ART : Defending the Avant-Garde From the Hysterical Hounds of Conservatism : Works that used to be of interest only to a small coterie are now being assessed for their moral fitness by those who would otherwise never bother to see them.

This is a cautionary tale, but I still haven’t figured out what the moral is.

Last month, I got a call from an associate of Holly Hughes, a New York performance artist whose work I reviewed last year when she appeared in Santa Monica. The woman on the phone told me that Hughes’ National Endowment for the Arts grant proposal had been recommended for funding by the NEA’s Theater Arts program.

However, a story that had just appeared in the right-wing Washington Times said that NEA chairman John Frohnmayer was about to deny funding to Hughes and three other artists--Tim Miller and John Fleck of Los Angeles and Karen Finley of New York--because he wanted to mollify political opponents of the Endowment. Work by all four artists frequently involves imagery frankly intended to provoke middle-of-the-road viewers.

Hughes’ associate said she was calling various critics to ask them to write brief statements testifying to the artistic validity of Hughes’ work, to be submitted to Frohnmayer. I had enjoyed the sly sexual humor of the text of Hughes’ “World Without End”--a piece she reprised this past weekend at Highways in Santa Monica--and I found Hughes to be a witty and able performer.

Before I composed my statement, I read the Washington Times story. It called Hughes “a solo performer and writer of theater skits.” Apparently quoting from a review (whose author was uncredited), the story said that in Hughes’ work, “World Without End,” she “demonstrates how her mother imparted the ‘secret meaning of life’ by displaying her body and . . . placing her hand up her vagina.”

Her works “are less concerned with male-female relationships,” the story continued, than “with lesbian desire”--the latter words taken out of context from another uncredited review of Hughes’ “Dress Suits to Hire.”

Faced with such descriptions--sure to raise the hackles of many readers, including conservative members of Congress--it seemed that I ought to describe Hughes’ work in such a way that even someone who (let’s say) secretly despised Lesbians might view it as eminently palatable and broadly humanistic.

So my statement, which I faxed to Hughes in New York, said: “Holly Hughes’ work involves a poetic transformation of the everyday activities of women into gestures that reveal the elemental sexual nature shared by all of humanity. She strips away social veneer to uncover the primal essence of her characters. This is art that treats the human condition in a metaphorical way, with lyricism, warmth and humor.”

Well, as you probably know, nothing anybody wrote in Hughes’ defense seems to have made much difference. Without explanation, the NEA decided to withhold awards to the four artists.

Last week, a story in the Los Angeles Times reported that the NEA’s advisory council is considering awarding Hughes and another member of the “NEA four” grants from an Inter-Arts program called Artists Projects: New Forms. But subsequently it was revealed that two members of the “peer review” panel which initially awarded the Theater Arts grants were also collaborators on Hughes’ and Finley’s proposed projects.

Everyone involved apparently made a full declaration of potential conflict of interest at the appropriate time, and this situation is common in the tiny world of progressive art forms. (There simply are not that many “peers” to draw from at any given time.) But to the outside world--and to some members of the independent commission appointed by President Bush to scrutinize the NEA’s performance--the situation smacked of impropriety. It hardly could have come at a worse moment in the life of risk-taking art forms.

In the meantime, during the past few months of right-wing hysteria over non-mainstream art, I’ve become increasingly concerned about the problems involved in writing for “polite society” about visual and performance art that exists primarily to unsettle this society.

One problem is that, while all good art is complex and takes time to fully explore, journalism--as well as the hectic pace of contemporary life--favors information that comes across with a minimum of elaborate and involved explanations.

It is much easier to condemn a work by brandishing loaded words and phrases such as “lesbian desire” than to praise it by evoking the dense web of imagery--achieved through words, movements, sounds and facial expressions--that a performer can muster in her art.

But even in attempting to write supportive commentary, reviewers are obliged to pick and choose the images we wish to discuss. And here’s where we are increasingly in a bind. Do we tactfully ignore the aspects of a work that are deliberately disgusting or sexually frank in order to plead for the “universal” appeal of the work as a whole?

The problem is that radical art is not about reaffirming the comfortable truths we already hold.

Such work does make us uncomfortable from time to time. If we are heterosexual, we may be embarrassed at the degree of empathy we feel for homosexual feelings or experiences. Rooted in our self-defined notion of sexuality, whatever it may be, we may shy away from acknowledging “the other” in ourselves. We may laugh nervously at evocations of extreme states of human behavior, embarrassed to be eavesdropping so intently at such intimate or repellent scenes.

But the works that make viewers uncomfortable or angry or both are provoking them to ask themselves, What do we really believe and why? Why do we act the way we do? Are we so imprisoned within the self-righteous paths we lay out for ourselves that we cannot for a moment consider a radically different point of view?

Of course, there are works that are “on the edge” but also (we reviewers may think) bad art. Nowhere is it written that the further out you go, the better you get. But in condemning such work, we may worry that we are being misunderstood, that readers feel relieved to be spared “such filth” rather than simply a half-baked work of art.

It seems to me that the more the arts have become enshrined as culturally mainstream activities, the more layers of misunderstanding have embalmed them. In decades past, avant-garde works of art, in particular, were seen and debated by tiny coteries. The rest of the world generally ignored them.

But in our time, a Pageant of the Masters-style notion of the pleasantly “uplifting” role of art has been trumpeted by the media as well as well-meaning publicists at purse-weighing arts institutions throughout the land. In a way, it seems sadly unremarkable that people with no art background whatsoever are now complaining about the moral fitness of obscure work they normally would never see--or even hear about--if self-appointed right-wing crusaders had not spread the word.

To be sure, the nay-sayers are said to be incensed about awarding of tax money (via the NEA) to art deemed objectionable. But many infinitely more far-ranging and expensive activities supported by our tax dollars have been objectionable to portions of the populace, from the development of the MX missile to the bailout of savings and loan institutions. It is utterly bizarre that people can be so distressed by the deliberately marginal activities of an artist with whose work they and their children probably will never come in contact.

As I said, I don’t have an answer to all this. I’m just brooding and waiting for better days.