IN OCTOBER 2010, the Smithsonian Institution corrected a decades-long oversight by staging the first major museum exhibition focused on GLBT American figurative art. Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, at the National Portrait Gallery, met with critical acclaim and enthusiastic attendance—as well as an explosive controversy worthy of the “culture wars” of the late 1980’s. When reactionary forces demanded the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video “A Fire in My Belly”—and when the demand was met—many people were reminded of the controversy around a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective in 1989 and the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s decision to cancel the exhibit. Both Mapplethorpe and Wojnarowicz were from New York, both focused their work in part on homoerotic imagery, and both eventually died of AIDS-related complications. And both controversies occurred in a Washington arts institution that succumbed to right-wing political pressure, notably from Republican politicians.
Despite the unpleasant sense of déjà vu, there were some significant differences between 1989 and the current controversy. Yet the curators, art fans, and activists were left wondering if D.C.’s pre-eminent cultural institution and Congress had forgotten the fallout from the Mapplethorpe affair.
Curated by Jonathan D. Katz, director of the visual studies doctoral program at the State University of New York–Buffalo, and David C. Ward, historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Hide/Seek explored how sexual difference and marginalization influenced American portraiture and social attitudes since the 1880’s. More than 100 paintings, photographs, and mixed-media projects followed gay Americans’ complicated journey from “hidden” to openly “seeking.” Works by Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, Marsden Hartley, Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, A. A. Bronson, and others showed a great breadth of sexual expression. The exhibit was financed by individual private donors—the largest number ever for an exhibit at the Portrait Gallery—to the record-setting tune of $750,000.
In late November, a tipster at the conservative website CNS-news.com alerted Catholic League president William Donohue to the presence of a video work in Hide/Seek that was allegedly anti-Catholic. “A Fire in My Belly,” Wojnarowicz’s grainy video shot in 1987 to eulogize his deceased mentor Peter Hujar, included a close-up of giant ants crawling over a crucifix for a few seconds of its four-minute running time.
Writing in The Washington Post (Dec. 1, 2010), style critic Philip Kennicott interpreted the imagery as part of the artist’s “raw Gothic, rage-filled sensibility that defines a style of outsider art that was moving into the mainstream in the late 1980’s.” A former Times Square hustler and drug user turned brilliantly provocative painter, photographer, videographer, collagist, writer, and activist, Wojnarowicz often used Christian symbols in his work to illustrate the affinity between Christ and AIDS victims, even as he railed against the Catholic Church’s homicidal stances against condoms, sex education, and homosexuality itself. As for the ants, a motif he used in other works, Wojnarowicz’s friend Kiki Smith saw them as “a mysterious stand-in for humanity and part of a life-long fascination with the natural world that … was part of a charmingly boyish rapture with creepy, crawling things.”
For this piece I interviewed curator Jonathan Katz, who remarked that “Wojnarowicz realized, from the early 80’s, that being a queer artist in America meant being marginalized.” In this regard, he might have predicted this reaction to his work. Donohue of the Catholic League didn’t bother to consider the nuanced symbolism of the piece, which he probably never saw, but instead issued a hasty press release decrying the “vile video” as “hate speech” against Catholics, vowing to bring the matter to the attention of the U.S. Congress—even while acknowledging that the exhibit had been privately funded (“It does not matter”).
As if on cue, the press office for then House Minority Leader (now Speaker) John Boehner (R-Ohio) immediately issued a statement concurring with Donohue’s complaint: “American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy,” falsely claiming that the exhibit was taxpayer-funded. “While the amount of money involved may be small, it’s symbolic of the arrogance Washington routinely applies to thousands of spending decisions involving Americans’ hard-earned money.” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va., now Majority Leader) told Fox News that the video was an “outrageous use of taxpayer money and an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season.”
The same day, National Portrait Gallery director Martin Sullivan and Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough decided to remove “A Fire in My Belly” from the show, ostensibly to prevent the offensive work from detracting from the rest of the exhibit. At that point a firestorm of protest erupted. The Andy Warhol Foundation, which contributed $100,000 to Hide/Seek, and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation both threatened to withdraw all future funding from the Smithsonian. In solidarity, A. A. Bronson demanded that the Gallery remove his monumental photograph “Felix, June 5, 1994.” Activists in New York and Washington staged silent protests. The Transformer Gallery in D.C. and dozens of other institutions vowed to air the uncut video.
To those outside the art world, the Wojnarowicz brouhaha looked remarkably like a rerun of the Corcoran’s much-maligned decision to cancel Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment in June 1989. Observed Katz:
Whereas Wojnarowicz was always sexually explicit in his work, Mapplethorpe was only occasionally. Both artists, though, created art that formed a forthright, utterly self-conscious resistance to dominant ideologies. Miscegenation, sexuality, sadomasochism—at some point there is a cultural sensitivity, and Mapplethorpe was always there. Wojnarowicz, too, sought to frame an outsiderness. Both were not surprised when their work was controversial. In the broadest sense, their work was a refusal of ideologies that created queer marginalization. It’s not surprising that the right still finds their work beyond the pale.
