ASU Professor Betsy Schneider is an artist and filmmaker. Among other things, she teaches a course on censorship and art.
It’s a subject she has personal experience with. Back in the 90s, when her daughter was born, Betsy and her then-husband started a daily photography project. Twice a day, they took a picture of their daughter. Their daughter was nude in the images, and over the years, Betsy came to see the photographs as a kind of document of human development.
She began exhibiting the photographs as a series she called “Quotidian,” and right away, they were controversial.
Schneider joined The Show to talk about how she says, the “Quotidian” series has been an evolving lens for her to understand her life as an artist and how people react to her art.
Full conversation
BETSY SCHNEIDER: I was so proud I had this stack of machine prints, and I went to just like a sharing session, like a critique session. And a woman, she’s like, “You’re going to have trouble with this.” And I mean, I knew, you know, certain pictures of children provoke people in certain ways. I mean, I also grew up in the ’70s and I was married to a Scandinavian, so childhood nudity and photography had been really normalized. So I was really shocked.
SAM DINGMAN: Can I just ask, I mean, do I take that correctly to say that the goal for you in making these photographs was not to be provocative?
SCHNEIDER: Yeah, no. You know, a lot of it was about, I mean, really basic, like, “Wow, look how much a baby changes.”
DINGMAN: So you do this showing of the work-in-progress version of “Quotidian,” and then you get this feedback that I think you said, the woman says “You’re going to have trouble.”
SCHNEIDER: Yeah. And then in 2004, it was actually removed from a show in London.
DINGMAN: Where you told us oh was going to be removed?
SCHNEIDER: Yeah. It was a weird situation where the curator was a friend of mine.
Her dad was taking pictures of the installation. Somebody saw a man taking pictures of pictures of a naked child, and they reported it to the director. And the director’s like, “That work needs to be taken down.”
DINGMAN: Can I just ask was the man punished for taking the photographs?
SCHNEIDER: No, I mean, he was taking installation shots for the artists.
DINGMAN: Oh, OK.
SCHNEIDER: Like, it wasn’t even genuinely somebody with prurient interest photographing. I mean, that brings up a whole other level of policing, right? Assuming the worst intent when somebody looks at something.
The Kohler Center wasn’t even that they thought it was genuinely problematic. It was that they thought other people were going to think it was problematic.
DINGMAN: That’s interesting. So we should just say that the Kohler Center is an art center in (Sheboygan), Wisconsin, where “Quotidian" was ultimately exhibited.
SCHNEIDER: So in 2012, it was part of a larger show at the Kohler Center. It got taken down from the Kohler Center. And just for context, there were some other artists — including Catherine Opie and Ryan McGinley, who are known for making work that pushes boundaries, and specifically in relation to the body.
So it was kind of ironic, I think, that we’re more threatened by the children’s body than the adult body.
DINGMAN: And to be clear, their work was not taken down.
SCHNEIDER: No, their work was not taken down. The show actually went on to two other venues, including one at the Weatherspoon in North Carolina, and then the Addison in Andover, Massachusetts. And they included my work, but they contextualized it. My daughter wrote a little text. She was like, “It’s just normal. It’s just like brushing your teeth.”
So they included this text and they kind of proactively created a space like “Look, we know some people might have issues with this. Let’s talk about it.”
DINGMAN: Can I ask, what is your daughter’s name?
SCHNEIDER: Madeleine.
DINGMAN: Madeleine. How does Madeleine feel about all this, looking back on it?
SCHNEIDER: So maybe two or three years ago, I had her come into a class that I was teaching, and one of the students asked her about the work. And I said, “Do you want it to be shown?” And she said yeah. She’s like, “We worked really hard on that.” And I mean, this is a 25-year-old at this point, and I was like, “Wow.”
I’d always been nervous about calling it a collaboration with her because, you know, an infant is not a collaborator.
DINGMAN: Right. They can’t consent.
SCHNEIDER: Exactly.
DINGMAN: Well, can I ask you, Betsy, there must have come a moment where she was of an age where you could show her the work for the first time, and she would have some understanding of what it was. Do you remember that moment and how it went?
SCHNEIDER: So I actually made a video of her looking at it, but by then she was eight.
And, you know, in this particular video, she’s like, “Well, it’s important to you. It’s your art.”
And the problematic nature of her mom interviewing her about something that related to her mom notwithstanding, that was definitely a moment where I was like, “She understands that this is something that we’re doing together, but that it’s ultimately my thing.”
You know, we go to shows, faculty shows where my work would be up. And she didn’t like being the center of attention. She’s like, “It’s not about me.”
We as adults are like, “Oh, you’re naked and you’re in public.” And her interpretation was like, “No. Pictures are pictures. I have a whole other life.”
DINGMAN: There is this way in which art being censored — or generating controversy, even if it’s not censored — weirdly attracts more attention to the art.
SCHNEIDER: Yeah.
DINGMAN: You know what I mean? What’s your thought on that piece of all this?
SCHNEIDER: Personally, I’ve never been able to spin that into gold. I’ve never been able to be one of those people that took controversy and advanced my career. So that’s answer number one. But I think things are scarier now in ways personally, they weren’t as scary 20 years ago.
DINGMAN: Can you say more about that, the scariness? What do you mean?
SCHNEIDER: I mean, obviously museums are canceling shows about things. It feels like there’s a lot more fear. It’s also our job as artists to keep making stuff. We can’t expect to be comfortable all the time.
Like when I was making that work, I was so confident. I was like, “I’m not hurting my kids. I’m making art. It’s important art, and I am going to stand behind it and maybe I’ll lose my job. And maybe this will happen, but I stand behind my work.”
DINGMAN: But let me go back to what you said a moment ago, Betsy, about how maybe artists need to be aware that they’re not always going to be comfortable.
It also feels like implicit in what you’re saying is that consumers of art need to have an expectation that they’re not always going to be comfortable.
SCHNEIDER: Oh, yeah. Yeah. I heard something recently that freedom and comfort are not the same thing.
I mean, I think it’s interesting too, is that, you know, there’s been a lot of push towards — well, there was until recently — towards identity-driven art. And on one hand was really interesting and good and positive, but it also started to become something that we became comfortable with, the ways that certain groups were portrayed and, and standing behind certain artists who we felt like made work that reflected our own kind of positive or progressive views of the world.
And a lot of us started to get away from and forget that one of the functions of art is to push us towards things that are scary and uncomfortable. And those may be for people who are left-leaning, they may be right-leaning things, or they may be things that don’t go left and right and confuse us a little bit and put us in this ambivalent or ambiguous place.
DINGMAN: Can I ask you as a last question — and this is a hypothetical — but let’s say that you had completed the work on “Quotidian,” or were in the midst of it, and your daughter had come to you and said, “I actually am not comfortable with this being shown, or I don’t feel good about the idea of people seeing me this way.”
How do you think that would have impacted your perspective on this?
SCHNEIDER: Yeah, I mean, I would like to believe I was the kind of person who would say, “OK.” What I probably would have done was find a way to keep doing it and wait until she got to be older and have a conversation. And there’s a self-centered nature to art, and I do think that making art out of your own life can be really complicated. It’s part of what makes it interesting. That’s an imperfect answer.
DINGMAN: That’s maybe not a comfortable answer, but it is the answer.
