Congressman Paints Dark Picture of NEA Future : Arts: Rep. Pat Williams sees content control as a permanent feature of the Endowment landscape.

The nation’s artistic community has lost much of its political momentum in Congress and it is likely that content-control standards are permanently imposed on the National Endowment for the Arts, a prominent congressional arts leader predicts.

If the trend continues, said Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), arts groups may, as early as within the next six months, face an agonizing dilemma: Whether the Endowment should be allowed to evolve into a sort of national censorship panel or simply be dissolved.

That assessment came in remarks by Williams to a Music Center luncheon sponsored by the American Council for the Arts. The New York-based council, one of the largest private arts groups in the country, held a board meeting in Los Angeles Monday and Tuesday.

Williams said renewal of the controversy over the content of federally funded arts will be as rancorous as the just-concluded dispute in the House and Senate led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Williams said a House-Senate compromise bill that jettisoned some of the most restrictive language proposed by Helms--but left some content controls in place for the first time--”was less destructive (than what was initially proposed) but isn’t a victory.”

The bill in question provided $172 million in operating funds for the Endowment for the 1990 fiscal year. Theoretically, its content-control provisions and other restrictive sections expire in one year.

Williams said that, if arts forces in Congress lose their battle against subject-matter control over Endowment-funded art, he may be forced to support a measure that would eliminate the Endowment altogether. “I love the NEA,” he said, “But I have no preconceived notions on whether it should continue to exist” if its mission under federal law transformed it into “a conduit for censorship.”

Williams is chairman of the House post-secondary education subcommittee, which will take up a bill next month that would extend the life of the Endowment until 1995. The agency must be formally reauthorized by Congress every five years.

Williams said the reauthorization, which is expected to come up for final House action early next year and conclude in the Senate sometime in the spring, will force arts agencies to grapple again with political pressures to impose content controls on the Endowment to prevent federal money being spent on “offensive” or “indecent” works.

He said the House reauthorization committee will probably resist such pressures and report out a bill that rescinds provisions adopted a few weeks ago that discourage federal funding of “obscene” work, but permit the Endowment to support such work if it has inherent artistic merit.

But Williams said the political tempest in which the Endowment found itself last summer and this fall has not subsided. He said that, irrespective of provisions of the committee reauthorization bill, it is nearly inevitable that conservatives will move on the House floor to reattach stringent content controls--and probably succeed.

Williams also delivered a rebuke to the nation’s arts community, warning that advocacy groups and their leaders failed to fully understand the way legislation works its way through Congress and failed to intervene early enough.

“Those of you who love the arts (but do not get involved in politics) ignore the reality of your peril,” Williams said. “The issue is coming like a train wreck.”

The bluntness of Williams’ analysis surprised some members of his audience. But others, including actor and singer Theodore Bikel, a member of the arts council’s board, contended that artistic freedom may have already suffered major damage: “I wonder whether the harm has not already been done. A certain amount of bruising has already taken place.”

At a meeting immediately after Williams’ speech, American Council for the Arts directors voted belatedly to endorse a position taken earlier this month by Milton Rhodes, the council’s president, that compromise legislation containing the vague content controls “is a bitter pill to swallow” and “a very dangerous road the Congress is traveling down.”

“Art by its nature creates controversy,” Williams said. “It requires that viewers abandon passivity and adopt passion.” When art precipitates raging controversy over its subject matter, Williams said, the situation only establishes that art “is working.”

He said the coming renewed arts debate will force arts supporters to make uncomfortable choices and face disquieting questions. He said he will hold a hearing next month in an attempt to address the conflict between the inherent rights of artists to express themselves and the right of taxpayers to object to what they see as inappropriate use of their funds.

If the assessment was gloomy, Williams also became one of the first politicians to come to the defense of besieged artists whose work became the focal point of a summer crisis for the Endowment.

Williams came most forcefully to the defense of Robert Mapplethorpe, the late New York photographer, and Andres Serrano, another New York photographer who produced an image of a crucifix immersed in urine that was titled “Piss Christ.”

Mapplethorpe’s images of homoerotic and sadomasochistic subjects became a lightning rod for conservative anger when they were included in a traveling show partially funded by the Endowment.

“Mapplethorpe and Serrano are the right wing’s new Willie Horton,” said Williams, refering to the Massachusetts criminal who committed violent crimes while on a prison furlough. Horton became an issue in the 1988 presidential campaign. “It’s wrong to use the arts for that in this country,” Williams declared. “It creates a cancer in America.”