Parent Outraged After UCSD Professor Asks Students to Take Final Art Exam in Nude
A parent of a female student expressed outrage after a visual arts professor of University of California, San Diego, allegedly required that all his students take their final exam for his class completely in the nude.
Ricardo Dominguez, an associate professor of visual arts at the UCSD who teaches a course, called "Performing for the Self," said 20 students strip down, including him, according to ABC 10 News.
It's a class that "focuses on the history of body art and performance art in relation to the question of the self or subjectivity," he added.
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"It's just wrong," responded the mother of a female student who was not named. "This is a memory my daughter is going to carry with her for the rest of her life…. To blanket say you must be naked in order to pass my class… It makes me sick to my stomach."
She said it "bothers" her, and "I'm not sending her to school for this."
"If they are uncomfortable with this gesture they should not take the class," Dominguez was quoted as saying.
But the mother said her daughter had not been informed. "Nothing was ever explained."
The Chair of the Visual Arts Department, Dr. Jordan Crandall, said the course is not required for graduation. "Students are aware from the start of the class that it is a requirement, and that they can do the gesture in any number of ways without actually having to remove their clothes," he was quoted as saying in a statement.
Dominguez sought to explain the idea behind the exercise to Inside Higher Ed.
"The students can choose to do the nude gesture version or the naked version (the naked gesture means you must perform a laying bare of your 'traumatic' self, and students can do this gesture under a rug or in any way they choose – but they must share their most fragile self – something most students find extremely hard to do)," he was quoted as saying in an email message.
"The nude self gesture takes place in complete darkness, and everyone is nude, with only one candle or very small source of light for each individual performance," he wrote. "Each student can select where everyone will be during the performance and where the performance will take in the performance studio – just as they are able to do for all the performances they do. A student may decide to focus on their big toe, their hair, an armpit, as being a part of their body that is 'more them than they are.'"
He added that students are graded "on the nature of the risks, transgressions and creativity of their gestures – that are always unique to each student and measured to a great degree to their growth and thinking about the self in relation to the body-as-canvas as method for art production."
