self-possessed. Like much of DeGenevieve’s work, The Panhandler Project troubles our rote notions of what’s unacceptable. Other projects raised questions that even now feel flammable. Can a sexual experience between an adult and a child ever be addressed in terms beyond abuse? “It’s easier to blame child or adolescent sexuality on an instance of molestation than entertain the idea that children are interested in sex, might like it, and might actually be the agent in making it happen,” DeGenevieve said about Steven X and Barbara C. Can pornography ever be sublime in the grand Romantic sense? For three decades, DeGenevieve critiqued and dismantled political correctness, letting her colleagues’ sanctimony and insulated self-righteousness indict themselves. She wasn’t just trolling. She understood that political correctness often muzzles whatever it is that makes us uncomfortable or anxious or ashamed, and she seized on this dynamic as a source of potent imagemaking. “Embracing the need to objectify and be objectified, to fetishize and be fetishized, to play the willing victim as well as the victimizer, opens up a mine field that will be difficult to traverse, but it is a more intellectually provocative and honest terrain from which to understand who we are as complex sexual beings,” she wrote.