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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[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.

Helms, with the help of a few others, managed to push through Congress a pledge that all NEA grant recipients had to sign, a kind of “anti-obscenity oath” ensuring the organization that their work kept to the “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” In 1990, the performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck were denied grants due to the sexual content of their work. (Hughes, Miller, and Fleck were all openly gay; Finley smeared her naked body in chocolate.) The “NEA four” — as the artists became known — took legal action, settling out of court in 1993, but the “decency test” (in October 1990, congress repealed the obscenity ban in favor of a “decency” requirement) was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1998. Throughout this period there was even talk of scrapping the NEA altogether, especially after the Newt Gingrich–led Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995, despite the fact that only a small fraction of those who received grants made work that could be considered obscene, by any standard.

Helms was never one to shy away from theatrics. He didn’t just object to Mapplethorpe’s photos, he mailed them to fellow lawmakers, asking “whether the taxpayers’ money should be used to fund this sort of thing.” Before handing out prints of the images in the Senate chamber, he would take care that there were no women or pages around. In 1989, he quipped, “Now if artists want to go in a men’s room and write dirty words on the wall, let them furnish their own crayons. Let them furnish their own walls. But don’t ask the tax payers to support it.” He called Serrano a “jerk” on the Senate floor. In a letter deriding Piss Christ, he described the photo as a “sickening, abhorrent, and shocking act by an arrogant blasphemer.” He described Mapplethorpe’s show as “an abyss of slime.” He called Holly Hughes a “sewer” artist.

Of course, he had bigger fish to fry than the artists themselves. What he was really after were lifestyle choices. “They cry ‘censorship,’” he said of arts advocates in 1991. “And they know that’s false. They have hidden from the public what the issue really is. And it’s indecency and rottenness, homosexuality, sodomy, bestiality.”

Helms’s name comes up nearly every time censorship rears its ugly head in the art world. Ten years after the Piss Christ debates, it bubbled to the surface when New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani blasted the Brooklyn Museum for displaying Chris Ofili’s painting of the Virgin Mary embellished by elephant dung. Giuliani said the piece was sacrilegious and took steps to set up a decency commission. In response to the uproar, artist Hans Haacke made Sanitation, an installation for the 2000 Whitney Biennial involving a set of rubbish bins, a soundtrack of marching troops, and, inscribed alongside American flags on the wall above the bins, Giuliani’s comments, as well as pro-censorship quotes from NEA-bashers Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Helms. (Haacke had already made Helms his bette noire. In Helmsboro Country [1990], he superimposed the senator's face on an outsized pack of cigarettes, evoking the North Carolinian’s ties to the tobacco industry. And Haacke wasn’t the only artist inspired by Helms’s pronouncements. In what sounds like a considerably more humorous approach, Lucio Pozzi created the piece Helmsman’s Fear [1990], which consisted of, in Pozzi’s own description, a portrait of the senator staring from eyeless sockets at the genitals of a huge male nude photo.)

The mere thought of Helms has been enough to scare curators from exhibiting in the U.S. As recently as 2001, Jean-Jacques Lebel, curator of the exhibition “Picasso Erotique” at the Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, cited the senator (who was soon to retire) as a reason for keeping the show off U.S. soil: “If politicians like Jesse Helms can attack Serrano and Mapplethorpe, they would not hesitate to attack Picasso.”

The senator had a way of, shall we say, creatively misinterpreting artworks. As Karen Finley pointed out, it was he who eroticized her performance, in which she smeared chocolate on her body in protest of the abuse of women. “My work was taken out of context and eroticized by Helms,” she told the press, adding that she felt that she was made out to be “a crazy woman with jaws between my legs and snakes coming out of my head.” If that sounds like an overreaction, a British documentary captured Helms, on the Senate floor, describing how Finley “smeared chocolate on herself and invited the public to… how to put it delicately… well, I guess there’s no way… to come up and conduct a g-g-gynecological examination.” (Let’s not forget that Helms’ objections to the NEA began when Erica Jong’s racy novel Fear of Flying caught his eye back in 1974.)

Soon others who had taken his lead were doing their own creative misinterpretations. The Reverend Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association — which art critic Robert Hughes dubbed a “religious hit squad” — practiced appropriation art. In 1990 Wildmon used snippets of New York gay painter, performance artist, and activist David Wojnarowicz’s artworks — which included such provocative images as a collage depicting Christ wearing a crown of thorns and shooting heroin — to dress up a pamphlet called “Your Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art’”; Wojnarowicz responded by successfully suing him.

Helms was certainly no aesthete, but he clearly relished aesthetic debates. He may have summed up his beliefs best when in 1989 he told the New York Times, as the Times’s recent obituary reminded readers, “I like beautiful things, not modern art. I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

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Still, no one can deny Helm’s indelible imprint on the art world. His outrage certainly gave artists a popularity boost. Would Finley have made Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year, were it not for Helms? Or, as then Newsweek critic Peter Plagens put it in 1990, “The only consistent thing about official condemnation of art is that it almost always means more sales and attendance for the offender.”

“[Mapplethorpe] died a multimillionaire [in part] because of the ranting queer hatred of Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, and the religious right,” Robert Hughes wrote in 1995. Eight years ago, in a review in the Art Newspaper of “Dirty Pictures,” a program on Showtime that dramatized the Mapplethorpe controversy, critic David D’Arcy quoted Harley Baldwin of Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, which handles sales from the Mapplethorpe Estate, saying, “There are plenty of people who still want to own something that Jesse Helms says is bad.” Exit values; enter value.

If Helms’s behavior during the NEA crisis is hardly remembered fondly, some people managed to find an upside even at the time. In the dark days of July 1990, while Robertson et al were hashing it out on Crossfire, an organization called the Theatre Communication Group, composed of actors, director, authors and the like, had gathered in Northampton, Massachusetts, for their biennial meeting, this one devoted to the subject of censorship. The keynote speech was given by historian and playwright Charles L. Mee, Jr., who said, “It’s when artists are not being attacked that something is really wrong.”

If this is true — if we can presume that strong work is bound to offend somebody — no one should balk at today’s censorship skirmishes, such as the brouhaha over Bill Henson’s photographs of children in Australia and, subsequently, that country’s prime minister’s upset over a photograph of a nude child on the cover of an art magazine. Or a government official’s attack on Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora, a sculpture showing a pope felled by a meteor. Or the fact that the under-16 set won't be allowed into Tracey Emin's upcoming Edinburgh retrospective without a guardian.

A show of Serrano’s new work — pictures of excrement, this time around — opens at New York's Yvon Lambert Gallery in September and, who knows, maybe all the controversy it will stir up will be the pot shots New York Post’s gossip column Page Six took the other day. But is the art world better or worse off for not having more of a to-do? The threat of censorship not only made for lively debate, it also reminded us why free speech is so valuable. As much as culture-war grandstanding may have benefited the careers of Helms, Guiliani, and their ilk, it also, paradoxically, may have kept some artists from becoming blandly market-driven. (Consider Plagens’s not unrelated observation made in 1990, at the height of the NEA controversy: He cited as one reason for art having become “driven by guilt” and hence having “turned politically aggressive and sexually explicit” the fact that in the ’80s, so much of it had “pandered so slavishly to the market.”)

Late beat poet Allen Ginsberg once called Helms and co. “legal narcotics pushers wrapped in the flag.” But maybe such pushers serve as a sort of foil. Maybe we need an enemy.

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction.