Smithsonian Repercussions After Removal Of Wojnarowicz Video "

Smithsonian deals with fallout over David Wojnarowicz video controversy

By Jacqueline Trescott

Senior Smithsonian officials are meeting with concerned museum staff over fears that removing a video from the National Portrait Gallery sets an unwelcome precedent. The action has generated protests, thousands of e-mails and an advisory board member's resignation.

The staff at the National Museum of American History met Monday with Richard Kurin, the undersecretary for art, history and culture, and a member of the senior staff who decided that the excerpt from David Wojnarowicz's video was what the Smithsonian called a "distraction" to an overall groundbreaking show.

One participant at the meeting said Kurin explained that Smithsonian officials moved fast because criticism from Capitol Hill and other critics was coming so quickly. "The secretary had to move quickly because the news cycle moves so fast now," said the longtime employee. "He also said the video wasn't an essential part of the show and had been added late."

Because the objections on Capitol Hill came initially from two powerful Republicans, Reps. John Boehner (Ohio) and Eric Cantor (Va.), and Congress controls 70 percent of the Smithsonian's budget, employees said they feared to go public with their viewpoints.

"Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" opened Oct. 30 and is the first major museum show to explore same-sex intimacy. The Smithsonian has said repeatedly the institution stands behind the show, which continues through Feb. 13.

Since removing the video, which contained an 11- second segment that showed ants crawling over a crucifix, the Smithsonian has taken steps to control the damage. The action has also been criticized by artists, who staged a protest outside the Portrait Gallery last week, and by the Association of Art Museum Directors, an influential group.

Last week, James T. Bartlett resigned from the gallery's advisory panel in protest. "I believe it is a fundamental right of museums and their curatorial staffs to make such decisions [about exhibition content], even if some art is deemed objectionable by external critics," Bartlett said in an e-mail obtained by The Washington Post. "I choose firmly and resolutely not to be part of an institution that is and can be put ad infinitum in this position."

Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough and Kurin attended meetings of the Portrait Gallery commission on Sunday and Monday.

Before a staff meeting at the Portrait Gallery on Wednesday, the museum's director, Martin Sullivan, released an e-mail with the details of a reply he is sending to "the thousands of e-mails and phone calls" that have come to the museum.

Noting the spectrum of opinions the museum had received, "I want to assure you that your message has come through.

"As you know, more than 100 artworks are on view in the overall exhibition. More than a dozen works specifically address the tragic impact of AIDS. The exhibition continues to include two important works by David Wojnarowicz as well as a portrait of him by Peter Hujar. The art was assembled from the Portrait Gallery's permanent collection and from many other sources. It is presented together for the first time ever, thanks to generous lenders and private financial supporters.''

The controversy has gained national attention, even meriting a commentary on Stephen Colbert's show. The New York Public Library had invited the curators to a forum next week before the exhibition became Topic A in the art blogosphere. The panel is still scheduled. David C. Ward, the historian at the Portrait Gallery and co-curator of "Hide/Seek," Jonathan D. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and the show's co-curator, are expected to speak, along with Sullivan, at Wednesday's forum.

 

This article is from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/09/AR2010120905885.html

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.

 

This article is from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/06/AR2010120607177_2.html?wprss=rss_print/style

An All-Too-Predictable Culture War

Critic's Notebook: Smithsonian Institution fails to stand up to anti-gay bullies

Pressure groups succeed in getting a piece removed from a show about gay identity in art at the National Portrait Gallery.

 



By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic

Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian.

Last week, Smithsonian Institution officials in Washington removed an artwork from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The critically acclaimed show's subject is a century of gay identity in art. The decision to remove the work caused an uproar.

Coming after months of news reports of bullying and shocking teenage suicides, and in the week of a fresh Pentagon study supportive of gays and lesbians serving openly in the armed services, the context of the action speaks volumes

Seven short years ago, the United States Supreme Court, ruling 6 to 3 in Lawrence vs. Texas, decided that consensual intimate conduct between same-sex adults is protected under the Constitution's 14th Amendment. Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, in a widely noted dissent, "If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is 'no legitimate state interest' for purposes of proscribing that conduct ... what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising 'the liberty protected by the Constitution'?"

Indeed, gay and lesbian couples can now enter into legal marriage contracts in five states — and more are on the way, California perhaps next in line. When gays and lesbians are also allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, then the social assimilation of homosexuals into previously restricted neighborhoods of heterosexual privilege will be, if not complete, then irreversible.

