Frohnmayer Plans a Good-News Blitz : The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts is collecting funding ‘success stories’ in a bid for congressional renewal

National Endowment for the Arts chairman John E. Frohnmayer has a vision of how to sell a five-year extension of his politically beleaguered agency to Congress, which is scheduled to act on the question sometime between now and the Fourth of July.

At the same time, there are signs that the usually complacent arts community is awaking and mobilizing to respond to increasing pressure from conservatives for more control over the kind of art the NEA should support with taxpayer dollars.

A week from Monday, Frohnmayer is to unveil his strategy for somehow guiding the NEA through the process of legislative renewal--technically called reauthorization --at a hearing before the post-secondary education subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu. The hearing, to begin at 9 a.m., will be the arts agency’s first opportunity to state its case since the controversy began 10 months ago.

Sitting in his high-ceilinged office in the ornate Old Post Office complex here three weeks ago, Frohnmayer talked about his plans to get the NEA renewed in Congress.

It was clear Frohnmayer intends--if he can--to finally close out the books on the events of the last 10 months--a period in which a conservative rebellion over two NEA-funded art shows and a separate blowup over over a third show nearly destroyed the U.S. government’s most visible cultural enterprise.

Within the last several weeks, Frohnmayer has ordered NEA staff members to scour the records of the 85,000 grants the NEA has given out since it was founded in 1965 to come up with one good-news, good-time example of heartwarming artistic success for each of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. The plan has not yet been put into effect.

Those good-news stories would, in turn, be told--either by the NEA itself or via private sector arts supporters--to members of Congress and their staffs. Frohnmayer cited three examples, all types of grants that maintain the NEA’s quiet political constituency in Congress--support that may find its knees wobbling at the prospect of conservative attack but which has usually marched obediently onto the battlefield in the past.

“We’re trying to run an endowment that is as carefully put together as any agency in the federal government,” Frohnmayer said. If the strategy is successful, he said, “we’re not going to eliminate controversy, but Congress is going to see that this is not an easy target and is not, in fact, a desirable target.”

Among the strategy’s elements:

* A $7,500 solo recitalist fellowship given in 1983 to Pasadena chamber clarinetist David Alan Shifrin. Frohnmayer said the grant gave Shifrin a financial cushion to concentrate on his music and become one of the most proficient soloists in the country, an opportunity he may not have had in the absence of federal support.

* A $500,000 challenge grant last year to the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson to finance the nation’s first statewide system of satellite art museums that will make art more easily accessible to under-served rural populations.

* A $1-million challenge grant to the Arts and Science Council of Charlotte/Mecklenburg to vastly increase the quality of arts education in the Mecklenburg County area of North Carolina. The grant, also announced in 1989, will provide for activities as diverse as hiring artists to work directly in local schools to arts instructional support for a total of 75,000 children.

But then there is the case of prominent singing/performance artist Laurie Anderson. A recipient of a $10,000 NEA visual arts fellowship a decade ago, Anderson is known in arts circles as bright, perceptive and serious. Except for the fact that her politics conflict with the Bush Administration, Anderson has even been mentioned privately within the NEA as a candidate for the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s advisory board.

A peek on the back of the album cover of her critically acclaimed “Strange Angels” reveals the quandary. The cover photograph was taken by one of Anderson’s close friends: Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer who died of AIDS last year before the NEA political crisis blew sky high over the refusal of the Corcoran Gallery of Art to accept a show of his work that included some homoerotic and sexually explicit images.

A picture of Anderson was in the show, “The Perfect Moment.” She is clothed. The image is not erotic; rather, it is one of a series of Mapplethorpe photographic portraits of women whose existence has been largely ignored in the larger dispute over some of his graphically sexual pictures of men.

It remains to be seen whether the NEA is prepared to be as publicly proud of its fellowship to Laurie Anderson as Frohnmayer says it is of the three grants he identified.

