Arts Council Blasts Attempts at Censorship

Members of the National Endowment for the Arts’ advisory council Friday condemned the political controversy besetting the agency as a harbinger of an era of censorship.

“History has proven that the freedom to create can only be healthy for a country,” said Sally Brayley Bliss, a North Carolina dance authority and council member. “If there is censorship, this can lead to the end of civilization.”

Added Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles: “The worst fallout of all of this is that we all start to edit ourselves because we think someone else will think unkindly of us.”

The 24-member, presidentially appointed National Council on the Arts met at what was originally scheduled as a routine session to discuss operations of the national endowment’s programs. But a series of events that have shaken the endowment in the last few weeks altered the character of the meeting.

Involved are two related recent actions in Congress: House of Representatives sanctions against the endowment that bar two prominent arts institutions from receiving federal funds for five years in a dispute over allegedly indecent artwork funded by the agency, and last week’s Senate amendment to an endowment funding bill by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) that would prohibit federal funding of any artwork judged “obscene,” “indecent” or likely to offend religious sensibilities. Both the Senate and House would provide $171.4 million for the arts endowment next year.

The controversy--precipitated by the endowment’s role in funding an exhibit that included an image of a crucifix immersed in urine by photographer Andres Serrano and another traveling show of work of the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe--has developed into the worst crisis for the endowment since it was formed almost 25 years ago.

The Mapplethorpe images, which are currently being shown to large crowds at the Washington Project for the Arts, includes some pictures of a homoerotic or sadomasochistic nature. The agencies affected by the blacklist provisions of the House bill are the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The endowment’s acting chairman, Hugh Southern, acknowledged that the recent developments had focused new and critical attention on the way the agency parcels out its money to arts projects.

“We are what we grant,” Southern told the council, in urging that a reevaluation of the NEA’s grant-making process, which actually began a year ago, be actively pursued.

Southern said the recent congressional criticism of the endowment’s grant making challenges the agency to “be able to say, here it is. It’s sound. You can believe it. You can trust it.”

Ironically, the two-day meeting that began Friday is scheduled to include a session on planning for the agency’s quarter-century anniversary--a celebration that could be clouded if a House-Senate conference committee scheduled to meet just after Labor Day preserves either or both of the restrictive provisions.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, arts advocates were struggling Friday to counteract the second of two state measures under consideration by the legislature in Raleigh that would enact state penalties against the center.

Last week, the state House of Representatives moved to cut off state funding from the center for its role in the controversy--specifically its selection of the photograph entitled “Piss Christ” that was included in the endowment-funded Awards in the Visual Arts program last year.

Arts agencies negotiated a compromise in which that measure was apparently neutralized. On Tuesday, however, the North Carolina Senate, acting on a proposal by conservatives, approved a version of the Helms language that would bar any state funds from being given to arts projects that “denigrate” religious beliefs. The provision was introduced without warning in the appropriations committee.

The North Carolina Arts Council and Arts Advocates, a private group, were optimistic Thursday that the latest development could be neutralized in a state house-senate conference committee, but lobbyists for arts groups said that the result would not be clear for at least several days.

National Endowment sources familiar with delicate negotiations now under way in the Congress also were optimistic that the two bills could be thwarted in conference-committee bargaining. The endowment has warned that they “would have a chilling impact on artistic expression” and on the willingness of arts organizations to involve themselves with work “deemed to be at all controversial or out of the mainstream.”