NEA Places a Special Restriction on N.Y. Art Center : Arts: Only the Kitchen Center is required to give notice in advance of individual performances. It presented a controversial work by Annie Sprinkle.

The National Endowment for the Arts has placed a unique restriction on a New York City art center involved in the NEA’s obscenity fight with Congress: It requires the facility to notify the endowment in advance of the nature of individual performances.

Disclosure of the NEA action against the Kitchen Center for Video, Music & Dance in Manhattan was included in testimony submitted for the record Wednesday by a top official of the U.S. General Accounting Office, which reviewed the NEA’s compliance with restrictions in its 1990 funding bill that prohibit support of obscene work.

The GAO senior deputy general counsel, Henry Wray, did not mention the NEA action against the Kitchen in abbreviated remarks to a House subcommittee pondering the endowment’s legislative fate. Material on the Kitchen was confined to the last two pages of an 11-page, single-spaced formal statement.

NEA officials and the director of the Kitchen confirmed Thursday that the grant provision had been imposed. The Kitchen is the only one of the NEA’s 3,900 grantees for 1990 to face the requirement.

The Kitchen was identified for special attention, Wray said in his text Wednesday and in a telephone interview here Thursday morning, because it presented last January a controversial work by performance artist Annie Sprinkle. The performance--which included nudity and sexual content--was accused of being pornographic by several members of Congress, led by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita). In his testimony, Wray disputed allegations by Rohrabacher and Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who contended that the Sprinkle show had been presented with NEA support.

The Sprinkle show became one of many episodes in the continuing saga of the NEA, which has brought the arts agency to the brink of severe restructuring and possible abolition in Congress this year.

Barbara Tsumagari, the Kitchen’s executive director, said she was not entirely certain that the NEA’s attention had been roused exclusively by the Sprinkle show. She noted that performance artist Karen Finley presented several shows at the Kitchen in mid-April--three weeks before a dispute over content of Finley’s work caused a furor at an NEA meeting when a newspaper column reported that she was being considered for an NEA fellowship. Finley’s work, which is stridently feminist in tone, includes some nudity and difficult language. The controversy resulted in action on 15 NEA theater program fellowships--including Finley’s--being deferred until August.

The NEA notified the Kitchen in January that it had been awarded a $60,000 grant for the year beginning March 15. The Kitchen said Thursday morning that it received word of its restriction in a letter dated May 21 from Julie Davis, the NEA’s top lawyer. The letter from gave no reason for the new restriction, stating its purpose was “to inform you of an additional procedural requirement” that “the National Endowment for the Arts has deemed is necessary.”

Tsumagari said that the organization’s board of directors would review the communication but that the Kitchen would attempt to comply, even though it produces more than 150 avant-garde events a year--many of which, she said, evolve creatively almost to the moment they are presented. The Kitchen has not received any monies from the 1990 grant, which are usually disbursed by the NEA in quarterly payments.

Sources familiar with NEA grant procedures noted that, normally, recipients of NEA funds must describe their programming in general terms before their grants are approved and are not required to account in detail until after the entire grant has been expended.

The focus on the Kitchen came as the GAO simultaneously proposed a new mechanism--without precedent in the endowment’s 25-year history--to ensure compliance with anti-obscenity provisions in the NEA’s 1990 appropriation bill. Under the plan advanced by the GAO, the federal arts agency would establish a new department that artists and arts groups could contact to obtain advance rulings on whether work they proposed to produce might be construed as obscene.

The NEA did not respond to questions about the reasons for the Kitchen requirement or the extent to which the new advance-reporting stricture may be utilized with other grantees. However, Wray’s testimony noted that, in regard to creation of an advance content-review office within NEA, “we have discussed our . . . recommendations with NEA officials and they have agreed to consider them.”

Private arts group officials expressed serious concern Thursday about implications of the new NEA initiative. Charlotte Murphy, executive director of the Washington-based National Assn. of Artist Organizations, said, “This new NEA demand is horribly misdirected. The endowment should not be pressuring through micromanagement an organization targeted by the far right.

“This, in effect, forces the Kitchen to spend considerably less time on presenting art to the public. It’s time for the endowment to stand up for its grantees and not cave in to the censoring impulses of a few members of Congress.”

Tsumagari said that the Kitchen will attempt to provide as much information as possible to the endowment but that she was concerned that the NEA may be implementing a policy of selective surveillance over a small number of arts organizations. “I want to make it very clear that I don’t object to the endowment gathering information on the basis of which to make decisions,” Tsumagari said Thursday. “But this is a new layer and a new (office to which to report). If the endowment needs to gather information to find itself more accountable, the Kitchen has nothing to hide.

“What the agency does with the information we provide them is key, and whether this kind of scrutiny is to be applied across the board--as opposed to very selectively to institutions chosen by the General Accounting Office or by a few congressmen.”

Wray said it would be possible for the proposed NEA department to accept inquiries from painters, sculptors, writers, theater producers and dance choreographers in which the NEA office would render opinions on whether works even as specific as individual paintings, photographs and short stories might be construed as obscene.

“As a practical matter, this may not apply to all situations,” Wray said. “I’m not sure that the endowment could give very specific advice to visual artists,” he said, adding that many artists--especially theater companies seeking advance rulings on whether dramatic works they might present with NEA funding were obscene--might find the new office helpful.

Though Wray emphasized that the Kitchen had been exonerated in the inquiry over the Sprinkle show, he said that a theater producing 10 plays in a season might be forced to give back 10% of its funding if one of the works was judged later to have been pornographic.