The subject matter of art and art’s underlying political ideology often mesh indistinguishably. Taste, subject matter and explicitness of expression--sexual or otherwise--often can’t be neatly separated. That it is sometimes impossible to separate what the NEA’s critics have tried to cast starkly as good and bad art may turn out to be Frohnmayer’s biggest challenge.

This challenge will confront Frohnmayer as the political right attempts to resuscitate a litany of objections to the NEA’s past performance. The litany, which became almost a rap song of moral outrage, played to a huge public and congressional audience last year. It depicts the arts endowment as a sacrilegious, smut-mongering bureaucracy that cleans its feet on traditional American values.

Frohnmayer, the arts community and arts supporters in Congress acknowledge they must face this opposition directly. If they don’t--and even if they do, some skeptics believe--forces led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) may succeed in their objective to cripple the NEA. This could occur legislatively by attaching stringent rules over the content of artworks it can support, by strangling it financially or both.

Even if this political roadway is negotiated, there are signs--from Los Angeles to New York--of the arts community mobilizing to confront political opposition directly, perhaps as never before. A march to protest incursions on artistic freedom, planned by the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the Los Angeles Coalition for Freedom of Expression, has been announced for Thursday morning in Los Angeles. Marchers say they intend to provoke arrest by chaining themselves to the downtown Federal Building for “high crimes against art and expression.”

The march is scheduled to begin at 7 a.m. at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and reach the Federal Building at 1 p.m.

In Washington, the newly formed Coalition of Writers Organizations--which took form last year after a Washington meeting of more than a dozen literary groups--has hired an experienced lobbyist to support its position that creative writing must not be made subject of legislative constraint. “A creative and vigorous American art that dares to take risks is fundamental to our democracy,” the coalition said in a statement. “The implications (of recent political initiatives directed at the NEA) are of deep concern to writers, readers and everyone committed to artistic freedom.”

In New York and Washington, separate organizations are planning for the annual March 20 observance of National Cultural Advocacy Day--a traditional opportunity for artists to lobby Congress directly.

Advocacy Day brings hundreds of arts supporters here to stage individual visits to the offices of every congressman and senator. House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Mass.) is scheduled to deliver the keynote address. The event is sponsored by mainstream, Establishment arts groups.

A New York-based national activist group, the Arts Coalition for Freedom of Expression, is planning a second event--described as a “demonstrative rally”--at the U.S. Supreme Court later in the day. The rally, scheduled to include speeches by the noted Jenny Holtzer and Claes Oldenburg, is intended as a protest not just against what may happen to the NEA this year, but at language inserted in last year’s endowment appropriation bill that bans funding of obscene art unless the work meets undefined standards of artistic excellence.

“We hope to allow artists to get their views heard, because I don’t think they have been heard yet,” said Sandy Hirsch, one of the rally’s organizers. “We see it as a freedom of speech issue since the effect (of even the mild strictures imposed last year) has been to send an intense chill through the arts community.”

The National Assn. of Artists Organizations, based here, said last week that it is developing a series of strategies ranging from grass-roots activism to formal political lobbying across the country. The group, which represents 230 artist organizations across the country, said its objective is to “fight the attack on freedom of expression by the far right.”

Across the political spectrum, the right-wing American Family Assn. has opened an advertising campaign accusing the NEA of supporting “pornographic, anti-Christian ‘works of art.’ ” And Rohrabacher, who represents a district that straddles Los Angeles and Orange counties, has started to lay the right’s cards on the table.

Two weeks ago, he accused the NEA of smut-funding in a performance at a New York arts center. The performance, by Annie Sprinkle, was described by Rohrabacher as one in which she “masturbates with various sex toys until she experiences orgasm, performs oral sex with rubber penises (and) invites the audience to massage her breasts.”

Tuesday, Rohrabacher released a second broadside, protesting a $15,000 NEA grant to Illinois State University in Normal for a show of work by New York artist David Wojnarowicz. The show includes an image of Jesus Christ with a hypodermic needle protruding from his arm.

