NEA Panel Asks to Meet After Grant Denials : Funding: Review board wants to discuss allocation of $23,000 after Chairman John E. Frohnmayer overturned awards to four performance artists.

A National Endowment for the Arts review panel that recommended awards to four artists that were overturned by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer has asked for the panel to be reconvened to deliberate--perhaps provocatively--on how to allocate $23,000 in unspent funds.

The call to reconvene the solo-performance fellowship panel was disclosed Sunday by Baltimore theater director Philip Arnoult, who chaired the panel that recommended 18 fellowship winners from among 90 applicants earlier this year. Disclosure of the call to reconvene came after Arnoult spent most of the weekend on the phone consulting with a variety of theater and arts community leaders.

Arnoult said the NEA’s theater program, which oversees the solo-performance award committee, had agreed to allow the panel to reconvene. It was not clear whether Frohnmayer, who is vacationing this week in Oregon and was unavailable for comment, would accept the appeal request.

The four Frohnmayer grant denials were to controversial performance artists Karen Finley of New York City, Holly Hughes of New York City, John Fleck of Los Angeles and Tim Miller of Santa Monica. All four deal with politically charged content, some employ occasional nudity and body symbolism. All are activists on either feminist or sexual-preference issues whose work has been extensively reviewed by a broad range of established critics.

“Our sense is that we want to get this on the table quickly,” said Arnoult, who added that he and arts leaders with whom he spoke hope to avert what threatens to become a near-disintegration of support for the NEA within the arts community.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who was awarded an $11,250 fellowship in the program, said she will not accept the money. Rosenthal’s action and the demand by Arnoult came as the first evidence of backlash over Frohnmayer’s action, which was perceived by many in the arts community as an attempt by the NEA to appease its political critics.

“This decision has apparently divided the performance community into the clean ones and the dirty ones,” Rosenthal said. “Apparently, I’m among the clean ones, for some strange reason.

“But I don’t want to be a part of a divisive issue of this nature. I am certainly not about to sign any obscenity clause (a condition of accepting NEA money this year). I think the obscenity is the singling out of certain people to be ostracized from this grant.”

Arnoult expressed frustration and rage, charging that by killing grants awarded by the panel, Frohnmayer was caving in to the political right. Arnoult said the embattled NEA chairman’s decision had, in effect, left the endowment’s respected grant-making procedures in tatters.

Arnoult said that he was still assessing his options but that he will insist on having the panel reconvened so he and as many of its seven members as want to can officially quit. He said the panel might also review records of all 90 performers it initially reviewed to select the 18 grantees and recommend funding for four more artists from among those who were nearly chosen--some of whom do work as potentially controversial as those whose grants were denied by Frohnmayer.

Arnoult declined to speculate whether the panel might take the provocative step of recommending grants to the same four artists Frohnmayer rejected.

Throughout the weekend, artists and arts supporters began to meet in major arts centers, including Los Angeles, Washington and New York, to discuss ways to respond to the new crisis engulfing the endowment, which faces imminent action in Congress on bills to extend its legal lifetime past October.

It seemed clear that the immediate result of Frohnmayer’s action would be an increase in the rejection rate of NEA grants by individual artists and arts institutions. Several influential officials of private arts groups said over the weekend that they also expected the beginning of a serious move within the arts community to force Frohnmayer out of his job.

But whatever the short-term effects of the unprecedented decision, sources within the endowment and observers outside with close links to the federal arts agency agreed that the NEA action reflected a high-stakes, long-odds political gamble.

Frohnmayer apparently decided that the good will of the arts community was expendable and that the endowment could survive only by redefining its concept of art to satisfy critics in Congress and the White House, according to some observers.

“I would rather have to face the wrath of the arts community over turning down these four fellowships,” said an NEA official with direct knowledge of the grant rejection situation, “than to deal with the White House and Congress if we had gone ahead and made them.”

Endowment observers said that Frohnmayer recently told a meeting of the NEA’s program directors that his emphasis would be on accommodating political pressures on Capitol Hill at the expense of standing behind artistic principles at the endowment. “Our constituency,” Frohnmayer was reliably reported to have told the program directors, “ is the Hill.”

Immediately at issue was the rationale for Frohnmayer’s decision. Earlier this year Arnoult’s panel originally recommended the 18 fellowships. But, in May, the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s advisory board, was sent into a panic by publication of an account in a conservative newspaper column branding Finley’s work as obscene.

Hoping to avert a new confrontation with conservatives in Congress, the council voted to defer action until early August on all 18 fellowships. But in the intervening weeks, Frohnmayer reportedly concluded that the NEA’s situation in Congress was too volatile and precarious to wait and, on Friday morning, Frohnmayer rejected four of the 18 grants.

It appeared over the weekend that a growing consensus is building that Frohnmayer may have satisfied no one--that he has simultaneously failed in his attempt to placate conservative congressmen and undermined his support across all arts constituencies.

When the NEA grant denials were made public, reaction from those in Congress who have been vociferous on the NEA issue was nearly absent. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) declined to comment. Also ominously quiet or restrained were moderates, Reps. Paul Henry (R-Mich.) and Tom Coleman (R-Mo.), whose support Frohnmayer was apparently seeking in denying the grants.

Henry, in particular, has proposed language to sharply restrict the kinds of arts projects the NEA can fund, which would include the types of performances that Finley, Hughes, Fleck and Miller often give.

In a sense, some arts observers said, Frohnmayer’s action may have been an audition to demonstrate to Congress how effectively the endowment can neutralize controversial art.

“I think this kind of a priori judgment of an artist’s work is what is most onerous about this entire issue, and I think we have now seen the first illustration of what everybody has feared,” said Bill Bushnell, artistic director of the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“One man (Frohnmayer) has set himself up as the arbiter of taste on a national basis,” Bushnell said. “He has taken this action in some effort to appease the conservative right, and that’s a futile gesture that, I think, will cause many of us to have to seriously re-examine what has been, to this date, unqualified support for John. I don’t know yet that I’m prepared to state that he should resign, but I’m going to do some serious thinking about it.”