Victory, but No Relief : Dennis Barrie tells of the price he and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center paid for displaying Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos

On Friday, Oct. 5, an Ohio criminal court jury ended a summerlong bad dream for the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie.

But in the weeks since Barrie and the museum were found not guilty on obscenity and child pornography charges that grew out of a show of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, Barrie has found the art center may have sustained long-term damage to its finances and reputation.

The center has been accorded a hero’s role in the controversy for insisting on its right to display the Mapplethorpe images--unlike Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, which in July of last year committed itself to a doomed pacifist gambit and refused to accept the Mapplethorpe show. The move caused one of the largest explosions in the national arts policy crisis .

Today, the Corcoran remains without a permanent director--its head at the time, Christina Orr-Cahall, resigned over her mishandling of the Mapplethorpe decision. The Corcoran’s board is in turmoil and its finances in disarray. Insiders say some artists have even called off sales of their work to the Corcoran in an ongoing protest.

Barrie thought his institution would not also suffer. He has learned otherwise since the verdict.

Early last week, a few days after he received an award for defending First Amendment rights from the Playboy Foundation, Barrie talked--in a telephone conversation with Times staff writer Allan Parachini--about the museum’s stand against the first known obscenity prosecution of a mainstream American museum and the price his institution has had to pay for taking it. Question: As the smoke has, at least, started to clear after the verdict, what do you see as the latent effects, both for your museum and the arts in general, of what happened and what the jury decided?

Answer: I think there are both good effects and bad effects. The good effects are that we did something that needed to be done in a sense that a museum stood up to political and legal pressure--something that didn’t happen in Washington last year--and that was an important thing to do.

I think as a result, the museum world and much of the art world is grateful. We did the right thing. There was no alternative. We could not have given in. The down side for our institution is that it was a costly battle--costly in terms of dollars and costly in terms of human health and morale. We’ve got a lot of wounded people here, and we’ve got an incredible amount of money to raise in order just to to stay stay afloat.

Q: What is the dimension of the dollar situation?

A: Our court-related legal costs are somewhere between $325,000 and $350,000. And this is with a lot of pro bono , so I don’t want people to ever get the impression that our lawyers did not give a lot. It is expensive to fight cases like this. And we’ve taken a real hit in corporate giving, somewhere to the tune of about $110,000. We expect it to be long-lasting. We expect we will have two or three years of perhaps no corporate support locally.

I think our corporations are scared at the moment, because, suddenly (Sen. Jesse) Helms (the North Carolina Republican who led the conservative drive to rein in the National Endowment for the Arts and control the kinds of work arts institutions produce) and others have made the arts controversial. The arts used to be a very good and safe place to put corporate dollars for public relations purposes and for civic purposes.

I think, sadly, that Helms and others have made it a political battleground and, lately, we see corporations shying away from anything controversial. Witness what’s going on in the (television) networks, and the withdrawal of sponsorship from anything that’s controversial in a network show.

Q: What do corporate sponsors say to you if they are willing to admit they are dropping donations because of the controversy?

A: That it’s difficult to sponsor the Contemporary Arts Center right now, because we’re too controversial. We’re too hot. That’s almost a quote.

I think that we face very real economic hardships here as a result. Among the ways we’ve seriously discussed keeping the institution afloat is to go dark. And for an institution that mainly focuses on exhibitions, going dark will be very hard for us.

It will be a real blow to what we’ve done for 52 years, but the hard reality is that we may be faced with that. Obviously, we’re going fight like hell not to do that. We’re going to raise money and trim budget and figure out how we can keep the exhibition program going through what we think are one, two or maybe three very difficult years. But the reality may be that for a portion of this coming year, the Contemporary Arts Center may have to close its doors.

Q: At what point might you have to make that decision?

A: I imagine probably we’ll have a good take by the first of the year on how our finances have fared. Our budget this year is roughly $1.5 million. We’re several hundred thousand dollars below that (for 1990).

Q: There has been some discussion in the last couple of weeks, after rejection of a grant by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to support an exhibit of work by Los Angeles Artist Mike Kelley, that if museums or performance spaces propose to show or present some specific controversial artist, that their NEA funding could be in danger, a danger that it would become the equivalent of a true blacklist.

Do you see things heading in that direction?

A: I guess I’m encouraged by the actions of Congress over the last week. It looks now like the NEA has been reauthorized without restriction. I think that is absolutely encouraging.

And I think that the lawmakers in Washington watched our trial very carefully--also the trial of (the rap group) 2 Live Crew, which also resulted in the Oct. 20 acquittal of the musicians on obscenity charges.

I think those trials had very real impact on the voting--certainly in the House, where it was suddenly an overwhelming vote in our favor and in favor of NEA reauthorization. So I think they sort of read some of the handwriting and saw that, maybe, they are out of step with the politics of the people on this issue. That’s the encouraging end of it.

I hope that the political climate will now subside so that we don’t see further activities like this. I think that once Helms (who is running for reelection against a black Democratic candidate in one of the nation’s most closely watched races) is either defeated or reelected, it may subside.

