Piss Christ Endorsed By Giuliani Fundraiser
aladdinsane
New Yorkers apparently do not support Mayor
Giuliani's holy
war on the Brooklyn Museum.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Bruce Shapiro
Oct. 2, 1999 | Anyone who doubts that
politics rather than piety
has inspired New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's
quest to evict the
Brooklyn Museum over an art show called
"Sensation" might
ponder this. At the very moment Giuliani
stood denouncing a
young British painter's depiction of Mary in
artistic media that
include elephant dung, the Whitney Museum in
Manhattan
opened its fall season by giving prominent
place to "Piss Christ,"
Andres Serrano's notorious photo of a
crucifix in urine that a few
years ago launched Jesse Helms' crusade
against the National
Endowment of the Arts. The fact that Giuliani
unleashed his
Torquemada imitation over "Sensation" but
stood silent about
Serrano might have something to do with the
fact that the
Whitney's board chairman is a major Giuliani
donor.
"Sensation: Young British Artists from the
Saatchi Collection"
opened Thursday. I haven't seen it but it is
clear that the guiding
spirit of the show -- which comes to Brooklyn
after two years of
immensely popular runs in London and Berlin
-- was as much
P.T. Barnum as Lorenzo DiMedici. The
promotional material, in
true sideshow-barker fashion, even warns that
"the contents of
this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting,
confusion, panic,
euphoria and anxiety." It's equally clear
that by threatening to shut
down a museum to prevent the opening of a
show he considers
sacrilegious, Giuliani is using the machinery
of government to
prevent an unpopular viewpoint from being
aired. The Brooklyn
Museum wanted a circus, but its directors did
not expect Giuliani
to seize the ringmaster's whip.
The last time New York was embroiled in such
a free-for-all over
artistic censorship was 1937: an episode, as
it happens, recalled
in "The Cradle Will Rock," a new film by Tim
Robbins scheduled
for release in just a few weeks. A
then-little-known theater
director named Orson Welles and producer John
Houseman,
employed by the government-funded Works
Progress
Administration, announced plans to stage the
world premiere of
"The Cradle Will Rock," an agitprop musical
about steel workers
and unions by composer Marc Blitzstein, an
outspoken
pro-Communist. Fearful of giving ammunition
to anti-New Deal
crusaders in Congress, WPA officials ordered
Welles and
Houseman to cancel the show. When they
refused, soldiers
evicted the company and padlocked the
theater.
Undaunted, Welles asked patrons to show up
anyway. With
piano and costumes loaded on the back of a
truck, Welles and
his newly unemployed band of actors led the
opening-night
audience on a parade uptown to another space
Houseman
managed to secure. What started as an act of
official censorship
became a legendary moment of artistic
defiance, and propelled
the young Welles and Houseman to notoriety.
While the mayor was headed to court over the
Brooklyn
Museum, I encountered one of the actors in
Robbins' film. "It's
quite astonishing," the actor told me. "Here
we are opening this
film -- and the mayor suddenly makes the
story relevant. We
could not have paid for publicity -- not just
publicity, but public
education -- like this."
But if politically colored censorship ties
the Brooklyn Museum
debacle to such earlier free-speech fights,
there are differences,
too. The mayor and his aides depict the
creator of "Sensation"
and his defenders as members of a narrow
Catholic-bashing elite.
(Chris Ofili, painter of the image of Mary
that has so riled the
mayor, traces his roots to a Nigerian culture
in which elephant
dung has sacred connotations.) More startling
is that Giuliani's
presumed Senate rival, Hillary Rodham
Clinton, Democratic New
York politicians and even other museum
directors evidently share
that view: They've all wrapped cautious
defense of the Brooklyn
museum's funding in ritualized denunciation
of a show they have
not attended, fearful that the public can't
draw its own distinctions
between bad taste and the Bill of Rights.
But the public isn't buying this tale of its
own resentment and
stupidity. Friday's New York Daily News
reports a poll
demonstrating that city residents support the
museum's right to
stage its show by a 2-to-1 ratio -- the
majority holding across
lines of class, race and religion, including
Catholics. The paper
reports that "many of those polled were
passionate about their
positions." Only 10 percent of New Yorkers
think the mayor
should have the power to cut off the museum's
funding. As with
Monicagate and impeachment, it would appear
that the public's
ability to judge matters of sexuality and
expression, to distinguish
private religious views from public values,
runs far ahead of the
politicians and pundits.
This matters because one of the most
deleterious consequences
of a decade of attack on arts funding has
been the
near-suspension of debate among civil
libertarians about the
artworks themselves, about the
responsibilities and content and
mission of art in the public realm. And here,
the comparison with
that last great New York censorship fight
bears some unexpected
lessons. Whether an enduring theatrical
monument or a flash in the
pan, the original "Cradle Will Rock" was a
public-spirited
artwork about the deepest issues dividing
American society.
Blitzstein's musical language, while biting
and acerbic, was
accessible to anyone who'd heard classical
music or jazz. The
whole Federal Theater Project was conceived
by the same New
Dealers who employed classically trained
painters to put art in
post offices and schools, who paid young
writers like Nelson
Algren and Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison to
collect the memories
of ex-slaves and Dust Bowl refugees and who
sent Shakespeare
troupes to inner-city neighborhoods and
remote towns. The
Federal Theater Project and WPA were rooted
in a vision of art
as deeply embedded in the fabric of life,
comprehensible through
the prism of daily experience. This is a far
cry from the
idiosyncratic, inaccessible artistic vision
of conceptual art from
which "Sensation" hails.
The public's overwhelming and sophisticated
rejection of
Giuliani's inquisition suggests that it ought
to be possible for a
defense of free expression to coexist with a
more vigorous debate
about the content of art. We can defend the
NEA, defend the
imperative for radical, taboo-bashing,
experimental art-making,
and still ask if the Whitney would so readily
display a sculpture
called "Piss Torah," with a scroll dropped in
a jar of urine. If civil
libertarians and artists want the public's
support for free
expression, they also ought to trust the
public with uncomfortable,
even angry questions, and not wait for the
mealy mouthed pieties
of politicians. Otherwise, the constituency
for art will become
ever more insular, the defense of free
expression finally as
abstract as the art itself.
In 1907, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem
condemning the
"eunuchs" of Dublin's cultural establishment
who fomented riots to
try to shut down John Millington Synge's play
"Playboy of the
Western World" because of its frank depiction
of Irish
womanhood. Yeats envisioned John Synge as
"Great Juan" and
wrote of his attackers: "Even like these to
rail and sweat/staring
upon his sinewy thigh." For Giuliani to seize
control of the
Brooklyn Museum because of "Sensation" would
be a crime. But
the fact that he rails and sweats at art of
such little sinew, that is
tragedy.
salon.com | Oct. 2, 1999
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