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College finals week can be stressful enough, but for some UC San Diego students there is an additional stress: taking it all off in front of your classmates in order not to fail the class.
VIS 104A: Performing for the Self has been taught by Associate Professor Ricardo Dominguez for eleven years – and for all of those years, Dominguez has required that students strip down to their birthday suits for their finals. “At the very end of the class, we’ve done several gestures, they have to nude gesture, “Dominguez told 10 News. “The prompt is to speak about or do a gesture or create an installation that says, ‘what is more you than you are.'”
He calls it a performance of self, the class is conducted in a dark room lit only by candlelight, and Dominguez also takes it all off that day.
The course description (which does not mention nudity) is as follows:
Using autobiography, dream, confession, fantasy, or other means to invent one’s self in a new way, or to evoke the variety of selves in our imagination, the course experiments with and explores the rich possibilities available to the contemporary artist in his or her own persona.Prerequisites: two from VIS 1, 2, 3 and 111.
The naked final has made the mother of one of the class’s students furious. “It bothers me, I’m not sending her to school for this,”the unnamed woman told 10 News.
Dominguez says that in the 11 years of teaching the class, he has never received a complaint. The school issued a release stating that removing your clothes is not required in this class and the course is not required for graduation.
UC San Diego estimates the cost of attending 1 year of classes for an undergraduate to be over $30,000 a year.
