Art Hearts the Far Right

Art Hearts the Far Right

Alexander Calder Pablo Picasso Tracey Emin Robert Mapplethorpe Maurizio Cattelan Hans Haacke Bill Henson Chris Ofili

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An Appreciation of Jesse Helms (1921 – 2008), Culture Warrior

[Robert Mapplethorpe] made the efficacy of his images a direct function of their power to enfranchise the non-canonical beholder — to enfranchise, ultimately, that Senator from North Carolina and insist upon his response — because, in truth, if the Senator didn’t think an image was dangerous, it wasn’t. Regardless of what the titillated cognoscenti might flatter themselves by believing, if you dealt in transgression, insisted upon it, it was always the Senator, only the Senator, the Master of Laws, that Father, whose outrage really mattered. 
—Dave Hickey, “Nothing Like the Son: On Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio” 

We need an enemy
I’m saving all my rage for you 
—Palace Songs, “Christmastime in the Mountains”

NEW YORK—Gaze into the crystal ball. It’s July 16, 1990. You just bought the new Public Enemy CD. Bush I is in the White House. As far as you know, “Operation Desert Storm” is the latest Nintendo game. And with no real war to worry over for a few weeks yet, CNN is entertaining with Crossfire, where you can keep busy worrying over the Culture Wars.  

What a line-up! Righty Pat Buchanan and lefty Mike Kinsley are hosting Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson and actor (and Creative Coalition member) Christopher Reeve. Robertson, Kinsley tells you, has just taken out a newspaper ad aimed at congressmen. It reads: “You may find that the working folks in your district want you to use their money to teach their sons how to sodomize one another. You may find that the Roman Catholics in your district want their money spent on pictures of the Pope soaked in urine. But maybe not.”  Robertson launches into a defense of his ad. “There’s something wrong with the government taking my money, my taxes, and using it to attack my savior, Jesus Christ, put him in a vat of urine, and say, piss Christ.” 

He’s not finished. “Is it art to have one man urinating into the mouth of another?" he demands of Reeve. "Is that creative art? It was one of the things we paid for, do you agree with that?” At this, Reeve momentarily seems to cave. “No. It is probably not art.” But wait! He has a zinger. “Unfortunately we also paid for a Stealth bomber. I happen to think the Stealth bomber is obscene. So, we all have our different definitions of what's obscene.” 

Bombs and obscenity! On the same talk show! Those were the days. Since you know a few things about the newest weapons, you know what a Stealth bomber is. Since you know a few things about cutting edge contemporary art, you know that Piss Christ is a photograph by Andres Serrano and that the other images alluded to are by Robert Mapplethorpe. You also know that not caught in the crossfire this evening, but very much there in spirit — hovering somewhere to Robertson’s right — is North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.

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Helms, who retired from the Senate in 2001, died on July 4, at the age of 86. In the two weeks since, his obituarists in the mainstream press have nodded at the fact that modern art disagreed with him, dropping a paragraph or two about public funding debates he set off in the late 1980s. But there was far more to the Helms-vs.-contemporary-art story than that, and it bears repeating now, because although obscenity accusations and censorship debates may be less heated these days, recent tiffs and headline-making upcoming exhibitions show they have not gone away. Also because those certainly were interesting times.

The broad outlines of the story are well known. In 1989, Helms became incensed that an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. that included Serrano's Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist’s own urine, had received some government funding from the 34-year-old National Endowment for the Arts. He denounced Serrano on the Senate floor (with help from fellow Republican senator Alfonse D’Amato, who added drama to the scene by tearing up a copy of the print).

Likely responding to Helms and co., the Corcoran soon canceled a planned exhibition of photographs — including images of nude men in provocative poses — by Mapplethorpe. This prompted protesters to project Mapplethorpe images onto the museum’s exterior. (Ironically, it might have been this that alerted Helms to the artist's imagery in the first place.) The Washington Project for the Arts picked up the canceled show, and it then traveled to Hartford and Berkeley, where it provoked little outrage. However, when it opened in spring 1990 at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center — because of the controversy, it attracted record crowds — the director of that museum, Dennis Barrie, was tried on an obscenity charge, of which he was later acquitted.