Congressional Cut Strikes Fear in the Arts of San Diego

The House of Representatives vote this week for a $45,000 punitive cut in the $171-million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts sparked fear and anger in San Diego’s arts community.

Sam Woodhouse, producing director for the San Diego Repertory Theatre, called Wednesday’s budget cut “outrageous, depressing and frightening.”

“The historical level of funding is already a sad comment on the lack of understanding of the role of the arts in a healthy, curious and forward-looking society,” Woodhouse said. “For such a mature, sophisticated world power to consider reducing funding because of two artistic works that may have offended some people is a frightening act.

“It’s not the dollar amount that’s frightening. It’s the motivation behind it.”

The House vote was precipitated by a furor over endowment grants totaling $45,000 to two touring art exhibits: a show of photographs including homoerotic and sexually explicit images by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and a show of works by award-winning artists that included an Andres Serrano photograph of a crucifix dipped in urine.

The NEA awarded the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania $30,000 to organize the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and $70,000 to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N. C., for an exhibit in which it gave Serrano a $15,000 award. Neither exhibit traveled to San Diego or Los Angeles.

In proposing the cut, Rep. Charles Stenhold (D-Tex.) called the move a “symbolic gesture” to punish the endowment for financing the Mapplethorpe and Serrano projects.

San Diego Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter voted for the cut, as well as for another unsuccessful proposal that would have reduced the endowment’s budget by $14 million. An aide to Hunter quoted the congressman as saying he wanted to “knock some sense” and “instill discipline into those people who make the grants.”

Old Globe Theatre artistic director Jack O’Brien, who serves on the endowment’s opera-music theater grants panel, said that anything that cuts or restricts the endowment “is visceral to me.”

“I sit with those panels of my peers and we make basically nominal contributions to the cultural life of the land and expect the community to do the rest,” O’Brien said. “John Houseman told me once he thought it a miracle that the artists sit in judgment on each other, and in the entire history of the endowment, there has never been a scandal about the misuse of funds.

“To make an issue of Mapplethorpe or (Serrano) is to denigrate everything that the endowment has done.”

O’Brien portrayed the endowment’s budget as “lamentably puny. (Congress is) acting as if we’re being indulgent and wildly over-funded, and we have the crumbs from the national table to be able to feed our artists.”

Video artist Louis Hock of San Diego deplored the House action, noting that it points toward art by majority vote.

“You have got to figure that some exhibits will be for some audiences and other exhibits for other audiences,” Hock said. “Although the NEA funds the arts for all citizens in the United States, it doesn’t mean every work that the NEA sponsored will be liked by every citizen. If we have art by majority vote, there would be no black art because there is not a majority, and no Chicano art because Chicanos are not a majority, and no Eskimo art.”

The real issue, Hock said, is the religious right trying to impose its beliefs on a federal agency. In recent weeks Rep. Dick Armey (R-Tex.), with the support of conservative Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N. C.), Alfonse D’Amato (R-N. Y.) and Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), has demanded a written guarantee that the endowment deny federal funds to artwork that “would be blatantly offensive to the vast majority of the American people.”

To Hock, “that confusion of morality with the idea of public decency is a bad omen. It’s essentially mixing politics and a religious attitude toward morality.”

Bill Nelson, a trustee of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and immediate past chairman of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce, aligned himself with the sentiments of a recent opinion piece about the Mapplethorpe-Serrano furor that appeared in the New York Times.

“The person who wrote the Op-Ed piece felt that, when you ask someone to pay for the piper, you have to learn to dance to their steps,” Nelson said. “I realize that public support for the arts is extremely vital, even though it’s only between 7 to 9% of a group’s budget. It doesn’t mean that any group should skew their approach to react to that. But (that money) is extracted from all of us, and is for use under penalty of law. We all have to be sensitive to that.

“On the other hand, politicians and the public at large have to be sensitive to the fact that arts on the cutting edge are going to annoy some people because it’s going to get them to look at themselves, their relationships to their family and community. That’s what art is supposed to do.”