I went to the library for research. I pulled out a stack of books; Marina Abramovic’s dreamlike memoir, a collection of essays about art by Marxist luminaries from Marx to Barbaro, a contemporary French academic’s survey into “the politics of the spectator,” etc.—but I needn’t have. I wanted to know why student left-wing art is bad. Why is “protest poetry” unreadable, performance art unwatchable, and “guerrilla art” of any kind not only needlessly confrontational but even counter-productive? I didn’t have to go to the library; a random visit to for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf told me everything I needed to know, because it is everything student art is not.
Shange was not a student when she wrote for colored girls…, but it was a milestone in the underground theater movement that student art continues to draws inspiration from (while it did show at the Booth Theatre on Broadway, it grew out of the tradition of alternative theater, directly challenging the canon it eventually joined). While it might be unfair to characterize Ntozake Shange as a “left-wing writer,” her work continues to speak to common alienated experiences as well as defy the hierarchy-reinforcing standards of capitalist production. Every student artist wants to do what she does, but most every student artist fails, because they have mistaken the form for the substance. In other words, they see the choreopoem and they are taken aback by its avant-garde, its boldness, its success. And these aspects, the ones that immediately strike even the laziest audience member, are easy to mimic. But they do not see the careful study that went into it, the deep soul-searching labor that produces imagery that would fuck you up. Student theater—and, more broadly, student art—does not fuck you up, because it wouldn’t dare to.
The “student” in “student art” is a necessary if arbitrary designation: the point is that I am talking about people our age who are more ideologues than artists, regardless of whether or not they are actually students at any institution. Left-wing art itself, broadly, contains a great many number of successes, from the surrealists to Le Guin—these artists infuse their politics with their art and vice-versa and, more to the point, they do it well. But that we are students drains our art of its necessity.
Urgency in art typically derives from its context; this art is needed because of its political milieu, its time, its place, etc. When student art is created, it is almost never without the illusion of necessity. It is not bad, per se, that student art thinks it will change the world; it is bad that it doesn’t. It conceives of itself as groundbreaking but refuses anything remotely controversial or soul-searching (sometimes it need not be but in that case it should just be admitted). This refusal is embedded within the nature of what it means to be a student.
To be a student is to position oneself awkwardly. Given the nature of our education system—that it is a function of class—, to be a student anywhere is to be a student at an elite institution. The elitism is only amplified at Princeton. The final layer of “awkwardness” arises from the elite nature of art at Princeton, and its domination by white and masculine stories. However, regardless of race or gender or even class, we are laborers but we are privileged. Student artists in particular are under a false consciousness: as a class, we think we are radical, but in fact, we only serve our own and, by proxy, the ruling classes’ interests. Real leftist art could and does often break through our navel-gazing, but is there any at Princeton?
To better understand where left-wing student art fails, we should investigate where it succeeds. One particularly powerful example of successful art is the Title IX graffiti that was set up all over campus last semester.
At considerable risk and consequence to themself, a student wrote “Title IX Protects Rapists” in spray-paint around campus. After the student was raped, Princeton’s Title IX Office underwent what might be characterized as a cover-up; the student was questioned, threatened, and, ultimately, no charges were brought against the person who assaulted them.
That this graffiti represented a protest is obvious. That it is art might not be quite as self-evident. That I call it leftist might even be offensive. That I say it was successful might just be confusing. After all, there were no lasting changes made to Princeton’s structural support of rape and rapists. However, not only was attention paid to the artist’s suffering, that attention catalyzed a protest that organized Princeton students to a level this campus rarely sees (the BJL protests in 2017 are a good example). It awakened the student body by exposing a shared experience of oppression, and in this sense, it is a leftist endeavor and a successful one. Moreover, it is an artistic one: these graffiti externalized the artist’s pain in a way that belonged to them and them alone but was shared by the entirety of campus. The graffiti represented both a display and a performance; a display on the part of the producer, which conditioned the performance (the protests) of the consumers. In other words, although the graffiti might not have been intended as an art project, it was enacted and received as one; meanwhile, its obviously intended political message was heard.
Granted, the Title IX graffiti is not like other student art. Perhaps it is because it probably did not intend to be art that it was so successful: it was impossible for the artist to conceive of themself as an artist, and so there was no pretension to what they produced. But more importantly, the graffiti destabilized the power of the institution and, therefore, the power of the students within it. When confronted with the failure of our single shared source of power to account for its own structural flaws, what it means to be a “student” becomes arbitrary.
Ultimately, student art can only be successful if it actively and meaningfully destabilizes its own and the audience’s power. By “actively and meaningfully,” I mean that student art must transcend the perfunctory concessions to liberal sensibility, like program notes and that include the word “intersectionality” but do nothing to undermine themselves. It is this undermining of one’s own power that leads to the self-erasure that distinguishes “good art.”
One of student art’s hallmarks is its self-indulgence, a necessary feature of art that pats the artist on the back. This art seeks to “express” what the artist feels, a task that nearly invariably leads to failure. “Self-expression” has become a pillar of amateur art; in this context, to “express oneself” is not literally to testify to one’s experiences, but rather to worship one’s own self—to impose one’s own experiences over everybody else’s. In practice, “self-expression” is how reactionary politics makes itself palatable to a liberal audience. The practice that should take its place is self-erasure, an undoing of everything that makes up the self. This is the art that is truly cutting.
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