The Return of the Culture Wars

The Culture Wars are back. Make no mistake about it. With the Republicans ascendant, their agenda and has been made clear with the new House speaker (and chief cry baby) John Boehner's (R-Ohio) successful efforts to remove David Wojnarowicz's video installation A Fire in My Belly from the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. Hide/Seek, the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture, is made up of art of and by gays. So it made sense to include a piece by the activist artist Wojnarowicz made in 1987, at the height of the AIDS panic, when thousands of young, gay men were dying. At the center of the Smithsonian' s action is a 10-second segment of the video collage that showed ants crawling over a crucifix. The multi-talented Wojnarowicz who was a photographer, painter, filmmaker, writer and performance artist died of AIDS in 1992.

The removal of A Fire in My Belly is a stunning blow to free speech and the first salvo of what's expected to become an escalating battle between those who value the role of artists and the work they make in our lives and those who don't. Even as the Smithsonian tries to minimize their censorious action, protests continue to mount. A commissioner at the museum has resigned and numerous art organizations have written letters in protest of the Smithsonian's actions. The Warhol Foundation has decided to withhold funding of shows at the Smithsonian and most recently artist A.A. Bronson has asked the Smithsonian to remove his piece from the show in protest. Demonstrations in Houston and coming up this weekend a march beginning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will proceed to New York's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a branch of the Smithsonian.

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" Original from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

As disheartening as this is, there is a bright side. For starters, Wojnarowicz, one of the most political and multi-dimensional artists of his time (or any time), is current once again. Once singled out for attack by the religious right, he took them to court -- and won -- for their unauthorized use of his imagery in a fundraising letter. Because of the notoriety that's been brought to the piece, more people will see this video now than would have before. Wojnarowicz would be thrilled to know that his work can still stir up a hornet's nest. The Facebook page, " Support Hide/Seek," is a great clearinghouse of the latest developments.

Another positive of the scandal is the presence of Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee responsible for much of the country's arts funding. Moran defended the work saying that the Portrait Gallery buckled under pressure from critics looking to exploit the artwork -- only 11 seconds of which was considered objectionable -- for personal and political gain. Himself a Catholic, Moran said that Catholic League President William Donohue, who "implicitly condoned all the pedophilia that was going on in the church," should be using his energies to object to much more serious offenses against humanity. Boehner and incoming majority leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) yesterday echoed Donohue, adding that the exhibit was a misuse of taxpayer dollars.

For Moran, that was an ominous sign.

"This new Congress has a bull's-eye on arts funding," he said. "I don't think there is any
question they are going to target the NEA, the NEH and anything else that funds art."

Here at PAPER, where we lived through the '80s- and '90s-era version of this story, this all has a vaguely familiar ring. Back in 1992, we ran a conversation between
Wojnarowicz and performance artist Karen Finley, then also a target of the religious right. We are reprinting it here.

Tongues of Flame

Karen Finley and David Wojnarowicz shoot the breeze and catch the culprits in the
crossfire.

By Carlo McCormick

David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley are shooting the breeze, and catching a few from-
from-innocent culprits of the right-wing America' s forces of oppression in the crossfire. Sitting in on this dialogue rates as one of the most memorable and historic moments I've ever had as a writer. Wojnarowicz and Finley are not only prominent figures, among the most exceptional, talented and outspoken voices of our age, but they have distinguished themselves as ferociously indomitable artists and advocates of society' s abused and disaffected minorities. At a time when an ugly slew of ideologically monomaniacal headhunters have positioned themselves as a self-righteous thought police aggressively monitoring an absurd, fascistic moral imperative in the arts, these two artists have refused to back away from the insultingly slanderous character assassinations, antagonistic intolerances and unconstitutional acts of suppression being launched against them, and instead have chosen to fight back through the courts and through their own artistic gestures.

As media headlines and moral majority marginalization have sensationalized their work, it is important for all of us to step back and seriously consider the artistic merit, moral integrity, social accuracy and political correctness of their unflinching expression. This interview is an attempt to address the discrepancy between the truth of their actions and the misrepresentations and harassments that plague them. However, their message alone here is not enough, it should be considered concurrently with Finley' s new book Shock Treatment (to be published by City Lights this month) and Wojnarowicz' s solo exhibitions at P.P.O.W. Gallery and Exit Art this month.

Karen Finley: David, when is your book coming out?

David Wojnarowicz: I don' t know. I'm having all these problems with the Random House legal department. They got their teeth into the book about a week before it was in the galleys. They just seem to be conservative and scared of the stuff I've written.

