Artists With Attitudes : In an era of dispute over public art financing, four NEA-aided artists have waded into battle with the San Diego Establishment

With the National Endowment for the Arts under siege over funding policy and much of the arts community trying to put its least controversial foot forward, you might think that four dissident artists who love to ruffle the status quo would be less public with their provocations.

Yet Deborah Small, Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock and David Avalos are sticking to their guns, continuing to create the kind of political works that could well make them a target of opponents of the NEA--and they’re spending $12,000 in NEA money to pay for it.

Funded in part by an NEA Inter-Arts grant, the four are in the middle of a series of works about what they call free-speech issues. They are using public spaces--billboards, bus posters, media advertising, street performance and more--to test limits of expression in the public arena.

Already the artists--who each have nationally recognized careers--are the subject of considerable opposition in San Diego.

In defending them, Cee Brown, executive director of New York’s Creative Time, an organization that has sponsored similarly controversial work, says, “They are doing what artists are supposed to do, calling attention to injustices and imbalance in this country.”

Small, Sisco, Hock and Avalos are also in the front ranks of nationwide efforts to organize artists against Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and others who are seeking to end public funding of artworks that they consider pornographic, religiously offensive or excessively violent.

The federally funded National Endowment for the Arts has drawn much of the fire of the Helms forces, and there have been demands from some conservatives, fundamentalist Christians and others that the federal government abolish the organization.

Within the arts community over the last six months, critics of the NEA have accused its leaders of knuckling under in response to political pressure and to congressional threats against its funding.

Last Nov. 15, Sisco resigned from the NEA’s Visual Arts Organization Panel--a peer group that reviews grant applications--to protest NEA Chairman John Frohnmeyer’s de-funding of the “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” show at Artist’s Space in New York. (Frohnmeyer soon restored the funds.)

A month later, Small, Sisco, Hock and Avalos spent some of their grant dollars to present an information forum called “Art: Framed: Censorship and the NEA, 1989”--essentially using NEA money to protest NEA practices.

Now, the four say their biggest surprise yet is in the works, due to break in San Diego’s north county at the height of this summer’s tourist season--and coinciding with Congress’ early July deadline for a decision on extending the life of the NEA.

What the surprise will be has not been disclosed, but the artists say they intend to use more of their unorthodox methods in taking on San Diego’s economic Establishment.

If the past is prelude, the powers that be are sure to be rankled.

In January, 1988, while San Diego was gearing up to welcome 75,000 visitors for Super Bowl XXII, Sisco, Hock and Avalos created a now infamous bus poster that rode the backs of 100 city buses--half the San Diego Transit fleet--during the weekend and spawned a rash of media coverage.

The central image of the triptych was Sisco’s photo of a U.S. Border Patrol agent handcuffing two men as they were taken off a bus. On either side were images of a dishwasher’s and a chambermaid’s hands. The placards read “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation”--a swipe at San Diego’s promotional slogan “Welcome to America’s Finest City.”

The goal, as Sisco puts it, was “to put the people who’ve been taken off the bus back on the bus.” A press release issued by the artists said, “If we consider the realistic rather than the mythological landscape of San Diego then we must acknowledge that . . . without the undocumented worker San Diego could not have a tourist industry.”

Particularly irksome to city and business interests was that the bus poster project was publicly funded--by money from the San Diego hotel/motel room taxes that are collected to fund the arts, as well as from NEA money and other sources.

The bus poster was an image that made people angry. Robert L. Myers, president and general manager of KFMB radio and TV, went on the evening news on Jan. 12, 1988, to call for the bus posters to be taken down.

“This cruel and distorted impression of San Diego is made worse by the (pictures) which include two people being handcuffed by a Border Patrol agent,” he said. “KFMB finds the billboard offensive and in bad taste. . . .”

KCST-TV also editorialized that the bus posters should come down--an highly unusual request, coming from journalists.

Behind the scenes, politicians and private parties maneuvered to have the bus posters removed--to no avail.

Yet there were also those such as Hugh Davies, director of the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, who cheered the artists. “The bus poster was a brilliant piece of artistic political sabotage,” he says. “It was no big deal until there was an attempt to censor it: Then every paper had an article. They succeeded in infiltrating the distribution system of advertising and image making.”

Says Cee Brown: “(Small, Sisco, Hock and Avalos) get the city to confront issues. They take a straightforward, highly visual American way of conveying information and twist that. We’re potty-trained with this kind of imagery, to get quick takes on things and think we get it. Helms has held up a picture and said, ‘This is what it means.’ We have to hold up the same image and say, ‘No, this is what it means.’ ”

In spring, 1989, Small became a collaborator. The four received a token $100 commission to create a public work for the Installation Gallery’s annual April Artwalk Festival. The money came from the NEA, the California Arts Council and the City of San Diego.

The result--which cost far more than $100 can produce--was a billboard (and matching bumper sticker) with a painting of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the caption: “Welcome to America’s Finest a) city, b) tourist plantation, c) Convention Center.” The billboard stood at 11th Avenue and G Street on space donated by Gannett Outdoor Inc.

