Protests At Smithsonian Over Removal Of Wojnarowicz Video

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Pesky ant video refuses to die

By Jacqueline Trescott

Despite protests and angry criticism by the show's co-curator, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery defended its decision to remove a video from a current exhibition while pledging that no other artwork will be removed.

Jonathan Katz, a co-curator for the provocative show "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," said he wasn't consulted about the removal of the video. "It was an incredibly stupid decision. I am flabbergasted that they rose to the bait so readily," he said in an interview Monday.

The museum removed the video art last Tuesday because officials said it was a distraction to the groundbreaking themes of gender identity and same-sex love from artists as diverse as John Singer Sargent and Georgia O'Keeffe. "One of the exhibition's 105 works - a short segment in a four-minute video created as a complex metaphor for AIDS - was perceived by some to be anti-Christian," said a statement from the Smithsonian Monday.

The Smithsonian's statement came two days after two protesters were charged with disorderly conduct at the museum.

On Saturday afternoon, Mike Blasenstein stood at the second-floor entrance to the show with the banned video playing on an iPad he hung around his neck. He also held some leaflets detailing why he was protesting the removal of David Wojnarowicz's "Fire in My Belly" video, which featured a Christ-figure crawling with ants.

The 11 seconds with this image had triggered a firestorm among some Catholic and conservative commentators and influential politicians on Capitol Hill.

Last week Katz was in London lecturing at the Tate Modern. The other curator, David C. Ward, a historian at the Portrait Gallery, participated in the meetings about the video and disagreed with the decision, ultimately issued by Secretary G. Wayne Clough.

"Unfortunately the exhibition itself has been lost in the mudslinging," Katz said, who said the criticism was based on "homophobia and raw politics." He said he admired the gallery for doing the show, adding, "the way forward is to refocus attention to the degree by which the show, by remaining up, continues to resist the politics."

Linda St. Thomas, the chief spokesperson for the Smithsonian, said Katz wasn't consulted because of the time difference and the decision was made by several high-ranking officials, including Martin Sullivan, the portrait gallery director.

Ward, the co-curator, said the film was "in the tradition of film surrealism from the late 1960s and early 1970s. We have been distorted. It is not anti-religion or sacrilegious. It is a powerful use of imagery."

Blasenstein said he had been looking forward to the show and was appalled when he "read about the art being censored." He was detained with photographer Michael Dax Iacovone, who was taking a video of the protest.

The duo arrived at the museum right after it opened but didn't find many people in the exhibition. Then they moved to the entrance, and Blasenstein put the iPad around his neck with the video running. "I made the mistake one time of passing one flyer out. The guard said you can't pass them out. I was then holding them," said Blasenstein, 37, who works in Washington as a webmaster for a nonprofit organization.

Smithsonian rules allow protests outside the buildings, but photography and video are prohibited inside the art galleries.

Blasenstein and Iacovone were given "barring notice" citations, according to the police document, and cannot come into the building that houses the Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Blasenstein cited the AIDS/HIV crisis in its early days and recalled its slogan.

"Suddenly I realized that 'Silence Equals Death' wasn't some retro relic, but something that made it possible for me as a gay man to enjoy whatever acceptance and protections I have today. I wanted to make sure that this man who died 18 years ago wasn't swept from view again - especially from an exhibition professing to honor the marginalized," he said. The New York-based Wojnarowicz died of complications from AIDS in 1992 at the age of 37.

Katz, an art historian and pioneer in gay and lesbian studies, acknowledged historical context as well. "In 1989 Senator Jesse Helms demonized Robert Mapplethorpe's sexuality, and by extension, his art, and with little effort pulled a cowering art world to its knees. His weapon was threatening to disrupt the already pitiful federal support for the arts. And once again, that same weapon is being brandished, and once again we cower," said Katz.

The exhibition, which has signs alerting the public to its mature themes, is scheduled to run until Feb. 13.

 

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Under Pressure, National Portrait Gallery Removes Video

Museums shouldn't bow to censorship of any kind

By Blake Gopnik

Against all odds, the stodgy old National Portrait Gallery has recently become one of the most interesting, daring institutions in Washington. Its 2009 show on Marcel Duchamp's self-portrayal was important, strange and brave. "Hide/Seek," the show about gay love that it opened in October, was crucial - a first of its kind - and courageous, as well as being full of wonderful art. My review of it was a rave.

Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards. Today, after a few hours of pressure from the Catholic League and various conservatives, it decided to remove a video by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992. As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.

But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

Until Tuesday afternoon, museum staff, under Director Martin E. Sullivan, believed that "Fire" was interesting art that made important points. And now it looks as though they're somehow saying that they were wrong about that, and that it really was unfit to be seen or shown, after all.

If every piece of art that offended some person or some group was removed from a museum, our museums might start looking empty - or would contain nothing more than pabulum. Goya's great nudes? Gone. The Inquisition called them porn.

Norman Rockwell would get the boot, too, if I believed in pulling everything that I'm offended by: I can't stand the view of America that he presents, which I feel insults a huge number of us non-mainstream folks. But I didn't call for the Smithsonian American Art Museum to pull the Rockwell show that runs through Jan. 2, just down the hall from "Hide/Seek." Rockwell and his admirers got to have their say, and his detractors, including me, got to rant about how much they hated his art. Censorship would have prevented that discussion, and that's why we don't allow it.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has said that taxpayer-funded museums should uphold "common standards of decency." But such "standards" don't exist, and shouldn't, in a pluralist society. My decency is your disgust, and one point of museums, and of contemporary art in general, is to test where lines get drawn and how we might want to rethink them. A great museum is a laboratory where ideas get tested, not a mausoleum full of dead thoughts and bromides.

In America no one group - and certainly no single religion - gets to declare what the rest of us should see and hear and think about. Aren't those kinds of declarations just what extremist imams get up to, in countries with less freedom?

Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.

This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "

The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.

And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack.

Twenty-one years ago in Washington, the Corcoran Gallery of Art took a huge hit to its prestige and credibility - a hit it has yet to fully recover from - when it canceled a show of images by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, under similar puritanical pressures. The Washington Project for the Arts, which this year celebrates its 35th anniversary, had its finest moment when it embraced the show instead.

So here's a gauntlet thrown down to test the courage of Washington's art institutions: Will the Hirshhorn Museum, the Katzen Arts Center, tiny Transformer, Flashpoint, or even the Phillips or National Gallery - or maybe the Corcoran, in a rare redemptive moment - have the guts to mount the video the Portrait Gallery has taken down?

Artists have the right to express themselves. Curators have the right to choose the expression they think matters most. And the rest of us have the right to see that expression, and judge those choices for ourselves.

If anyone's offended by any work in any museum, they have the easiest redress: They can vote with their feet, and avoid the art they don't like.

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