KF: And what stuff is that?

DW: Some speculative fantasy about Jesse Helms' desire. Something to do with giant roosters and a feather taped on his ass. Somehow they had a little bit of a problem with that. There' s a long list. Every other day they come up with new things they want me to cut out of the manuscript or alter.

Carlo M cCormick: Karen, have you had any problems with your book coming out on
City Lights?

KF: None whatsoever.

CM : I guess with all the outrageous material they've published over the years, nothing could freak them out anymore.

KF: I was more concerned than they were. They were more interested in grammar than in my fantasies of Ollie North. The fantasy has got to be grammatically correct. I just found out that yesterday Rohrbacker brought me up and discussed me on the floor of Congress, and Helms is doing me today.

DW: Do you know that Ollie North has been fundraising for Helms using your work and mine?

KF: Well great, because aren't we using him in our work?

DW: He sent out this letter saying "Dear Freedom Partner," and dished your work and mine and a handful of gay activists. The thing that made me laugh is that he was picked up about 20 years ago running around naked in the suburbs of Virginia with a handgun.

KF: You what how you were saying how [religious right activist Donald] Wildmon was really like an artist in his appropriation of your work. It would be really great to get all these people and the stuff that they're making and have a show of it. Did you guys hear about the Jesse Helms portrait contest they' re having in North Carolina? One of his people is actually going to be a judge.

DW: I did a portrait of him. I have this show coming up in November called " In The Garden," so I did a color photograph of this garden with lush beautiful flowers, and on a leaf is an ugly-looking spider with a swastika on its abdomen, and a little head of Jesse Helms. On the back it says " Subspecies: Helms Senatorius. The arachnid is found in Washington, D.C. and North Carolina and is responsible for cutting safe-sex education for lesbians and gays." Maybe I should send it in. Just to underline their tactics -- how they form images and information.

CM : I know you' re both going through the same sort of bullshit, and I understand you two talk with each other about it every now and then.

KF: I haven' t actually been seeing David. We saw each other at the trial. When there' s legal situations going on, or when you' re having your work taken out of context, it' s very difficult for people to understand how it eats you up inside. You get so angry from it. Your life gets focused on it. You want to get even. You want to have your name cleared. I feel that David understands that.

DW: Or about how Wildmon looks like Baby Huey with a cowlick?

KF: David, do you remember during the trial you said you were going to do some drawings of him. Do you think you are?

DW: Yeah, I've done a few drawings of Wildmon on the deposition that he had to give to my layers. They were drawings of him at a pig-fest, getting petunias put in his behind and stuff like that. One of my lawyers asked him if he ever won an award. He got really golly-gee bashful about it and said, 'Gosh, if you insist upon knowing, Larry Flynt named me asshole of the month.' My lawyer said that she didn' t think that qualified as an award and then had to refresh his memory about Ad Week magazine giving him a marketer of the year award.

KF: I liked it when he was asked if he knew what a collage was.

DW: His lawyer asked him, 'Mr. Wildmon, do you know the difference between a portrait and a collage?' and he goes 'No, ahh don' t.' Karen, do you have any idea when the trial is going to come up for the lawsuit you brought against the NEA?

KF: We filed September 27th, and now I don' t know how long it' s going to take. I'm sure there's going to be the depositions. You've been through that.

DW: Yeah, I did a six-or-seven hour deposition with Wildmon's lawyers.

KF: Did you get to have your lawyers present?

DW: Absolutely. But the weird thing about depositions is that you have to answer everything regardless if the lawyers object. So they were asking me really creepy stuff like what I thought about Mapplethorpe's 'sexually provocative child photos.' I asked them to describe these pictures and they said 'unclothed or partially clothed children.' Then I told them that the only place I had ever seen them was on The 700 Club, and when I looked at them I had no sexual feelings at all, so I can only imagine that Pat Robertson did. Anyway, they weren't so happy with the deposition.

KF: Okay, I'll be ready. Have you gotten the dollar that you were awarded in the lawsuit yet?

DW: Now, actually I'm going to get it pretty soon. I'm really excited. I' m going to use it to buy either an ice cream cone or a condom, depending on how hot I feel.

KF: Is it going to be a check or what?

DW: It' s going to be a check signed by old Baby Huey himself.

KF: Oh my goodness, aren't you going to keep it?

DW: I think I'm going to enlarge it to something like 16 by 20 feet and do a piece on it. Maybe I'll cover myself with paint and fuck it.