The artists say the target was racism, particularly as exemplified by officials’ protracted refusal to establish a tribute to King and the rejection of requests to rename the new $160-million Convention Center in King’s honor.

As with the bus poster, the artwork involved a play on the “America’s Finest City” catch phrase. The billboard went up as the City Council was due to reconsider naming the center.

The real brouhaha over the billboard, however, didn’t come until more than a month after it was taken down. That was when the four artists found themselves part of the growing national debate over publicly funded art.

San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts began an effort to “de-fund” Installation Gallery. Roberts, a member of the council’s Public Services and Safety Committee, told local newspapers that he didn’t care for billboards and also that his disdain for the King billboard in particular was why he wanted to cut the funding of the Installation Gallery.

Roberts’ opposition was contrary to a recommendation by the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture that Installation Gallery receive its full $42,000 request for funds. Eventually, Roberts led the public services committee to overrule the commission. The gallery was the only organization among 80 considered for funding that Roberts targeted.

A month later, when the debate was shuttled to the full City Council, the members sustained the public services committee’s move to cut funds. That was when Mississippi clergyman Donald Wildmon was beginning to speak out against artist Andres Serrano’s crucifix-in-urine photograph in his widely reported campaign against public funding of the arts.

Two days earlier, the board of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., had canceled a photographic exhibition by Robert Mapplethorpe that was to become a focal point of efforts to deny tax dollars to exhibitions that opponents denounce as obscene.

In San Diego, Milton Fredman, chairman of the Commission for Arts and Culture, announced he would resign if the City Council didn’t change its mind about the Installation Gallery funding. Finally, on June 29, the council reversed itself by a 5-4 vote, granting the gallery $37,525 of the $42,000 it had originally requested.

Early last November, in the middle of Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s $6-million San Diego Arts Festival, “Treasures of the Soviet Union,” the four artists organized a street performance and prepared a related advertisement, both addressing what they saw as inequities in San Diego. Collaborating with them were Scott Kessler, Carla Kirkwood, Bartlett Sher and William Weeks.

The most complex of their projects so far, the performance and the ad were intended to draw parallels between early 20th-Century San Diego and the current state of affairs: civic boosterism for the Panama-California Exposition of 1915 and for the 1989 Soviet Festival, as well as alleged repression of free speech and of unionization.

When Small, Sisco, Hock and Avalos submitted a full-page advertisement they had designed, the Copley-run San Diego Union refused to publish it.

“Mayor Maureen O’Connor . . . called upon us to enjoy the art and to celebrate Soviet history,” the ad read. “In this glasnost spirit, let us remember a time in San Diego’s history when the powers-that-be chose tourism over free speech, the rule of a tiny elite over participatory democracy, and mob violence over the rule of law.”

When asked why the ad was not published, Shirley Haiman, display advertising sales manager of the San Diego Union-Tribune, responded: “It was an ad that was decided not to be run, and (upper management) chose not to say why they didn’t want to run it.”

The four artists, however, call it censorship. “They (the newspaper) don’t have any policy that they can tell us, nor what the guidelines were that were broken,” says Small.

The ad--which was posted, handed out and later run in the alternative weekly, San Diego Reader--was intended to be published in the Union on Nov. 2, announcing a performance that night. Even without the newspaper ad, the event was a success, the artists say.

The performance centered on turn-of-the-century political anarchist Emma Goldman. Goldman, played by actress Kirkwood, led an audience of 150 on a downtown tour of historic sites such as the Spreckles Theater and the historic free-speech area known as “soapbox row,” where she was reminded of her last visit to San Diego in 1912. It was in 1912 that the city adopted an ordinance severely limiting freedom of congregation and speech and Goldman came to town to join a protest against the law.

She was run out of town by vigilantes. Her companion, Ben Reitman, as the San Diego Union reported, was last seen “on his way to Los Angeles, clad thinly in his underwear and a coat of tar and feathers . . . after being forced to kneel and kiss the Stars and Stripes and promise solemnly never again to return to San Diego.”

The artists maintain that both the performance and the ad showed how little San Diego has changed, despite the eventual victory of the free-speech movement in the ‘20s and what they call the pretty face that Mayor O’Connor put on the city for last year’s Soviet festival, funded with taxpayer monies as well as sizable donations from Joan Kroc of the MacDonald’s hamburger chain and Union-Tribune publisher Helen Copley.

Weeks says, “The context is the phenomenon of the mayor inviting the Russians here to show how free we are and (her) unabashed support of unionism in the Eastern block, but the all-out war (against such organizing at the Copley newspapers) here.”

According to the artists’ ad, “Approximately 1,000 Guild workers (at the Union and the Tribune) have been without a contract since July, 1988.” (Last month, the long labor dispute ended when the Newspaper Guild and Union-Tribune Publishing Co. agreed to a two-year contract.)

“You’re free to speak in America, as long as no one is listening,” says Weeks. “The Helms assault is not about funding work that shows crucifixes in urine or gay men in pictures, but about funding work that dissents from the status quo.”

“The project,” Avalos says of the ad and performance, “was about investigating the possibilities of participating in a society that supposedly has democratic ideals. Can we walk onto this stage called the City of San Diego and have a voice?”