NEA Advisers Nix Grants After Mapplethorpe : Arts: $80,000 for a university institute is threatened due to the photo controversy. And the National Council on the Arts defers a decision on theater aid.

The advisory body to the National Endowment for the Arts has recommended denial of two grants totaling $80,000 to the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Contemporary Art, which last year was swept up in the controversy over work by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

In a separate action, the National Council on the Arts voted to defer a decision--perhaps until August--on 18 theater grants characterized as potentially controversial.

The votes were seen by NEA sources as a victory for endowment opponents and as setting up an even more fractious debate over whether the NEA has caved in to political pressure.

The decisions, contended one council member, opened divisions within the arts council, apparently splitting it into two factions.

One includes members who favor clamping down on the content of NEA-funded art. The second faction contends that the crackdown may destroy the NEA’s traditional strong support for cutting-edge artists.

Jacob Neusner, a conservative member of the national council, characterized the vote to turn down the two grants to the Pennsylvania institute as “an enormous victory.”

Sources indicated that the recommendation to reject two of three grants to the ICA may have been invalid because fewer than half of the national council members were present. Apparently intent on avoiding parliamentary mistakes that could invalidate council actions, NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer briefly halted the council meeting on Friday because a quorum was not present.

The action of the National Council on the Arts took place in closed session Sunday after a weekend open meeting at which council members heard that the 14-month-old political campaign against the NEA has apparently inflicted major damage.

Details of the secret actions emerged Monday morning. Ironically, in its open sessions, the council had voted to hold future grant deliberations in public.

The actions came as the NEA faces deterioration in its political support. Endowment staff members warned the council Friday that opposition may be insurmountable.

The council was told the NEA’s political situation has deteriorated so significantly--at least in the House of Representatives--that it may be nearly impossible for the agency to undergo renewal of its legislative mandate to exist this year without Draconian controls being placed on the content of art it can fund. At the same time, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies circulated a proposal to strip the NEA of much of its ability to support working artists and transfer 60% to 65% of its money to state arts councils.

The vote against ICA was reportedly 6-to-5. The council has a total membership of 26 but there are three vacancies. The 11 people participating in the ICA vote fell short of a majority even of the 23-person current membership.

Earlier in the day, sources said, the council voted 8-to-4, with three abstentions, to defer action on 18 proposed recipients of solo performance fellowships.

The vote to delay action on the theater fellowships until the next scheduled meeting of the NEA advisory board in August came after conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak attacked New York performance artist Karen Finley.

The Evans and Novak column characterized Finley as a “nude, chocolate-smeared young woman” who would use her $12,000 fellowship to create an offensive and possibly obscene performance. They contended that other troublesome grants were about to be approved by the council.

The columnists objected in particular to a performance piece by Finley called “We Keep Our Victims Ready,” a feminist diatribe in which Finley ends up partially naked, smeared with chocolate intended to simulate cow dung and festooned with alfalfa sprouts playing the role of sperm.

“I’m prepared for this,” she said in a telephone interview of her role in the controversy. “What I’m doing and thinking about as an artist--but really first as an American citizen--is (that this is) a problem of freedom of expression. For me as a female it would be outrageous that I am not allowed to talk about or make work deconstructing feminist imagery and trying to challenge the fact that there has been oppression of women for generations.”

In the closed session, it was learned, four solo performance fellowship applicants were attacked.

The NEA declined on Monday to confirm details of the council votes on rejected or deferred grants applications. However, Judith Tannenbaum, assistant director of the ICA, provided details of all three, concluding that the council action is “quite terrifying.”

Tannenbaum said the rejections are a clear indication the NEA has buckled under pressure to function as a guarantor that publicly funded artworks will studiously avoid controversial content. “It’s an enormous loss for the cultural life of the country,” Tannenbaum said.

ICA came to prominence in the arts endowment controversy last year as the organizer of a show of work by Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in March, 1989. ICA received a $15,000 national endowment grant to support the show’s catalogue. When the images emerged as a focal point of the congressional firestorm over the NEA, the House and Senate voted to require the endowment to notify Congress specifically whenever a grant for ICA or the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art was to be awarded.

SECCA--ironically headquartered in Winston-Salem about 5 miles from where the National Council on the Arts met--was a role-player in the crisis over its role in organizing a show including a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine.

NEA sources said the endowment’s museum program recommended approval of three grants to ICA--for $40,000 each--but decided to recommend funding for just one, though it was not immediately clear which of the three was accepted. The council’s recommendations are not binding on Frohnmayer, who was reported in Chapel Hill, N.C., on personal business Monday and unavailable.