Jonathan Yegge spent months preparing his performance project for a class in the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Then, Jan. 25, the big day arrived. And everything went just as Yegge had planned. He asked another student to volunteer as his assistant. He secured that volunteer's written consent to participate in acts "including and up to a sexual or violent nature." At which point Yegge and his partner moved to an open-air stage, where about 20 other students, two professors, and random passersby watched as Art Piece No. 1 dramatized "Heidegger, Derrida -- [and] all this stuff" about Hegel's master-slave dialectic and Kant's theories of freedom. Or so the artist explains.
"[The volunteer] was tied up," Yegge has since elaborated. "He had a blind-fold and gag, but he could see and talk through it. He had freedom of movement of his pelvis. I engaged in oral sex with him and he engaged in oral sex with me. I had given him an enema, and I had taken a . . . " THE SCRAPBOOK will paraphrase what Yegge had taken: He had taken a page from Heidegger's previously unknown manuscript on the artistic uses of solid human waste and . . . um . . . analyzed it.
All of which "was videoed," Yegge now remembers. "And the piece was over."
Only it wasn't. Yegge's volunteer soon developed misgivings about what he'd done and complained to Art Institute administrators, who, fearing a lawsuit, decided they needed to make clear how horrified they were. Gadzooks, Yegge hadn't worn a condom! "It is considered a serious violation for you or any individual to participate in any activity, sexual or not, which involves exposing yourself or others to any bodily fluids or excretions including but not limited to feces, urine, semen, saliva and blood," academic affairs dean Larry Thomas informed Yegge in a letter. Yegge was placed on probation, kicked out of his performance art class, advised to seek counseling and an AIDS test, and ordered not to have sex on campus.
It was too much for a 24-year-old artist to bear. Yegge quit the Art Institute, on principle, March 1. "I'm just shocked and appalled that you can't do certain things in art school," he announced.
THE SCRAPBOOK is shocked, too. Not so long ago, this same San Francisco Art Institute awarded controversial performance artist Karen Finley an honorary doctorate for her own audience-participation experiments with candied yams and bowel movements. Finley's art is similarly "unprotected." So what's the difference? Quality is the difference, says Yegge's former instructor, Tony Labat, who witnessed the Jan. 25 incident (and did nothing to stop it). Art Piece No. 1, Labat offers, was "bad art, absolutely." THE SCRAPBOOK wonders how he could tell.