Wojnarowicz was the author of a controversial essay in the catalogue of a New York art show called “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” The exhibit caused an uproar last year after Frohnmayer canceled a grant to support it, then changed his mind and restored the funding after vehement protests from artists and arts supporters. An NEA spokesman confirmed that the grant had been approved, but the endowment declined to take Rohrabacher on directly.

“The NEA continues to thumb its nose at the American taxpayer and at Congress,” Rohrabacher contended in a letter to other members of the House. “The NEA since last year has not gotten better, but worse. The art (in the Wojnarowicz show) is sickeningly violent, sexually explicit, homoerotic, anti-religious and nihilistic.”

Helms himself has remained in the background, but Frohnmayer said he and Helms talk regularly in what Frohnmayer characterizes as an ongoing attempt to maintain a dialogue. Publicly silent or not, Helms is clearly watching. A file of his correspondence with the NEA--obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act several weeks ago--showed he continues his surveillance of potentially controversial NEA grants.

Helms declined through a spokesman to discuss the situation.

That the NEA and arts supporters face a risky, daunting political reality is unchallenged among observers here. But even many arts supporters say preoccupation with political damage control may mean that the best resolution of the NEA crisis--reauthorization this year for another five years--creates other problems. These critics fear that getting life-extension legislation through the House and Senate in 1990 means a variety of other important--but not potentially politically fatal--problems must be set aside.

Among the issues that may be jettisoned are such divergent creative imperatives as changing the NEA’s legal authority to enter the international arts arena--a creative issue made critical as the decade begins by the unexpected disintegration of Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe and by the increasing multi-cultural makeup of the United States, itself.

Noting that the new president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, is a playwright, an NEA internal evaluation of the agency’s international arts activities argued that “Americans should know more about them (significant international artists) and they, who look to the U.S. as a model, should have a chance to experience the best of our art and culture first hand.”

Frohnmayer acknowledged that world events make 1990 a pivotal year for the American arts agency in constructing a better focus on the interlocking nature of arts around the world. “It’s our feeling that we ought to have a much broader presence in international cultural exchange,” he said. The endowment also faces a continuing debate within the arts community over whether its system of picking grant winners, in which applications are judged in secret by panels of expert peer reviewers, is open enough to give little known artists equal prospects for recognition with established artists from large cities.

Contemplating the task before him, Frohnmayer seemed almost simultaneously determined and perplexed. “I told Sen. Helms the same thing that I told every other congressman and senator,” he said. “That is that we will not fund obscenity and that I will be a responsible steward of this agency. I have kept my word to him in that regard. The more we can tell him about what we are doing, the less critical he’s likely to be.”

But to crucial questions--”Has it worked?” and “Has Helms been persuaded to your line of thinking?”--Frohnmayer answered: “I don’t know.”

Frohnmayer is obviously weary of the situation. “One of the things that happens every time this comes up is it seems it’s necessary to rehash everything that has gone before,” Frohnmayer said. “What has never been clearly said or articulated in a broadly disseminated manner is how central the arts are to our society.”

But having said that, Frohnmayer unwittingly acknowledged his political predicament. What if an NEA reauthorization bill that included restrictions of taste or content legally available from the federal government became law?

“We have operated very successfully under the original legislation, which is content-neutral,” Frohnmayer said of the existing enabling act, which sets no limits on the nature of art that may be supported. “My goal is to convince Congress that this agency is in good hands. I hope that, if that message is successful, Congress will not feel that additional legislation is necessary.”

What if content restrictions are enacted anyway? “I can’t answer that question at this point.”

Could he remain in his job as NEA chairman if such legislation was on the books? “I don’t know,” Frohnmayer replied.

Occidental College journalism students Scott Saxon and Will Shepa Jr. assisted in the research of this article.