Mapplethorpe’s AIDS-related death in March 1989 heightened interest in The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of more than 150 photographs, some of which contained homoerotic content. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, which received $30,000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibit traveled from Philadelphia to Chicago without incident on its way to Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.
At the same time, some members of Congress, notably the conservative Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY), were fuming over NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) support of the photographer Andres Serrano and his photograph “Piss Christ.” While no funding had gone directly to either Serrano or Mapplethorpe, the notion that the government would finance an exhibit of their work was apparently grounds for outrage. When The Perfect Moment came to the Corcoran in June 1989, the proximity to Mapplethorpe’s posed depictions of overt sexuality became the catalyst for Helms and company to react.
The Corcoran had received $292,000 in federal funding in 1988, which is how D’Amato justified his desire to censor the offending show. “This is not a First Amendment issue,” a D’Amato spokesman said. “The Senator has been a longtime supporter of the arts community in New York and has always supported full funding for NEA. He is absolutely opposed to censorship, but we are talking about taxpayers’ dollars.”
Bowing to conservative pressure, Corcoran director Christina Orr-Cahall pre-emptively canceled the exhibit. “Our institution has always remained outside the political arena, maintaining a position of neutrality on all such issues. In a city with such a great Federal presence, this has been essential,” she said at the time.
About 700 activists, artists and arts administrators staged a protest on June 30, projecting ten Mapplethorpe photos onto the façade of the Corcoran building. Eventually Congress held hearings to re-evaluate the NEA’s principles and appropriations, and then drastically reduced the NEA’s federal budget for the following year (and for years to come). The Perfect Moment moved to the scrappy Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) in July 1989, where a record number of visitors—many of whom said they normally wouldn’t see such a show—went to judge the works for themselves.
Despite the similarities between 1989 and today, Katz cautions against drawing quick conclusions about two very different time periods. As a pre-doctoral student, Katz was involved in staging the memorable protest outside the Corcoran. “In 1989, we were both bereft and besieged, with no allies anywhere. [Queer art] was more like a guerilla movement. Today, there’s a prevailing sense that we don’t want to return to those dark days.”
The gradual integration of homosexuality into the mainstream has also changed the cultural landscape. In 1989, the small percentage of sexually explicit images in The Perfect Moment was enough reason to yank the entire show, while Hide/Seek completed its run intact, absent the Wojnarowicz video.
“The most profound difference between 1989 and today is their use of religion as the red herring, not sexuality—although sexuality is the subtext, of course,” Katz adds. “But the opponents of the show know that using homosexuality to attack the show creates a politics of diminishing returns. The final difference is that we’re in a position to discuss homosexuality in American art, as a criminally overlooked aspect of art and art history. As someone who remembers 1989 very well, it feels like a different universe.”
America’s cultural awareness may have advanced, but the same cannot be said of some responses to the Wojnarowicz spat. In 1989, the rhetoric from Helms and his ilk was calculated to fuel the culture wars; today, Katz believes that the newest and boldest members of Congress are stoking the same fire:
They are absolutely trying to seed a culture war. Conservative politics needs an enemy in order to do its ideological work: divide and conquer is the method. In the best case scenario, they need a domestic enemy, and they’re trying to create one with this issue. What disappoints me is that the left hasn’t responded to this provocation. There will be Congressional hearings about federal funding of the arts as a result of the uproar—I’m certain of it—and then maybe the Democrats will step up.
A contrasting analysis was offered by Canadian artist A.A. Bronson, who questioned whether the Smithsonian can be compared to other art institutions: “While they are quick to respond to the wishes of the Republican politicians and the Catholic League … it’s a pretty safe bet that they don’t care much about the reaction of the art world in general, even though it has been so strong. The Smithsonian somehow stands outside the art world.” Moreover, he argued, the controversy over Hide/Seek was unwarranted, because the featured works are “meek and mild-mannered” as compared to the explicit works in The Perfect Moment. “The Mapplethorpe exhibition … was at least an exhibition that was truly testing limits. And as much as I believe that in both cases censorship is uncalled for, at least one can understand how the Mapplethorpe controversy came to be. The Hide/Seek controversy should never have happened, and if it was not for the spineless response of Dr. Clough, it probably would not have happened.”
The Internet has played a key role in not only disseminating news of the censorship but also links to the video itself—an online declaration of artistic freedom. “Many thousands of people saw the video who never would have even known about its existence before,” Bronson points out. “It was possible to silence us during the days of the Mapplethorpe controversy, but it is not possible now.” Indeed, one thing that the Mapplethorpe and Wojnarowicz affairs have in common is that both attempts at censorship backfired. Concluded Katz: “The power of queerness to disturb is unmitigated” between 1989 and today. “The fundamental truth is that in mentioning what they oppose, they bring attention to what they seek to bury.”
Kat Long’s book, The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City, is out now.
