Orange County 1990-1991 The Year in Review : Censorship, Public Fund Issues Seize the Spotlight : Controversy over government subsidies for allegedly offensive works cropped up again and again, adding to economic pressures.

As the furor over federal arts funding, obscenity, religion and censorship made it onto national network news, controversy over the same issues erupted repeatedly in Orange County this year.

In April, a photograph of rock ‘n’ roll titan John Lennon in the nude triggered the first fracas, which brought the county’s art scene some of its own national media exposure.

The picture, showing Lennon curled in a fetal position embracing his fully dressed wife, Yoko Ono, was yanked, then reinstated, from an exhibit at Fullerton’s Muckenthaler Cultural Center after objections from several center board members.

The incident came just weeks after a Cincinnati gallery and its chief were indicted (later to be acquitted) on misdemeanor obscenity charges for exhibiting a show of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe. The show included images of homoeroticism and naked children.

Mapplethorpe’s photographs were among those that had ignited the National Endowment for the Arts furor. NEA funding of such work was attacked by congressional critics, chief among them Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Long Beach), whose district includes parts of Orange County. The attacks led to a hotly contested policy that required 1990 NEA grantees to certify that they would not create or present obscene art.

Muckenthaler trustees said the Cincinnati case had nothing to do with their decision to pull the Lennon picture. The NEA imbroglio was at the core of the county’s next flap, however.

John Feeney and his wife, Ernie, went to City Hall repeatedly throughout the second half of the year to complain about a litany of arts issues, from South Coast Repertory’s flyer voicing support of the NEA to Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse’s production of a caustic satire about parochial education.

The City Council dodged and weaved in response to a variety of conflicting factions, first withholding arts grants, then releasing them, then suggesting strict anti-obscenity guidelines to placate the Feeneys, and finally adopting language that echoed state law, to the dismay of some civil libertarians who argue that the city law is too vague.

Costa Mesa City Atty. Thomas Kathe said recently that the language is being revised to make it “more specific” and that the revision would be ready in February. Local arts activists, however, say they hope to eradicate the restrictions in the coming year.

* It’s likely that advisers to the John Wayne Airport arts program will think long and hard before they suggest the exhibition of nude images again. Such a recommendation resulted in another arts brouhaha.

Airport arts advisers had suggested that a poster to commemorate the airport’s new terminal be reproduced from a painting, commissioned from Jim Morphesis, of a nude Icarus figure. But the plan fell through in September after bureaucratic snafus and disapproval of the picture’s nudity by Anaheim printer Bob Cashman, also a member of the airport commission, who had offered to print 2,000 copies, gratis.

The story had something of a happy ending when a trustee of the Laguna Art Museum purchased Morphesis’ work for donation to the seaside institution. The museum, however, soon found itself enmeshed in a cultural ruckus of its own.

At issue was a decision by museum officials to exclude a potentially controversial work--an American flag crafted with pornographic magazine photos--from an exhibit installed in October entitled “Flags” by artist Mark Heresy.

The museum received more in 1990 NEA grants ($222,500) than any other county group. But director Charles Desmarais flatly rejected any notion that deletion of the work was influenced by controversy dogging the NEA. It was strictly a matter of curatorial selection, he asserted, adding that the exhibit was not supported with NEA funds and thus “invulnerable to endowment action.”

The most recent flap over alleged constraints on free speech transpired earlier this month in Orange.

The focus here was, and probably will be again, on a public-access cable news program geared for homosexuals and a proposed regulation that would require public-access producers to submit their shows at least two weeks in advance of broadcast for review by an advisory board that oversees the city’s cable operations.

Orange city officials who floated the proposal have been working on new cable-operation guidelines for several months. During that time they received a few citizens’ complaints about Spectrum News Network, a gay-oriented soap opera, and a program titled “American Atheist TV Forum,” all aired over Cablevision of Orange.

Spectrum news producer K. Bradley Hudson has protested, however, that the two-week review period would impede timely broadcast of his biweekly show and said he is prepared to sue if the policy is adopted. Ben Pruett, acting president of the Orange Community Video Advisory Board, said he doubts that the matter will wind up in court. The guidelines are expected to be reviewed again next week.

Some Orange County arts groups responded minimally to the year’s attacks against the NEA, such as those by Rohrabacher who suggested that the agency be abolished entirely. (The NEA was recently reauthorized for another three years and given a $174-million, 1991 budget, but major changes in grant distribution figure to drastically reduce the size of grants to be awarded next year.)

Others took stronger action, however, such as the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s lawsuit, which surely grabbed the most publicity. As with the similar suits, it claims that the agency’s 1990 anti-obscenity clause is unconstitutional. Attorneys for the museum have asked for a summary judgment and expect a federal judge’s ruling soon.

The Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach stood out as the only one of eight county groups to reject its 1990 grant of $15,000.

Certainly the most colorful arts-related protests of the year came from the Orange County Coalition for Freedom of Expression whose artist, arts administrator and other members staged three creative guerrilla-theater pieces.

One, which fell outside the NEA censorship debate, came after the La Habra Community Theatre board quashed a director’s plan to present an interracial production of “Romeo and Juliet” this fall. In a park near the theater, coalition members enacted their own version of the Shakespearean classic, in which Romeo was played by a black male and Juliet by a white male.

Costa Mesa’s new grant policies were the target of two other skits, presented during City Council meetings.

In the first, the protesters symbolically stripped the city of its self-proclaimed status as “City of the Arts” and put on masks of former Mayor Peter F. Buffa to signal his alleged part in imposing “homogeneous cultural standards upon the entire community.”

In the second, they presented a check for $3.72 to the city’s general fund. The activists said the money represented the share of city arts grants paid by the Feeneys that year.

SUPPORT The role of government financial support for the arts--the flip side of governmental censorship--was another thread that ran through other major events in the arts community during 1990. Like the censorship issue, this issue reflects fundamental political and economic assumptions in Orange County.

Since its opening in 1986, the $73-million Orange County Performing Arts Center has boasted of its choice to eschew government backing, relying on only two of the three traditional legs of the arts’ financial support: ticket sales and private gifts.

“It is a point of pride,” Arts Center President Thomas R. Kendrick said recently during the course of a 2 1/2-hour, taped interview. “The board and I are very proud of the fact that this was built with private funds and is being operated with private funds. It does keep us free of certain restrictions.”

On the other hand, Kendrick said that doesn’t mean Arts Center leaders are philosophically opposed to receiving public monies. “If there were a significant source of government support, we would obviously investigate that,” Kendrick said, but he added that in the era of budget cutbacks, he does not believe that such a financial wellspring exists.

Having to rely on ticket sales and private donors alone during the current economic downturn, without government subsidy or a substantial cash endowment, Kendrick said, “is a double whammy.”

Asked exactly how much of an additional burden the downturn in this year’s recession had placed on the Center by the end of November, Kendrick replied:

“Well over a million dollars. . . . We will be down a million dollars on the programming side, which means that has to be made up on the support side or by cutting expenses.”

Specifically, what Kendrick called a “risky” summer season of non-subscription offerings, ranging from ballet to Broadway, ended in disaster.

The Center’s first foray into production, a restaging of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” with the La Jolla Playhouse, was a critical success but a box-office failure, costing well over $400,000. Kendrick blamed the summer season’s failure--beginning with the Australian Ballet, whose engagement coincided with a Los Angeles visit by the Bolshoi Ballet--on the upheaval in the Persian Gulf and a weakened economy.

Signs of a box-office slump--first detected early in the year with weak subscription renewals for the ballet series--accelerated, and in April the Center instituted a hiring freeze on its staff of 65.

Nonetheless, Center leaders have reiterated their fundamental commitment to high-overhead, high-culture events such as ballet, which can require six-figure subsidies even when every seat is sold.

The continuing slowdown in the economy, Kendrick said, has had a marginal effect on ticket sales, which had been extraordinarily high for the Center’s first few years, and were due for a downturn. Yet even a 10% drop in box-office sales can translate into a loss of $1 million, he said.

In mid-November, the Center’s vice president for development, George E. Engdahl, resigned after only 10 months on the job. Engdahl had been hired after an 18-month, nationwide search.

Kendrick and other board members predicted that despite the downturn, donors would be able to pick up the slack from box-office losses. On the plus side, Kendrick pointed to a high subscription sign-up for the Center’s current Broadway series--78%--and the recent sellout of “A Chorus Line.” Additionally, its co-production of “Annie” hit almost 79% attendance and turned a profit, while the Center’s 2,800-member network of guilds expect to raise $620,000--$108,000 above 1989 and $120,000 more than budgeted.

* Another incident that reflected the county’s “libertarian mentality” toward government arts funding, according to one state arts official, occurred this year when county supervisors rejected a $50,000 funding request for a proposed countywide arts service agency. Later, the supervisors essentially ruled out any substantial funding for the agency.

The Committee for a Countywide Council, a group of local arts officials working to form the agency, recommended that the Orange County Board of Supervisors allocate $50,000 in support. The money--far less than an initial proposal of $125,000 in cash or in-kind services--was to have come from the Environmental Management Agency.

But the board rejected the request, and county officials later signaled that the agency would receive no county money at all, although they said that in-kind services were not out of the question. Historically, county arts funding has been minimal.

