Bound and Gagged by Hearsay Evidence : Art: Censorship is bad enough; what of censorship and censure by people who haven’t seen : the work?

I am one of the four solo-performance artists who were unanimously recommended by a panel of theater experts for an NEA fellowship and then turned down by Chairman John E. Frohnmayer.

As an American artist, I have made a commitment in creating work that addresses social concerns. I feel it is my responsibility to apply my talents to record history and make my audience more sensitive to our country’s problems.

Much of my work deals with victims in our society--victims of sexism, victims of racism, victims of homophobia, economic victims, victims of sexual abuse and other violent crime--and I use the language that society commonly uses in its put-downs of these victims. I am being punished because I am a morally concerned artist, speaking about situations as they are.

We, as a nation, are creating our own new era of blacklisting. It is a sad, regressive time, uncannily like what McCarthyism did to Hollywood in the ‘50s. As the wall in Eastern Europe is coming down, a wall in our own country is going up. We are choosing not to take strength from our cultural diversity, but to weaken our nation by denying that diversity the right to speak publicly.

I perform throughout this land and I will be performing next season in many publicly funded spaces. Will I now be looked at as a hindrance to their funding? This is the insidious side of the NEA attacks. I am told that I have the freedom to perform anywhere I want as long as it’s not with public money, yet all of the art spaces and museums across our country are publicly funded. They are taking away my freedom to perform, as evidenced by Sen. Jesse Helms’ request for the government to investigate certain New York City art spaces specifically because I had performed there.

I hope that we keep the National Endowment, for we do not want to return to a society where art is only for the upper class. Where there is no public funding of the arts, art is made only by the wealthy or those sponsored by the wealthy. This gives a slanted view of expression, for there is no voice of the middle class and the poor.

Those who have written damaging articles about me (Evans & Novak, William Safire and William Buckley, among others) have not seen me perform. Is Frohnmayer listening to them and ignoring the panel of theater experts who know and recommended my work? Has he read the many positive, thorough reviews of my work? He seems to be reading the Washington Times instead of ARTFORUM. This is the man who is in charge of the National Arts Endowment?

Frohnmayer never contacted me personally to find out about my work before making me and three of my fellow artists the sacrificial lambs for the endowment. He is making a horrible mistake in using a “sacrifice game plan” to save the NEA. He should be standing up for artists rather than bowing to the demands of a few fanatics in Congress. This is supposed to be the National Endowment for the Arts, not the National Endowment against the Arts.