Q: In that NEA reauthorization bill that otherwise avoids restrictions on arts content, there is one sentence that people are choosing to read with some degree of alarm: “No payment shall be made under this section except . . . in accordance with (NEA) regulations (to) ensure that artistic excellence and artistic merit are the criteria by which applications are judged, taking into consideration general standards of decency, and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” There are those who are reading that as a more onerous piece of writing than last year’s language.

A: I think that John Frohnmayer’s got a very difficult situation right now. He’s trying to save an organization that came under severe attack. And to put the wording in there right now is to placate all the sides. I think this issue is going to subside. Are they going to take everybody to court like they took us?

It’s pretty unlikely. There may be a few aggressive prosecutors, but they got their derrieres kicked here in Hamilton County, a place where they could have--and should have--won. They lost. I mean I’ve just been through it, and I’m not worried. I’m not talking about the abstract.

Q: If someone offered you a one-man retrospective by Andres Serrano (whose “Piss Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine, set off the NEA crisis last year), would you take it?

A: Serrano I’d be interested in. We always judge on the merit of the artist. I think Serrano’s done some marvelous things. He has something to say. so it would be something to consider.

Q: I’m sure this is one of the many questions you’ve been asked more often than you’d like, but if you had it to do again, would you accept the Mapplethorpe show?

A: Oh yes. I mean, I know this has been very difficult. There’s no way of saying that it hasn’t been. It has been a nightmare for this institution, and for me personally. And at the same time the show was a fine show. I would see no reason not to book that show. And we would do it again.

I don’t want to say that cavalierly, because I know that it has had a real impact on everybody involved in this community. But the national situation allowed the hysteria to be created here in this city. And we did not know that at the time we booked it that we were going to be victims of political campaigns that have embraced the nation for a year and a half now.

Q: It seems ironic that the Contemporary Arts Center and the Corcoran--two museums of competence, reputation and quality--that took totally different approaches to the same show have both been very seriously injured.

A: There is an irony. I know the Corcoran people well. I was very saddened by what the Corcoran did. It’s a good place. They made the wrong decision, and you can’t deny that. They don’t deny it anymore. But we’re both institutions that are damaged by it. They’re damaged on a financial level and a professional level. I think we are in the sunshine professionally, but the hard reality is that, while the profession supports us with kudos and applause and flowers and telegrams, we still are on the short end of our ability to finance what it cost us.

Q: From the perspective of 20 or 30 years from now, what do you suppose will be the critical reputation of Robert Mapplethorpe?

A: I don’t think Mapplethorpe broke any new ground in terms of his points of view with photography. He may have broken it in terms of revealing a sexual aspect of the world that you know hadn’t been dealt with much openly in photography.

I think he’s a fine classical photographer. And I think some of the works were stunningly beautiful. And he’ll be looked upon that way. Will he be looked upon as a seminal figure of the ‘80s? Probably not. I don’t know who will.

But certainly he was a good and competent photographer whose works are quite beautiful. You know, some people accuse him of being just a fashion photographer. But when you walked into “The Perfect Moment,” it was really quite a moving show in terms of its impact. Some of the nudes particularly were just stunning.

Q: Some people have observed that it’s been a shame that the artists whose work has become so controversial have not been defended consistently by either the NEA or the arts community at large. Do you think it’s a valid criticism that people of prominence and power in the art world have, in essence, thrown the artists to the wolves?

A: You have to look at the greater view of what these artists have done, or why defending their work is important. And you have to not nit-pick, in the way that only artistic people can do. I find it embarrassing, in the middle of our crisis, that somebody told me, “Well, Mapplethorpe’s a second-rate artist,” or “Andres Serrano’s a third-rate artist.” I thought, “Man, you are missing the point.”

Q: What is the point?

A: The point is that freedom of expression is at stake here. Washington was under attack. Whether you want to make some art-historical posture to show what you know, or don’t know, about photography is not the issue. The issue is to defend the freedom.

Q: Do you think that your situation, the NEA situation, the 2 Live Crew controversy or the controversy over distributing the film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” for instance, are all manifestations of the same issue or do they diverge?

A: I think they’re manifestations of the same issue. What we see happening is an assault from the far religious right. And it’s a very real political-social agenda, which focuses in some areas on censorship because they want control. And so you see censorship within the attack on the arts.

It’s gone into the entertainment world. It’s gone into textbooks. This is all (about) social control. You can link the anti abortion-rights movement to these same groups. It’s all linked to a group of people who are desperately fighting some kind of rear-guard action against the changing America.

And they are people who really don’t represent near a majority point of view, but who are terribly well organized, are well financed, have lawmakers who will listen to them--and use them for political purposes--and who have the ear of some powerful forces in the United States. And they’re very good--amazingly good--at what they do. They have beaten everybody up for several years.

They use the arts for political fodder. They don’t care whether the arts are funded or not. And the reality is, that at the same time that they would shrink federal dollars (devoted to support of the arts), I think corporate dollars will shrink as well.

We all know we’re at the edge of a recession if not in it, and these politicians have made the arts controversial. The artists didn’t make the arts controversial. The politicians made the arts controversial.