Edited Photos Fueling NEA Confrontation : Art: Fundamentalist group cropped portions of allegedly pornographic or sacrilegious works in mass mailing to Congress and religious leaders.

A mailing of 13 allegedly pornographic or sacrilegious photos by a fundamentalist group opposing the National Endowment for the Arts employs--without saying so--severely edited photographic images in what threatens to become another escalation of the yearlong NEA political crisis.

The mailing, distributed last week by the American Family Assn., based in Tupelo, Miss., was said by the organization to have been sent to every member of Congress, 3,200 Christian church leaders, 1,000 Christian radio stations, 100 Christian television stations and 100,000 church pastors.

One of the cropped images--a Christ figure with a syringe protruding from his arm--was also used as the focus of a mailing to members of Congress a month ago by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita).

But an examination of the cropped pictures from the now closed Illinois State University gallery show from which the works were taken indicates that small parts of the artworks in question were cut out and distributed in the mailings without acknowledging that the edited versions were details of larger works.

Art experts likened the cropping to selective reproduction of details of Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, which includes at least 19 penises on nude males. Other experts denounced the cropping, which several likened to judging the artistic merit of an entire book by scrutinizing one sentence.

The images were distributed by the American Family Assn., labeled, “WARNING! Extremely Offensive Material Enclosed.”

The mailing noted that the images were among works in a show by photographer-multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, called “Tongues of Flame,” that received $15,000 in NEA support. The show closed last month. Wojnarowicz, who is infected with the AIDS virus, has become one of the nation’s most visible artistic commentators on the plight of AIDS victims. The show is strongly influenced by Wojnarowicz’s anger, fear and passion about AIDS and AIDS public policy across the country.

“Tongues of Flame” is scheduled to travel to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, where museum officials said they expect it to open in late July. Final arrangements are pending.

“The NEA has been insulated from mainstream American values for so long that it has become captive to a morally decadent minority which ridicules and mocks decent, moral taxpayers while demanding taxpayer subsidies,” said a cover letter from Donald E. Wildmon, executive director of the American Family Assn. “Congress must either clean the NEA up or abolish the agency altogether.”

Earl A. Powell III, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said museums sometimes reproduce detail from larger works, but Powell said professional ethics require noting that the image is only a detail. The Wildmon mailing characterized the 13 images in question as “photos from the exhibit booklet,” but made no reference to the fact that they had been drastically edited.

“That is really using a part that is misrepresentative of the whole, I think,” Powell said. “To crop an image and to imply that the detail is the whole is to take a quote from an author out of a novel and say this is the entire oeuvre. That is really something that is inappropriate.”

Susan Wyatt, director of the New York gallery Artists Space, which was at the center of the NEA controversy last year over another show in which Wojnarowicz’s images appeared, said the cropping “is a misrepresentation and a desecration of the artwork. It simply shows the extraordinary lengths they (conservative groups and politicians) will go to try to scare the American people.”

Wildmon did not return calls seeking clarification of the reasons for the cropping of the images. Wojnarowicz was said to be on vacation in Mexico and unreachable.

In a telephone interview, Rohrabacher said he had been aware that his mailing to congressmen relied on a drastically edited version of an image titled “Untitled (Genet).”

In one case, the American Family Assn. separated two small 8-by-10-inch sections of a work that is 6 by 9 feet. The two sections depict men engaged in sexual activity with one another. They are two of more than two dozen small images that make up components of an acrylic and ink collage titled “Water.”

Six of the 13 images identified by Wildmon are photographic negatives of sex acts that appear in the original Wojnarowicz work as circles less than four inches in diameter in corners of larger photographs where no sexual activity is shown.

Rohrabacher defended his decision to distribute a reduced image, saying space considerations in the newsletter he sent out required the selective cropping. Rohrabacher maintained that the cropping did not distort the meaning of the work, saying, “I thought the whole work was actually more sacrilegious, taken as a whole, than the cropped part.”

But in explaining his decision to severely crop the black and white photographic collage in question, Rohrabacher also said he was under the impression the Christ image was intended to be subordinate to a picture of a second man--which Rohrabacher identified as a self-portrait of Wojnarowicz, but which is, instead, a photo of playwright Jean Genet. Rohrabacher said that his opinion would not be altered by the revelation that he had misconstrued the Genet image as a self-portrait of Wojnarowicz.

“You see Jesus Christ shooting heroin and a self-portrait of the artist with a halo,” Rohrabacher said. “That itself suggests that it shouldn’t be getting government funds to have that kind of an attack on Christianity. People shouldn’t have to subsidize the portrayal of Jesus Christ.”

The 8 1/2-by-10-inch work includes the disputed Christ figure--less than 2 1/2 inches high--in one corner, above an image of the head of Genet, who appears to be wearing a halo. The Christ and Genet images are superimposed on a variety of images that, said Barry Blinderman, the Wojnarowicz show’s curator, actually make up a juxtaposition “of an image representing very, very clearly the wrongs of contemporary society--the addictions, not just to drugs.”

“It’s not in any way anti-religious or anti-Christ. What’s happening is very similar to the propaganda techniques employed by Adolf Hitler, in that the tactic (then) was to postulate that the country’s problems are due to a morally decadent elite, in Hitler’s case the Jews and the homosexuals. In Wildmon’s case, it’s (gays as well as) the arts community.”

LENNON PHOTO REMOVED

A photo of a nude John Lennon embracing a clothed Yoko Ono has been removed from a Fullerton exhibit. F7