KF: I think you should have the handwriting analyzed, especially the " One Dollar," to find out about the loop. Fronhmayer is coming here to Chicago in a few days. Did you hear about Tim Miller, who is one of the artists whose grant got denied. He was doing a performance in Atlanta, and Lynne Schutte, who runs a performance space in San Diego, was up there and happened to run into [NEA chairman John] Fronhmayer in a bar there and got him to go to Tim's show.

CM : In a way that's good, because when these people are asked if they've actually seen
the work they' re condemning, the common response is something like --' no, I wouldn' t look at that.'

DW: But Fronhmayer is pretty brain dead as it is. I think even if he witnessed the performance it wouldn't make any difference.

KF: Don't you think that he' s really smart and knows exactly what he' s doing?

DW: No I'm pretty repulsed by his actions. They should have fired his ass a long time ago. Is it smart that on the backs of a handful of people he manipulated his position within the NEA and set up a system where he' s going to judge artistic merit, when he obviously doesn' t know beans about the creative act or expression? Bottom line, his remark that 'you wouldn' t want to hang a picture of the Holocaust in the front room of a museum,' should have gotten him fired. He' s totally grotesque.

KF: I've been talking with [my husband] Michael about whether or not I should apply for any more grants. There could be two ways. One is that I just never want to see the NEA again. But the other idea is that I should apply, and you should also David, for as many grants as possible. Maybe you and I should apply for something together.

DW: That would be great. Let's cook up a collaboration.

KF: Let's apply for something like Interarts. Maybe we could do something with the sets using these current people, like incorporating Wildman's check.

DW: Yeah, could build architecture out of all these mailings that they do, just blowing them up billboard size.

KF: Let' s build a rat maze out of it.

DW: Or an asylum.

KF: I look forward to that David, and I can't wait to send it in our supporting materials. That could be the answer -- to keep on applying and just don' t go away. For a while I was
thinking that I' m never going to apply for a grant again, just get me out of here, I can't take it. But I think it' s good not to go away, and just be there in their face.

DW: It could be like Freddie Krueger, just come back again for the fiftieth time.

KF: David, you know your company, Random House, I think why they' re being so careful is because they want to get it as exciting and controversial as possible. It' s going to be a big seller. The right is going to be flipping out. It' s sort of a scary thing, because once they have the book out I wonder what' s going to happen. I was thinking they' ll probably use the book for further fundraising.

DW: Exactly, those sons of bitches are making more money off our art than we are. They're raising fucking millions off a single painting. What do we sell for? I can' t wait to see Ollie North's Freedom Alliance newsletter's review of your book, Karen.

KF: Well, I hope they use the passage, 'and then I go home and take a hot bath of piss and masturbate to Ollie North.' I'd like that.

CM : I think the scary thing about what is happening is not so much any real fear I may have about you two being censored out of existence, because I think they'd need a firing squad to silence you, but it's more about this sort of self-censorship on all levels that this harassment is breeding.

KF: Our careers are escalating, of course careers do, but I don' t know about you, David,
I'm noticing places and situations where I'm not performing at. There still are a lot of places that are very scared to put me on. Also, there are a lot of small performance spaces that are receiving these letters inquiring if they have any intention of having me performthere. So, there is this fear before a place even puts me on that there is going to be trouble, that their funding could get taken away, that their files could be impounded, that they really could be under a tremendous amount of scrutiny just for presenting me. And I think that some of these spaces, given that type of possible harassment, aren' t going to be presenting me.

DW: Yeah, and you get up in the hierarchy of the art world and they ran a long time ago. These one-page messages decrying censorship put out by museums and other institutions
are a bunch of bullshit. These people haven' t put their names/faces/money on the line at
all. Their curatorial efforts have always excluded people like us. It' s just the rare bone that comes sailing through once in a while. If they had any guts at all, or any blood in their bodies, they' d be putting themselves on the line in a real way. What the hell is culture? It' s certainly not somebody' s blue-chip collection.

KF: What I'm really excited about is trying to get artists to be organized, to get artists to become political. I think what's happened for hundreds of years is this idea that the artist is crazy. That's the whole reason for the Van Gogh phenomenon. Everyone loves Van Gogh more for his being out of his mind and out of control, which is what they want to believe creativity is, than for his paintings. No one could think that a person who is intelligent, or is a professional, or who thinks, could create work. The idea is that creativity only comes out of irrationality.

DW: What's hilarious is that they've picked on performance artists, who are probably some of the most articulate people, because they not only work with sound or verbal techniques, but they use images and gestures. So they've executed every possible gesture or expression that the human body can make, and they're very articulate. They definitely picked on the wrong people. Wildmon is creating this crack legal team to go out and create nuisance suits against artists that they find reprehensible. So there are probably going to be a lot more trials on the local and state level.

