Art Museum Rejects Controversial Work : Exhibit: The display ‘Flags’ in Laguna Beach will include 19 of the 20 works of political artist Mark Heresy. The 20th, a Stars and Stripes made from pornographic magazine photos, won’t be shown.

The Laguna Art Museum, whose director has vowed to “abide by the rules” to secure a hefty sum of National Endowment for the Arts grants, has excluded a potentially controversial work from one of its current installations.

The exhibit, “Flags,” includes 19 of 20 American flags that political artist Mark Heresy has fashioned out of such materials as bullets and buckshot shells, cut currency and human hair. But the 20th flag, “Freedom of the Press,” a Stars and Stripes replica constructed of photos from porno magazines, has been left out.

The Laguna Art Museum is Orange County’s largest NEA grantee this year, having been awarded six grants totaling $222,500. Recipients of 1990 grants have been required to certify that they will not produce or present work that the NEA might consider obscene.

Museum Director Charles Desmarais on Thursday angrily defended the museum’s omission of the flag and insisted that its exclusion was “absolutely not” influenced by fear of losing NEA funding.

He said the museum’s decision to display all but one of Heresy’s flags was “a matter of selection” and that the excluded work was not specifically singled out. “I don’t care if there were 50 flags,” he said. “It’s the job of the museum to make choices. . . . We didn’t omit things. We select what we believe to be valuable and important to include (in any exhibit) for our public.”

Asked whether he considers “Freedom of the Press” to be not valuable and important, Desmarais responded, “You can draw your own conclusions.”

Heresy said his flag works are an attempt to illustrate his view of America’s bent toward censorship, militarism and materialism by infusing artifacts representative of those attitudes into the fabric of the nation’s symbol of freedom.

The exclusion of the pornographic magazine flag, he said, underscores the message he hopes to portray in the piece--that America pretends to stand for freedom of expression yet institutionalizes censorship.

“It just reinforces what the piece says,” said the 25-year-old artist from Los Angeles. “It’s very much about hypocrisy. It’s a very cynical piece.”

Heresy said, however, that he doesn’t fault the Laguna museum for leaving out the flag. Instead, he said, he is “encouraged” that the rest of the exhibit was accepted at all by a museum in a predominantly conservative county.

He credits Bolton T. Colburn, the museum’s curator of collections. Colburn “really stuck his neck out on this,” Heresy said. “It gives me hope that we can still do art and say something without (being censored) too heavily.”

Some arts groups throughout the country have rejected NEA funding this year because of the obscenity stipulation, which they have criticized as government-sponsored censorship. Desmarais has ardently defended his museum’s acceptance of the grants, contending that refusing the money would be to acquiesce to the pressure of conservatives whose criticism of a handful of works they consider sacrilegious or obscene prompted the anti-obscenity pledge.

Museum officials recently sent to the NEA an acceptance form for a $150,000 grant along with a letter that objected to the certification but said “we will abide by the rules,” as Desmarais put it last week.

The “Flags” installation is scheduled to remain on display at the museum through Dec. 16. “Freedom of the Press” remains at the Zero One Gallery in Hollywood, where the other flags had been before they were moved to the Laguna museum last month.