Public Enema No. 2

Perhaps, or perhaps not.

But if one of performance art's central objectives is to get people thinking, the piece was a success.

The Art Institute administration has been forced to contemplate the risks inherent in its 20-year-role as a vortex of cutting-edge performance art. Students at the Institute, the Academy of Art College, and elsewhere are having conversations about the difference between creating out-there art and merely being an asshole. Labat has been confronted by an often-overlooked aspect of any professor's job -- looking after kids. And Yegge himself is now pondering a question artists of all types face: Is intellectual expression an end worth any means?

The fix the Art Institute finds itself in -- it conceivably stands to be sued into oblivion by a distressed student -- is entirely of its own making. Perhaps to its credit, by placing itself at the vanguard of the academic art world the Institute has also put itself in jeopardy.

While performance as art is still little-noticed outside the art world, it's enjoying a San Francisco-centered renaissance right now, in part thanks to artists coming out of the Institute. For 20 years, the boundaries of performance art -- and certainly performance art produced in an academic setting -- have been stretched at the San Francisco Art Institute. And for better or worse, shit and violence and sex and truly, truly appalling behavior are now prosaic on performance art stages.

Instructor Howard Fried two decades ago founded the New Genres department to bring into the academic fold "lifelike art" that had emerged during the 1960s. At the time, it was the first academic department to recognize artwork that left no physical remnants.

"The reason that department came into existence was because we wanted to redefine the boundaries, not so much in terms of content, but in terms of form, of what was considered by, what was suggested by, the structure of the institution as being art," says Fried, who retired from the Institute 12 years ago. "There was a sculpture department, but there wasn't a department that understood actions to be art, necessarily. At that time there was no school in the country you could go to that had a department that had that kind of activity."

The idea driving these new works, Fried says, began as an extension of the notion implicit in Jackson Pollock's spatter paintings, which, rather than creating a facsimile of something existing in the physical world, evoke in viewers' minds the image of a man pouring cans of paint onto a canvas.

"The act becomes as important as the result. The connection between the act of doing the thing and the thing that results from the act are both seen and have equal weight in the piece," Fried says.

Taken a step further, "When the action is finally free from the object it is producing, the people around it become the potential canvas."

So an artist may stand in the living room and give an erotic reading of a cereal box label, recite a soliloquy about his lot in life, or roll herself in a rug and lie in a museum entrance for hours.

Such pieces were novel, provoked audiences to reflect and ponder, and generally altered the human canvas they were painted on -- but not as much as some artists wished. Within the performance art world evolved a group of artists who wanted not merely to provoke people, but to shock them out of complacency.

So there was public masturbation, people shooting others in the arm on purpose, others hanging themselves by hooks.

HIV-positive artist Ron Athey makes his living lacerating himself onstage. And Art Institute alum Karen Finley made a tour of the national talk show circuit a decade ago after her NEA-funded work angered Republican congressmen. Finley's pieces involve forcing candied yams into her anus, shitting into a bowl and letting another artist eat it, and inviting the audience to lick goo off her naked body.

So Yegge was in good company when he physically humiliated his volunteer. Like his contemporaries, he shocked, angered, disturbed, and otherwise made his audience, participants, and sponsors very uncomfortable.

A success, no?

You wouldn't think so judging from the subsequent behavior of the parties involved. Yegge himself, after demonstrating persecuted-artist bravado during conversations just following the piece, is now contrite.

"Right now, I'm just worried about the student who volunteered," he says.

Labat was quick to change the subject away from Yegge's piece, repeatedly, during a recent conversation over breakfast.

"I find it very unfortunate that this incident is making us meet here, and not the other, truly good work that is being done at the Institute," Labat said.