CM : The general perception of how this excess of media attention has effected you both is that you're each happily swimming in gravy now. The most common comment I hear has to do only with how great this has been for your careers. One thing I think people fail to realize, as you mentioned Karen, this has created such an emotional stress in your lives.

KF: Yes, I feel that it devours your ability to actually create, first of all with the time that is involved in trying to defend yourself. People aren' t interested so much in the work, but in the sound byte of the controversy. There is so much energy involved, because I feel a responsibility to defend the arts, so that with the interviews I'm forced to do all this clarifying and to be on top of everything. With the legal case, I have to try to really be up on everything that's happening politically. That takes a tremendous amount of time. There is also this sense of self-censorship in terms of knowing what you're going to create and how it's going to be looked at. I think as much as David and I are making jokes and laughing about it here, there's still the situation that you think, oh wow, when you go and write this it' s going to be looked at in this different light -- it's either blasphemy or sacrilegious or obscene. So you' re carrying that, and now I always have that thought process when I'm creating work. That just always effects you.

DW: Yeah, it's like creating stuff in a public context instead of a private context. The dialogue that one has with oneself for years, it' s as if you' re taking a bath and you're surrounded by 300 people waiting to see which way the water falls. It' s very wearing. Tell me there' s nothing to the assassination of spirit, which is what the gestures of Rohrbacher and Helms and Dannemeyer and North and Wildmon are all about. Their attempt is to shut down a flow of information and assassinate the spirit. To have a bestseller or a sold-out show or performance doesn't deal with the psychic weight of that kind of assassination. I remember looking at a New York Post editorial about me that said I was somebody who would worship Hitler. Do people understand the weight of what that is? Or to have somebody on the 700 Club suggest that my work might be part of a satanic plot to undermine the fabric of America. They throw out these red flags that are really designed to kill the spirit.

CM : Absolutely. It disturbs and depresses me to continually hear people say, ' Karen Finley, oh yeah, she' s that chick who shoves yams up her butt.' First of all, anatomically speaking, you never actually crammed yams into your rectum on stage, but more importantly, what a ridiculous byline to be known by.

DW: Or distillation of a huge body of work.

CM : The oppression of personal spirit you both speak of could well be the intention of these right-wing thought police, but one effect of this battle they have not anticipated, I think, is the radicalization of a number of people who may have had radical views, but who were not necessarily radical activists, per se. I've noticed this in both of your cases, how you've been backed into a corner where you' ve essentially been forced into a much more aggressive, public and antagonistic mode, and a much more intensely activist agenda.

KF: I feel that our freedom, or ability to create is being threatened and has become the number-one priority for me. We were talking before about museums and art institutions emphasizing art as decoration, or art just in terms of the history of aesthetics. What has happened is that art's political responsibility or responsibility to humanity has been ignored.

CM : How do you think the establishment, the big-deal galleries and collectors, are responding to this? Do you think they're involved enough?

DW: No, because these are the people who really need to be held accountable -- the people on the boards, the collectors, the people that own the institutions with the secret weight of money. Those are the people who are least involved at this point; they've reduced art to a non-functional object and continue to create a market for it because they don't give a shit about it. They don't care about suppression of information, identity or anything else, and they've always been involved in that. There are a handful of people in institutions who have put their jobs, their bodies, their names on the line, but not the majority of people who can make a difference because of the weight of their bank accounts.

CM : What kind of America do you think Wildom, Rohrbacher and Helms would be satisfied with?

KF: The image that came into my mind -- do you remember Captain Kangaroo? Where they had that opening with this little train and this artificial miniature town, sort of like Mr. Roger' s Neighborhood, and there' s his hand moving trucks? That' s what I see. And there's no people there. I see a country where there's no people.

DW: I remember these movies I used to go see for 15 cents out at the local firehouse in New Jersey when I was a kid. There were these zombie films made in the '40s where everybody walked around with popping eyeballs after drinking some kind of lotus potion. That' s the kind of America I see -- pure zombie society.

KF: I think we should do a story called The Holy Family.

DW: We could do a biblical scene; we could modernize the Bible. I mean, here's a book where they quote some guy from a time when they didn' t even have tape recorders. We might as well bring it up-to-date.

KF: I hope I get a chance to play Jesus.

DW: Well, we could do a Siamese twin Jesus, with your head and my head, wearing diapers. The Wise men can bring us yams and diapers. It' s the only kind of art we can make since we're under a Christian occupation in this country.