Against this remarkable backdrop of landmark civil rights advances, long thought impossible, came last week's Smithsonian dust-up. The public had registered no complaints about the show, but a small, familiar cast of voluble anti-gay pressure groups, politicians and media did. They have read the civil rights handwriting on the wall, and they threw a tantrum. The Smithsonian acquiesced.

Among 150 artworks in the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," attention focused on 11 seconds of a 13-minute video made 23 years ago by the late artist David Wojnarowicz. Images of a decaying crucifix lament the failure of many Christians to act with compassion in the AIDS pandemic's early years.

Opponents turned those 11 seconds into what Alfred Hitchcock famously called a MacGuffin — the ultimately irrelevant plot element everyone on screen is after. A MacGuffin is used to mislead the audience, diverting attention from the real caper that's underway.

The real story here is an exhibition at the nation's officially sanctioned Portrait Gallery that treats gay and lesbian identity as a respectable subject for serious artistic study and, by implication, social acceptance. Privately funded, as most such Smithsonian exhibitions are, "Hide/Seek" is not the first museum show to examine homosexual identity in art. But it is the first to do so in the nation's capital with the establishment blessing of the popular Smithsonian Institution.

And so, to some, it needed to be stopped.

Who objected? Not the public. Museum publicist Bethany Bentley told the media that no complaints — none — were received from the day the show opened, on Oct. 30, until Nov. 29, when an online article appeared on the right-wing Cyber News Service.

CNS was founded by L. Brent Bozell III, who once complained in the Hollywood Reporter, "Why can't a single prime time [television] show say — with no strings attached — that homosexuality is morally wrong?" Last summer Bozell expressed outrage that, on the hit TV show "Glee," the only characters "disapproving of homosexuality are vicious school bullies."

The CNS story was written by Penny Starr. An article of hers immediately before this one wondered whether elected Republicans backed by the "tea party" movement would take on social issues "such as same-sex marriage." Last March, she also went after the Smithsonian — this time with an article about the National Museum of Natural History, which did not include the conservative religious doctrine of creationism in a science display.

The video MacGuffin was propelled by the anti-gay Catholic League. Spokesman William Donohue — who last spring received widespread criticism for declaring that the Catholic Church "doesn't have a pedophile problem, it has a gay problem" — claimed the 11 seconds are "hate speech." Within hours, conservative Republican politicians piled on.

House Speaker-designate John A. Boehner, majority leader-designate Eric Cantor and Jack Kingston, who hopes to chair the House Appropriations Subcommittee, called for the show to be closed. All three congressmen rate a zero on the Human Rights Campaign's scorecard on gay equality issues.

Immediately, the Family Research Council praised the politicians. The FRC is designated an anti-gay hate group by the watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center for continuing to "pump out demonizing propaganda" against homosexuals.

Finally, Fox News Channel climbed onboard. Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Mercedes Viana Schlapp and others took to the airwaves to falsely suggest, as Donohue did during an online Washington Post Q&A, that the exhibition was paid for by taxpayer dollars.

Apparently none, Starr excepted, had seen the National Portrait Gallery show, MacGuffin and all. They didn't need to. The anti-gay agenda is to pick bogus fights about art, free expression and federal funding, since those tactics were effective in the bruising culture war of the Reagan era. And it's being led by partisans who owe significant portions of their livelihoods to the money-raising power of homophobia.

It's easier to see the scam now than it was 20 years ago, when similarly manufactured outrage over homoerotic art was likewise the MacGuffin. Back then, in the exhausting wake of the AIDS crisis, the attack meant to divert attention from the sex and money scandals roiling the lucrative, politically influential televangelist empires of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Peter Popoff, Marvin Gorman and Jimmy Swaggart.

Will it work this time? The onslaught might damage art museums, which would be lamentable. And Smithsonian acquiescence is a self-inflicted wound.

But it won't turn back the tide of civil rights history. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is "no legitimate state interest," as Justice Scalia wrote, it's too late for equality to be denied. Irrational animus is a good working definition of bigotry, and that's all Smithsonian opponents have been putting on display.

 

This article is from: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-new-smithsonian-20101206,0,6416921.story

Shock Of The Ho-Hum

By ERIC FELTEN

My, that was fast. Before the complaints even got going in earnest, the curators at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery caved in and removed a video they had been exhibiting that featured images of a crucifix crawling with ants. The 1987 video, David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly," was part of a show called "Hide/Seek," celebrating gay and lesbian portraiture. The Defenders of Art, racing to the barricades, were dismayed to find the battle was over even before they arrived.



Perhaps the museum capitulated for reasons of pure politics—why, they may well have reasoned, make it too easy for the new GOP House majority to find a place to cut the federal budget? (One can imagine NPR was hoping the Portrait Gallery would hold its ground, if only to divert fire from Capitol Hill.) But maybe just as salient in the curators' calculations was a sense that the art in question was hardly worth going to the mattresses over.



Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik, decrying what he sees as censorship at the National Portrait Gallery, expressed disgust that curators wouldn't defend "interesting art that made important points." Yet he was perplexed that anyone even noticed the offending images in the first place: "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." So tired, so shopworn, are the art world's provocations, they go unnoticed even by their advocates.

In his 1962 book "The Theory of the Avant-Garde" Renato Poggioli observed that "Like any artistic tradition, no matter how antitraditional it may be, the avant-garde also has its conventions." The most conventional of modernist conventions has been the need to shock and offend, doing so, as the lingo has it, by "transgressing boundaries." But once all the boundaries have been blurred, what's left?



Salman Rushdie—whose credentials at discomfiting theocrats are unimpeachable—has lamented how lame and predictable transgressive art has become: "Once the new was shocking, not because it set out to shock, but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new. And shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily."



Where does that leave the artist or curator who wants to shake things up? According to Mr. Rushdie, he "must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence."

Not only is it self-indulgent, it's self-defeating. Once the problem was, as Mr. Rushdie puts it, that shock wears off. But things are so far gone that shock rarely registers in the first place. This is the natural result of decades—the better part of a century, really—of artists using up the public's reservoir of indignation. And if transgressive art can't shock, what does it have to offer? After all, once you've seen Duchamp's "Fountain" and gotten the joke, is there anything worth revisiting in it? Whatever frisson it might once have delivered was used up in its first display. Once the shock is gone, all that's left is a urinal.

The heirs of Duchamp can't even count on the benefit of an initial shock. Pity the poor artist who would try to get a rise out of an audience these days with the naughty shenanigans that used to work so reliably. How easy it was to pique public sensibilities 30, or even just 20, years ago, when images of nonstandard sexual activities were not quite so commonplace. "Perversion is no longer subversive," the fashionable leftist intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written, noting that "transgressive excess loses its shock value."



And yet the same old tropes meant to signal sexual daring and deviance keep getting trotted out as though they are edgy and bold gestures. When Bob Fosse first put his dancers on stage in fishnets and bowlers, eyebrows were duly raised. How many decades will Madonna continue to wear that same costume as if it were a racy innovation?

In this, our transgressive artists are rather like the frustrated scaremongers in the film "Monsters, Inc." The job of the workers on the "scare floor" is to gather the energy of fright from the children they spook. But as innocence is lost, the kiddies get harder to scare, and soon the factory is sputtering. The monsters finally change course, making their marks laugh instead of scream. But the art world hasn't been so nimble. Shock is their stock in trade, even in the face of alarmingly diminishing returns.

Who knows how long it will take for the one-trick transgressives to realize that they don't have the impact they imagine, and soon may have no impact at all. I look forward to the day when—like the Grinch, straining to hear the boo-hoos from Whoville only to hear singing—the artists who fancied they could shock with their trite antics discover their targets are unperturbed, unfazed and uninterested.

Which is why I don't plan to contribute to stifling anyone's freedom of outré expression. I'll be too busy stifling a yawn.

This article is from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703377504575650882413327998.html?KEYWORDS=felten

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.

This article is from: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/30/AR2010113007227.html?wprss=rss_print/style



 

Commission Proposes Admission Fee For Smithsonian

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Proposal Recommends Charging Admission at the Smithsonian

By KATE TAYLOR

In New York, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art will set you back $20, but down in Washington, the Smithsonian Institution, which is 70 percent federally funded, has long been free. That would change under a proposal by the national commission charged with reducing the deficit. In a draft report Wednesday, it recommended that the Smithsonian’s federal appropriation be cut by $225 million, or roughly 30 percent, and that the institution make up the loss by charging a $7.50 admission fee.

The Smithsonian’s spokeswoman, Linda St. Thomas, said by phone that the Smithsonian had studied the idea of charging admission several times in recent decades, and at each point rejected it.

“The Regents have said repeatedly we don’t want to charge admission because it then makes it difficult for all people to come and visit the collections, which in theory are held in trust for the American people,” Ms. St. Thomas said.

She pointed out that, because the Smithsonian is federally funded, Americans are in a sense already paying to visit, through their tax dollars.

Various folks in Washington have been trying to throw an admission fee at the Smithsonian for years, without success. The most recent time the issue was raised was in 2006, when Representative James P. Moran, a Democrat of Virginia, suggested that the Smithsonian pay for building repairs by charging a $1 admission fee.

This article is from Arts Beat