Cutting Off Funds to ‘Offending’ Art

An ongoing wrangle over government subsidies for radical art is a miniature version of ideological attacks on freedom of expression creeping over the globe like an oil spill. Hardly the massacre in Tian An Men Square or the Salman Rushdie affair, it nonetheless points to the same old question of how much dissent the power structure will tolerate before it squishes its own people like pesky flies.

In the art world the question most recently focused on an exhibition of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist noted for stylish nude male figures with unmistakable homoerotic and sadomasochistic overtones. Washington’s Corcoran Gallery canceled its presentation of the show when it learned that defenders of public decency such as Sen. Jesse Helms had fallen into characteristic red-faced indignation because such exhibitions are not uncommonly financed by public monies through the National Endowment for the Arts.

The lawmakers say they are not going to take any more of this and are looking for ways to frame legislation that will preclude offensive art from receiving public beneficence. This is going to be tough to do since one segment or another of the public is certain to be offended by just about anything. The current flap also includes religious rancor over a Julian Serrano photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a liquid said to be urine.

In recent years we have seen Vietnam veterans go from hating their black memorial for patriotic reasons to venerating it for aesthetic ones. Federal office workers in Manhattan objected to a huge slab-of-steel sculpture by Richard Serra with such persistence it was finally pulled down. Not long ago segments of the citizenry in Chicago were put in high dudgeon by separate incidents in which one art student painted the late mayor Harold Washington in drag--upsetting civil rights people--while another shocked patriots by placing the American flag on the floor to be walked upon.

The incidents raised a motley of questions that seemed illuminated when the Supreme Court ruled that dial-a-porn calls cannot be banned and that the American flag can be burned or otherwise defaced as a legitimate extension of the right of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. Apparently this decision is wildly unpopular with that entity politicians like to call “The Vast Majority” of the American people, including President Bush. Well, majority will is allowed to hold sway through that great mechanism of representational democracy, the ballot box. The Constitution is there to defend everyone’s rights, perhaps especially those of wonderful cranks and dissenters. The only logical way to do that is to safeguard everybody’s right to express themselves as they choose in words and symbolic acts.

Why is that important?

If you think about it, we--the Homo sapiens animal--probably invented language as a way to keep from killing each other. If a stranger turns up in your cave, it’s a threat to your mate and other chattel, so the efficient and logical thing to do is to puree his brain with a large rock (preferably lashed to a stick to cut down the mess).

If, on the other hand, the stranger can tell you he just wants to swap you a cup of lard for a nice saber-toothed tiger pelt, you may get something you want and save yourself the trouble of wasting him.

If he says something you don’t like, such as “your old lady has dinosaur feet,” what is the worst thing that happens? You are indignant, offended and ticked off. This is no fun, but it is a lot less final than being massacred and considerably less discomfiting than being sentenced to death by some obdurate holy man. For millions of years, humans have been hurling insults at one another to avoid real killing. In that sense, the free use of language is an absolute cornerstone of civilization.

“Sure, OK, I don’t care how these art weirdos express themselves, but what they say wounds my most cherished beliefs. They can babble on all they want, but I won’t have my tax dollars used to pay them to insult me. It seems like those guys are either spreading filth or making stuff I don’t understand at all. I don’t know which is worse, but I don’t want to pay for it.”

And somebody else doesn’t want to be taxed for nuclear weapons.

And another guy doesn’t see any point in building schools or low-cost housing.

We all see tax dollars going for things we don’t like. The best way to feel better about that is to pretend all of our personal contributions are being spent on our pet causes. Assume it’s the art crowd that funds the NEA.

If our self-righteous lawmakers do manage to frame and pass a law excluding “offensive” art from NEA financing, what will that mean? Paranoid artniks will certainly find parallels to the old Soviet system, which excluded “dissident” artists from making a living or to Hitler’s banning of “degenerate” art in favor of propagandistic Socialist Realism.

But the truth is that the authoritarian social structure in those countries has no parallel in the United States, so the comparisons are alarmist and fanciful. We might get something roughly comparable to the old French academic system where bureaucratically approved art got the conformist goodies and excluded artists who formed a kind of counterculture, free to do as they chose outside the arid marble gardens of official sanction. Given the independence of the art market and the prevalence of cult followings, such artists could very well thrive financially wrapped in the glamorous mantle of the renegade.

Amid the Populist leanings of this culture, Official Art might well wind up looking like something from a Reagan-era Disneyland, planting heroic bronzes of cowboys, warriors and movie stars in every park in the land and decorating official buildings with murals dedicated to noble deeds like “HUD Secretary Jack Kemp Visits Watts” (patterned after Baron Gros’ “Napoleon in the Pest House at Jaffa”).

If you’ve got a perverse sense of humor, it’s hard to resist the idea.

If you don’t, it’s not so funny. Restricting NEA grants would make some worthy artists and institutions poorer and would encourage blandness all around. It would tend to defuse the varied forms of risk that are at the heart of every serious artistic enterprise, whether it be the risk of giving offense or that of being esoteric beyond the immediate understanding of regular people.

It certainly would be a good idea if the art bureaucrats would try to exercise a little street-savvy in their selection of art to receive public funds. No one is saying they should be timid or craven, but a bit of discretion is more wisdom than folly.

Years ago I reported on a case from London that became known as “The Catfish Affair.” Newton Harrison, now an established California artist, prepared an ecologically based work involving tanks of water containing real aquatic critters--lobsters, clams, catfish and the like--for the Hayward Gallery--a publicly financed institution.

As part of the exhibition, groups of catfish were to be periodically “harvested,” cooked and served to visitors. To everybody’s surprise, groups of British animal lovers became indignant over this “slaughter” of innocent catfish. (Some confused citizens thought feline cats were to be sacrificed.) It was a real musical-comedy scandal, but the London tabloid press had a field day with it. It looked like the exhibition might have to be canceled.

Harrison and the Hayward’s functionaries put their heads together and came up with a compromise. The catfish, instead of being publicly filleted, would be humanely zapped with electricity--out of sight--before being served. Somehow this solution satisfied all concerned, and the show went ahead with no one the worse for it except the catfish who tasted a little funny from being electrocuted.

Surely it would do the official art Establishment no harm to pass over art that is obviously going to get people’s backs up, such as the Serra sculpture that was a public nuisance or art that is so heavily pornographic as to constitute deliberate provocation.

Making such distinctions is a matter of delicate balance but exercising them is certainly preferable to prohibitive laws fixed in concrete. Legislated restrictions on official support would signal a significant subtraction from the idea that this country constitutes a civilization.

Civility is at the heart of civilization--tolerance for the other guy and his quirks. This culture has already taken significant steps in the direction of neo-medieval intolerance, toward a kind of aggressive touchiness that will brook no contradiction of sets of fastidious and brittle tribal laws. You can’t sit next to me if you smoke. You can’t eat with me if you consume meat. You can’t marry me if you insist that men are stronger than women. You can’t hold public office if you booze.

But civility cuts both ways. Madame, I wouldn’t dream of smoking in your space if it bothers you.

Somehow the idea that you can’t get a helping hand from the government if some know-nothing senator thinks your art is odd strikes me as a very bad idea. Frankly I don’t think much of Mapplethorpe either, but I lack the arrogance to think that earns him a place in outer darkness.

So he offends me. So what?