Canopé, formerly the “National Center for Educational Documentation”, is a public administrative establishment which depends on the Ministry of National Education and publishes educational resources.

In September 2020, Canopé published a History of the Arts file for final year classes entitled “Arts and Emancipation” [downloadable here: https://www.reseau-canope.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/Projets/arts_et_emancipation/ArtsEtEmancipation_gratuitImprimable_sept_2020.pdf], whose foreword is written by an inspector general.

The first section, entitled “Family Emancipation” (pp. 5-11), presents “works” that aim to “deconstruct kinship”: https://www.reseau-canope.fr/arts-et-emancipation/emancipation-familiale/presentation.html

The editor of this section, a conservation officer at the New Media Service of the MNAM/Centre Pompidou, defended a thesis in 2018 on the “Visual Culture of Industrial Music (1969-1995)” before pursuing postdoctoral research on “Contest Material Culture: Performance and mail art activist of the group Les Petites Bonbons (1970s) ». In his CV, he indicates working on "experimental art: psychopathology and behavioral studies" (he is a founding member of the association "Art et Antipsychiatrie"), as well as on a research axis devoted to "identity politics" which he defines as follows:

Analysis of a radical emancipation of gender in the multimedia performances of pro-sex feminist artists. The deconditioning experiments carried out by these artists in their performances engage the biopolitical limits of the body and gender, by playing on the psychological and physiological thresholds of the subject. The activities of Cosey Fanni Tutti, Karen Finley, Kembra Pfahler and Annie Sprinkle help to reflect on questions of identity intended to overturn patriarchal values, when the concept of "pandrogyny" thought up by Genesis and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge explores the porosities of gender, by adapting counter-cultural theories to a real physical experience, properly surgical (breast implants and facial surgery).

[Source: http://labexcap.fr/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/BALLET-Nicolas-CV-analytique.pdf]

Canopé therefore called upon a specialist in pornographic transgression to write a chapter entitled “Family Emancipation”.

We discover in the presentation of the subject (p. 5) that if "the family structure today asserts its plurality", this does not lead to an absence of standards or the disappearance of models: quite the contrary, the "reconstituted family constitutes a new model". The appearance of a "new model" is not insignificant, since the inspector general who opened the file rightly pointed out that the imperative of "transgression" had as its reverse this movement by which the artist must "submit" to a new moral authority, the very one that denounces and opposes" [the old model] ("Foreword", p. 3). Conformism of anticonformism: artists who courageously transgress outdated models put their art at the service of the defense of a new norm and the illustration of a new moral order.

The first work mentioned, from the "presentation of the subject", is a family photo taken in 2001. The chapter's author cites the interpretation by Chloé Maillet, a transactivist, of this photo of a family whose members do not resemble each other, which would allow us to "question a form of 'conservatism of representations in images of kinship'". A hyperlink invites you to consult Maillet's article, “Kinship as a Method (From Family Portraits to Artistic Generation)”, where we can read for example, still on the subject of the same photo:

But intra-family resemblance seems to be taken for granted in the West, while in some societies, by convention, one always resembles the same parent from generation to generation. And adopted children also resemble those who raised them. Images of kinship almost always remain dependent on this problem, which stems from the Christian axiom "God created man in his image", which made every human his son or daughter.

This is the ultimate explanation: going back to Genesis to deconstruct what "seems to be self-evident in the West." Resemblance to parents does not exist: it is a mythological ideology.

In a subsection entitled “Deconstructing kinship” (p. 5-6), the final year student is called upon to "question the determinisms linked to the family": "certain artists devote themselves fully to the deconstruction of the role of the father or mother to express an emancipation from the family model." Thus a contemporary art installation entitled The Destruction of The Father, which mixes fantasies of parricide and cannibalism, is presented to students as "a device that transforms into a real tool for emancipation." Another work, " The Bad Mother (1997), a drawing in which a mother lets her milk flow, provides an example of this type of reflection on maternal identity. These types of installations or performances have not questioned or disturbed anything or anyone for a very long time, but they have become the new firefighter art, the real official art that serves the propagation of political correctness. As proof of the absence of any transgressive dimension in this type of representation, we find it even in a supermarket novel written by the editorial director of Viewpoint Images of the world:

[Esther, the narrator's ex, was a performer.] She distorted the maternal image, making milk flow onto her small breasts while revealing her crotch.« 

Adelaide of Clermont-Tonnerre, Happy Days,
quoted in The Angels' Matricule, n°226, Sept. 2021, p. 50.

Why maintain the myth of the transgressive power of this pompous art among students, if not to convince them of the relevance of the deconstructive discourse heavily illustrated by these works?

The file then mentions cinema:

The deconstruction of kinship also appears in the field of cinema when the French filmmaker Anne Fontaine develops family anti-models in her films (How I Killed My Father, 2001) to counter the harmful effects of the traditional family. The filmmaker considers the notion of family "as a threat, as an obstacle to freedom: it restricts the mental space of the individual, forces him to comply with rules. We must free ourselves from it" (Anne Fontaine quoted by Nathalie Crom, Émilie Gavoille, Jacques Morice, Fabienne Pascaud, "La famille, inspiration d'artistes", Télérama, February 28, 2014.)

(p. 6 https://www.reseau-canope.fr/arts-et-emancipation/emancipation-familiale/deconstruire-la-parente.html)

"Emancipation" is therefore the deconstruction of the family and of parents. Of course, this speech is addressed to students who are already adults, since the file is intended for those who are taking the "History of the Arts" option in their final year of high school. But, even in their final year of high school, the minor student remains subject to parental authority. The ministerial circular of September 29, 2021 “For better consideration of issues relating to gender identity in schools” recalls that "the exercise of parental authority, which covers a set of rights and duties aimed at the child's interests, cannot be called into question". The circular cites article 371-1 of the Civil Code:

Parental authority is a set of rights and duties aimed at the child's interests.
It belongs to the parents until the child reaches the age of majority or is emancipated to protect their safety, health and morality, to ensure their education and enable their development, with the respect due to their person.
Parental authority is exercised without physical or psychological violence.
Parents involve the child in decisions that concern him, according to his age and degree of maturity.

The circular also invites, "in the interest of the student and on his/her initiative, to establish a dialogue with his/her family", if "the parents of the minor student oppose the use of a first name requested by their child in his/her school setting".

How can the high school respect the parental authority under which the minor student is placed, while inviting him to "deconstruct kinship"? How can it both invite parents to dialogue and denigrate them in an art history class where the family is presented solely as an "oppression" from which one must "emancipate oneself"?

And if one wonders what are the means of this so-called emancipation, and where it leads, one only has to consult the section “Questioning the uses made of the female body” (p. 6-7) in the chapter "Family Emancipation". It is pornography and prostitution that are presented there as tools allowing to "deconstruct [fantasies] by diversion tactics to overthrow the male gazebo (or male gaze) »:

"Prostitution", conceived with COUM Transmissions (ICA, London, 19-26 October 1976), attests to this approach in the contemporary art world of the time. Cosey Fanni Tutti's radical initiative here proposes a liberation of bodies, which finds its origin in a conflictual parental relationship, source of a family emancipation crossing various artistic practices.

It turns out that COUM Transmissions was a troop ofperformance art including both intellectual and criminal elements. The organization was particularly fascinated by totalitarianism, pornography and serial killers (Source: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/COUM_Transmissions). This is the “liberation of bodies” to which Canopé invites high school students.

This case study highlights the porosity of secondary education to “ studies " of which universities are the ideological laboratories. In this case, this History of the Arts file disseminates to students the doctrines and representations developed by the Post-Porn Studies. Is this reasonable?