Frohnmayer to Retain NEA Obscenity Oath : Arts funding: Endowment chairman hopes ‘cooler heads prevail’ as Congress determines the fate of the federal agency.

Declaring that “cooler heads may prevail” and bring political resolution of the 18-month crisis of the National Endowment for the Arts, the agency’s chairman insisted Monday that he will nevertheless retain a controversial obscenity oath that has become as a focus of bitter criticism.

The remarks by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, prepared for a morning briefing session with reporters in Washington, appeared to add to a growing sense in the capital that Congress is about to deal--for better or worse--with questions of the endowment’s continued existence.

“We await the action of Congress with the hope that clear thinking and cool heads prevail,” Frohnmayer said in prepared remarks. “That’s the fresh breeze blowing these days regarding the 18-month trauma of the NEA.”

The remarks were Frohnmayer’s first public response to two major Washington developments last week that are increasingly being viewed as making it likely that the House and Senate will play out the final scenes in the NEA drama between now and Congress’ scheduled Oct. 5 adjournment.

Companion measures in both houses of Congress have been stalled for weeks as the NEA’s advocates have appeared uncertain about how to find and hold together a middle-of-the-road compromise that could provide enough political cover to insulate NEA supporters from attack from conservative groups.

Developments that have begun to alter the situation included release last week of a report by the Independent Commission, formed to conduct an inquiry into NEA procedures last year, and a lopsided Senate committee vote sending for floor action an NEA renewal bill that emphatically renounces controls on the kinds of art the NEA can support.

In addition to Frohnmayer’s remarks, Senate, House and other Washington sources on Monday said that action on bills to reauthorize the NEA for another three to five years and to finalize its 1991 budget could come early next week. While the prospects for action remain uncertain, there appeared to be an emerging consensus that an NEA compromise was possible--in which unity among mainstream liberals, moderates and conservatives had been achieved for action to renew the arts endowment without gutting its ability to preserve artistic freedom of expression.

The alliance, House and Senate sources agreed, remains fragile, unpredictable and somewhat uncertain, but a clear series of tactical and political decisions appeared to have been made under which the NEA’s most vocal opponents in Congress, including Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (a Long Beach Republican whose district includes parts of Orange County), would be politically isolated and forced onto the defensive.

Under these plans, House action on a substitute reauthorization bill embodying the recommendations of the Independent Commission might come up for floor action as early as Monday of next week. Action on reauthorization legislation in the Senate could come at nearly the same time or be delayed until late the following week.

The Independent Commission, which emphatically rejected content-control language in the NEA’s authorizing statute, recommended a series of specific reforms within the endowment, ranging from eliminating conflict-of-interest problems in the grant-making process to major changes that would strip artist-dominated grant-review panels of a large amount of power they now wield.

The Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, chaired by Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), approved an NEA compromise bill sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a key conservative, that rejects content-control statutory language in favor of establishing a process for the arts endowment to retrieve grant money used to create works later judged by courts to be obscene.

But Frohnmayer would stick to a requirement that NEA grant recipients sign a certification they will not create “obscene” work. The requirement, which critics have likened to an anti-obscenity loyalty oath, has precipitated three lawsuits against the endowment and at least a dozen grant rejections by mainstream arts organizations.

There were also indications within the endowment that Frohnmayer was having a difficult time persuading some of his own staff to support the reforms in the Independent Commission report and the Hatch-led Senate compromise. The reforms include provisions opening some grant-review procedures to public scrutiny, naming non-artists to grant panels and requiring that panels recommend more grants than can be funded, with the NEA chairman exercising final determinations over which specific grants are awarded.

NEA sources confirmed that a fractious meeting of endowment program directors--convened last week by the endowment’s acting deputy chairman, Randy McAusland, and its general counsel, Julie Davis--produced broad opposition to many of the reforms Frohnmayer publicly endorsed on Monday. The program directors reportedly argued that, in addition to problems with the costs and bureaucratic red tape associated with some of the reforms, the new procedures, by concentrating more power in the office of the NEA chairman, could increase the risk of political interference in artistic decisions.

A key arts organization leveled precisely that criticism Monday, as well. The National Assn. of Artist Organizations, which represents artist-run galleries, performance spaces and other facilities, charged that many of the grant review reforms are not reforms at all, but an increase in politicization of NEA procedures.

“We totally reject it,” said Charlotte Murphy, the artist group’s executive director of the grant-reform initiative. “It flies in the face of the whole impetus behind the endowment’s start in 1965, which was to keep politics and art separate.”

Murphy said that her own organization had decided to accept a $32,000 NEA grant itself after a divisive board meeting in which artists who oversee the group split over issue of whether taking NEA money constituted an endorsement of controversial endowment practices, including the obscenity oath requirement.

Murphy contended that none of the NEA reform proposals satisfactorily guarantees new ways to prevent a series of apparently political grant-rejection decisions that have markedly worsened the NEA crisis in the last few months. The situation revolves around Frohnmayer’s decision, in June, to reject fellowship grants to four artists, apparently in the belief that the rejections would mollify conservative NEA critics in Congress.