SURVEYS Two significant surveys in 1990 on the state of the arts in the county also reflected varying attitudes toward governmental and private support.

In the first, the Performing Arts Center commissioned a study by Mark Baldassare & Associates on attitudes toward the Center after three years of operation. The survey, of 500 county residents and 300 Center subscribers, found a high level of awareness of the Center among the general population and strong support for existing programming by Center subscribers.

But curiously, for all its pride in building and running the facility with private funds alone, the study found that 45% of the residents sampled and 30% of the subscribers believe that the Center receives direct government support. Half of the residents and one-fourth of the subscribers believe--erroneously--that ticket prices cover all performance costs.

The Orange County Business Committee for the Arts, which promotes support for arts organizations through the private sector, commissioned a study of its own. The survey, which received responses from 37 of the county’s 113 arts organizations, found that the arts generated $260 million in economic activity.

Orange County ranked ahead of San Diego and Boston in per capita private donations to the arts, and Chapman College’s Dr. James Doti, who did the survey, suggested that the paucity of government support of the arts in the county served as a spur to private giving.

VENUES Government support--in partnership with the private sector--brought the county a major new performing arts facility, the $17.9-million, 750-seat Irvine Barclay Theatre. The city of Irvine put up $11.3 million; UC Irvine donated the 2.3-acre site on the edge of the UC Irvine campus and $1.8 million; and $4.8 million was solicited from corporate and individual contributors.

Douglas Rankin, the theater’s president, projected a first season’s operating budget of $1.1 million, plus $250,000 in start-up costs. An operating deficit of about $300,000 is expected the first season, to be shared by the city of Irvine and UCI. In subsequent seasons, private support also will be solicited.

The theater will be available to community groups, such as the Irvine Symphony, and to the UCI drama department, as well as to some groups which now use the Performing Arts Center. The Orange County Philharmonic Society, for example, plans to use the Barclay for soloists and chamber groups that might not be able to fill the Center’s 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall.

Few of the Barclay’s early offerings broke any box-office records, and one especially small turnout, for England’s Hull Truck Theatre, “put a cautious note in the back of my mind,” Rankin said in an interview. A poor draw, he said, “doesn’t make it a bad show or a show that shouldn’t be done.” Because of the intimacy of the hall, a crowd as small as 350 can be very comfortable at the Barclay, he said.

For the most part, Rankin sounded philosophical about his first season.

“More people are beginning to know we’re here,” he said, adding that the theater’s financial support structure and staff of eight allows him to stay with an innovative programming mix.

“We attempt to be very realistic about people’s moods and attitudes,” Rankin said, but “being entirely market driven can lead you in the wrong direction, at least in the long term.”

In South County, plans are continuing for a 1,500- to 2,000-seat facility on the Saddleback College campus in Mission Viejo. In May, Saddleback’s trustees “agreed in principle with the scope and function” of the proposed facility. The college’s president, Constance M. Carroll, said she hopes that by the spring of 1991 an architect and a design would be selected and filed with the State Chancellor’s Office of Community Colleges.

Estimated costs of the facility have ranged from $10 million to $30 million, and some sort of partnership of college, government, and private forces, along the lines of the Irvine Barclay, is contemplated.

ART MUSEUM Nowhere have the vagaries and vulnerabilities of private arts funding been more obvious than at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The museum, the recipient of numerous state and federal grants for programming and administration, has embarked on a $50-million campaign to construct and endow a new building. But, coming in the midst of other capital improvement projects, such as the Irvine Barclay and Mission Viejo theaters, and ongoing support drives for the Performing Arts Center, its fund drive faltered in 1990.

In fact, the campaign remains at a standstill, where it’s been stalled at $10 million in cash and pledges for months, according to museum officials.

Officials continue to assert, however, that the fund drive will resume once they hire a director and approve building designs, which are expected to more than triple the size of the institution’s present 23,000-square-foot home.

Two finalists for the museum’s long-vacant directorship have been pegged, and while the museum won’t identify them, they are being interviewed, and a new chief “should” be named in early 1991, museum spokeswoman Maxine Gaiber said last week.

As for curatorial operations, the museum this year named Ellen Breitman, former director of education, to head that department. Officials say the vacant curator and assistant-curator’s posts will be filled once a director is hired.

Also, contract negotiations are continuing with Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, which, if successful, would mean resumption of a building design beyond the “vague, general plan” supplied by William Pedersen, a partner in the New York firm, Gaiber said.

Pedersen was hired by museum trustee Donald L. Bren to draft alternate sketches for the new building after trustees began to worry that they wouldn’t get what they wanted from world-renowned architect Renzo Piano, who was later fired from the project.

A spokesman for Bren has denied that the developer acted on his own whim and said Bren never undertook any initiatives except at the “request of museum leadership.”