WAR OVER CULTURE
‘Deplorable’ art fuels anger on NEA funding
U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed budget calls for the complete elimination of the National Endowment of the Arts. This would cause delight to many conservatives, who will tell you, still angry after nearly 30 years, about the Mapplethorpe exhibit and a photo called Piss Christ.
By 1989, the hard right’s effort to de-fund the NEA was well underway. But that was mostly a spending issue, something to be cut — disliked by the Ronald Reagan administration but not necessarily loathed.
There had long been “a perception that a lot of liberal causes and a lot of liberal art was being promoted by the NEA,” says Reagan biographer Craig Shirley. But the passion to do away with the organization entirely had yet to become a fever.
Then came Immersion (Piss Christ) by Catholic artist Andres Serrano, a photograph of a small plastic crucifix, Christ on the cross, soaking in the artist’s urine. It debuted quietly in New York in 1987 but caused uproar two years later when shown in Virginia on a tour partly funded by an NEA grant.
Donald Wildmon, a Methodist minister and founder of the National Federation for Decency (now called the American Family Foundation), sent a letter to every member of Congress: “I would never, ever have dreamt that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ in our country,” he wrote.
Conservative senators Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alphonse D’Amato ( R-N.Y.) took to the Senate floor in May 1989 “to question the NEA’s funding procedures.” Helms called Serrano “not an artist (but) a jerk,” and D’Amato theatrically tore a reproduction of the work to shreds, calling it a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.”
More than 50 senators and 150 representatives contacted the NEA to complain. The religious right’s crusade against the NEA had begun.
But what pushed Helms over the edge was a retrospective by late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. After being displayed with little fanfare in Chicago and Philadelphia, The Perfect Moment was set to arrive at The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in July 1989, four months after Mapplethorpe died. Like the exhibit containing Piss Christ, it was partly funded by the NEA.
It featured 175 photographs, of which 168 were inoffensive. But the seven from his X-Portfolio were intensely provocative. One shows a finger inserted into a penis. Another is as self-portrait showing Mapplethorpe inserting a bullwhip into his anus. Two display nude children.
The exhibit so enraged Helms that he mailed reproductions of four offending images, including one of a prepubescent girl exposing herself and one of a naked boy, to several senators. His outrage quickly spread.
One person who viewed the exhibit wrote in a museum registry, “I’ve been here four times already and this show disgusts me more each time I see it.”
The museum cancelled the exhibit to avoid being involved in the fight over the NEA’s funding of the work. Nearly 1,000 gathered outside to protest the cancellation. Congress was flooded with phone calls, both in protest and support.
The House quickly cut $45,000 from the NEA’s proposed budget, “the exact amount of the two grants that funded Mapplethorpe and Serrano,” The Washington Post reported in 1989.
Helms sponsored a bill, which passed, to bar the NEA from using funds to “promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sado-masochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts, or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion.”
The controversies transformed the NEA into a political symbol and brought it front and centre in the culture wars.
“We are not going to give the money to aging hippies anymore to desecrate the crucifix or do other strange things,” Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) said in 1997. Dick Armey (R-Texas), called the organization, “the single most visible and deplorable black mark on the arts in America.
As then-speaker of the house Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said in 1997, calls to defund the organization weren’t just about government spending but about fighting “an elite group who wants the government to define that art is good.”
It was a common theme. Two years earlier, Gingrich had said about the NEA on C-SPAN, “I’m against self-selected elites using your tax money and my tax money to pay off their friends.”
Even the NEA in its own written history acknowledges this was the point the anti-NEA sentiment became an issue of values. “To many, the names Serrano and Mapplethorpe were now tokens of moral corruption inside the agency,” it says.
Conservatives found the exhibits so deplorable that they still talk about them nearly three decades later as among the reasons for abolishing the NEA.
Still, the NEA has so far avoided defunding, in part because the right has never been ascendant in both the Congress and the White House and also because the NEA has mostly avoided funding controversial art ever since.