May 12, 2015
Officials at the University of California San Diego on Monday defended an art professor who reportedly requires his students to perform their final exams in the nude, ABC10 News reports.
Associate professor Ricardo Dominguez has been teaching the class, "Visual Arts 104A: Performing the Self," for 11 years.
"At the very end of the class, we've done several gestures, they have to nude gesture," Dominguez told ABC10 Friday. "The prompt is to speak about or do a gesture or create an installation that says, 'what is more you than you are.' It's a standard canvas for performance art and body art. It is very all controlled."
He said that he and the students strip down in a dark room lit only by candlelight. He added that students are made aware of the expectations on the first day and should not enroll in the class if they are uncomfortable.
"There's a perversion going on here," one mother of a student in the class told ABC10. "The fact he is a professor and has control over these students, I think he's taking it way too far."
Dr. Jordan Crandall, chair of UCSD's Visual Arts Department, released a statement Monday in defense of Dominguez and the class.
"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," Crandall said in the statement.
"There are many ways to perform nudity or nakedness, summoning art history conventions of the nude or laying bare of one's 'traumatic' or most fragile and vulnerable self. One can 'be' nude while being covered."
Read more from ABC10.
