Spring Break
Op-ed: Free expression, impropriety blur too often at UConn
By Stephen T. Squires of Willington.
Issue date: 4/27/09 Section: Commentary
A university is all about freedom of expression, something I dearly believe in. But some "expression" can go beyond the pale. Is it alright to kill and then hang little birds in nooses just to make art? Is it also OK for an anti-war group to build and set off nail-bombs to kill whomever may happen along? Both of these issues came up over two consecutive days on campus last week.
Domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, a one-time member of the violent "Weather Underground" and infamous acquaintance of President Obama, was on campus to make a speech about education. There was almost no promotion of this very controversial speaker beforehand. Artist Randall Nelson gave a talk the day before on his exhibition at the University of Connecticut Library, a repulsive exhibit of postmodern shock-value one-upsmanship, re-inventing history as art. This exhibition featured dead birds killed for Nelson's artworks. The dead birds have since been removed by the library following the artist's confession, under my questioning during his talk, that he had killed the birds for this exhibit. Appallingly, both Nelson and Ayers demonstrate the uses and abuses of history by the cynical, postmodern intellectual for propaganda purposes.
An impressionable student cannot be blamed for going home this summer believing Nelson's so-called "concept art" includes some secret rediscovered history, instead of just very clever, even devious, creative talent attacking past President Teddy Roosevelt. Nelson must have seen the same documentary I once did on the very curious natural history of dwarf woolly mammoths at Wrangle Island, a World Natural Resources Heritage Site. These lesser mammoths survived on their isolated Arctic island into a much more recent age than did their larger North American cousins, which went extinct 13,000 years ago.
Nelson's artistic "goof" on the public initially had no identification, no brochure and no Web site information pointing out the none too obvious about it (these would become available only later). There was nothing to identify that this window-box onto a supposedly recently re-discovered "secret" hunting expedition by Teddy Roosevelt to Wrangle Island was merely a fiction created by the artist. Perhaps a tip-off to the truth was the trunk of old bones the artist installed, bones clearly not of a dwarf mammoth. No, Teddy did not ever hunt down the last woolly mammoth.
Domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, a one-time member of the violent "Weather Underground" and infamous acquaintance of President Obama, was on campus to make a speech about education. There was almost no promotion of this very controversial speaker beforehand. Artist Randall Nelson gave a talk the day before on his exhibition at the University of Connecticut Library, a repulsive exhibit of postmodern shock-value one-upsmanship, re-inventing history as art. This exhibition featured dead birds killed for Nelson's artworks. The dead birds have since been removed by the library following the artist's confession, under my questioning during his talk, that he had killed the birds for this exhibit. Appallingly, both Nelson and Ayers demonstrate the uses and abuses of history by the cynical, postmodern intellectual for propaganda purposes.
An impressionable student cannot be blamed for going home this summer believing Nelson's so-called "concept art" includes some secret rediscovered history, instead of just very clever, even devious, creative talent attacking past President Teddy Roosevelt. Nelson must have seen the same documentary I once did on the very curious natural history of dwarf woolly mammoths at Wrangle Island, a World Natural Resources Heritage Site. These lesser mammoths survived on their isolated Arctic island into a much more recent age than did their larger North American cousins, which went extinct 13,000 years ago.
Nelson's artistic "goof" on the public initially had no identification, no brochure and no Web site information pointing out the none too obvious about it (these would become available only later). There was nothing to identify that this window-box onto a supposedly recently re-discovered "secret" hunting expedition by Teddy Roosevelt to Wrangle Island was merely a fiction created by the artist. Perhaps a tip-off to the truth was the trunk of old bones the artist installed, bones clearly not of a dwarf mammoth. No, Teddy did not ever hunt down the last woolly mammoth.
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