By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. Make a piece that addresses your own racism. Make a piece that is guaranteed to offend or piss people off. Make a piece you would consider sexually pornographic. Make a piece of art that will save the world. Make a piece that will save yourself. 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 , 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.
Anecdotes abound. 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. DeGenevieve was a provocateur, but she was also a rigorous thinker. 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.
That credo that guided both her teaching and her artmaking. True to her word, she spent the next two decades—until her death—making art that punctured liberal pieties around class, race, and gender.
In the early s, she upped the ante on her political incorrectness in a trio of captivating lo-fi videos. Steven X and Barbara C , ,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.
