Delicate Compromise May End Arts Funding Dispute

House and Senate conferees reached a tentative compromise Thursday night that softens or drops restrictions barring the National Endowment for the Arts from funding offensive or sacrilegious art.

But the compromise agreement would include language in a report that does not have force of law that castigates the NEA for supporting controversial exhibits.

The fragile settlement proposal came after negotiations that consumed parts of two days. Committee members tried to find a way to accommodate congressional fury at the NEA for funding two exhibits that contained provocative photographs but to back away at the same time from legal restrictions on art content proposed by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.).

But in an effort to destroy the fragile compromise, Helms immediately rushed to the Senate floor and offered his original provision as an amendment to a pending defense bill. The North Carolina senator threatened to display the offending pictures in the Senate and invited women and children to leave the chamber.

Senate Democratic leaders agreed to bring the issue to a roll call vote later Thursday night. The Helms amendment had passed the Senate originally by a voice vote.

The Helms provisions are politically sensitive since senators who oppose them could be depicted as voting in favor of pornography. At the same time, they raise significant constitutional obstacles, since they could violate the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Conferees are scheduled to meet again this morning to complete work on the measure.

It is uncertain whether conservatives will endorse the delicate settlement, crafted by Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.). Sen. James A. McClure (R-Ida.) said that he would hold out for specific restrictions in the NEA’s 1990 funding bill that would bar grants for pornographic art works. McClure suggested including wording from the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court obscenity case of Miller vs. California.

That case defined obscenity as material of “no redeeming social value” as determined by “contemporary community standards.”

“I would like to see no less than the Supreme Court’s expression in the Miller case,” McClure said. “I would like us to go slightly further than that.”

After the conference committee had adjourned, Helms warned the Senate in his speech against any attempt to “diddle around” with his original language and “water it down.”

Helms Maneuver

In the unexpected parliamentary maneuver, Helms had demanded a rollcall vote on the nonbinding resolution that would urge Senate members of the conference committee to insist on retaining his original amendment. But Helms’s action had been held up--at least temporarily--by procedural maneuvering.

The Yates language in the compromise said flatly that “the NEA erred in approving grants for the exhibiting publicly of certain controversial photographs” by Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work includes some homoerotic and sadomasochistic images, and Andres Serrano, who produced a photo of a crucifix immersed in urine titled “Piss Christ.” Shows including the work received a total of $45,000 in NEA support last year.

The compromise would eliminate Helms language that would have barred government money for “obscene or indecent materials,” or art that “denigrates the objects or beliefs” of any “religion or nonreligion” or any “person, group or class of citizens.”

The Yates proposal also would eliminate a five-year ban, voted by the Senate, on grants to the two private arts agencies that organized the controversial shows and drop the transfer of $400,000 from the NEA’s visual arts division to other programs. The transfer had been criticized as nothing more than a punitive measure attacking the NEA office responsible for the controversy.

The tentative agreement also calls for creation of a 12-person commission, with four members each appointed by the House, Senate and President Bush. The House version of the NEA bill included a $100,000 appropriation to support the work of such a study group.

“We are in quite a predicament here,” said Yates of the emotionally charged atmosphere in Congress that has found members furious that the endowment gave federal money to controversial work that ignited a firestorm of criticism. But lawmakers have been unable to decide whether to slap content restrictions on the national endowment that might violate First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and artistic expression.

Grant Standards

“The only area still in question,” Yates said. “is considering what grant-making standard, if any, should be adopted by Congress respecting pornography as established by the Supreme Court.”

In a related development Thursday, members of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee agreed to approve President Bush’s nominee to head the national endowment and to send the nomination to a Senate floor vote today, where confirmation is expected.

The unusual committee action on the nomination of Portland, Ore., lawyer John E. Frohnmayer reportedly occurred in a telephone poll of committee members initiated by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who proposed that the committee meet informally before a formal vote.

Reached at his Portland home, Frohnmayer reacted to the tentative agreement cautiously. “I certainly favor that kind of oversight,” he said, “and would welcome any ways that the panel system (the NEA’s system of juries of artists’ peers that selects grant recipients) can be improved.” But Frohnmayer indicated some concern about the viability of any specific content restrictions on art written into the NEA bill, a concept he warned in his confirmation hearing last week would be, at best, difficult to administer.

Times Staff Writer Sara Fritz in Washington contributed to this report.