NEA Denial Inspires ‘Artistic Merit’ : Art: Controversial artist whose erotic collages were singled out as the reason for grant rejection stages an impromptu exhibition.

This year’s euphemism for “obscene” -- “Lacking in artistic quality”--is clever, but ultimately it is as subjective and legally vague as was last year’s “indecent.” -- L.A. visual artist Joe Smoke, in a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts

Joe Smoke is the latest artist to taste the highs and lows of controversy.

Last month, slides of his erotic photo-based collages of male couples were singled out by the National Endowment for the Arts as “not having artistic merit” and “besides their content, simply not very good.” Those comments came from members of the National Council on the Arts--the NEA’s advisory body--during a debate which ended with the denial of a $5,000 grant for Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, where Smoke’s works had been shown in 1990.

Now, in an impromptu exhibition at Highways--”Can You Find the Artistic Merit in This Picture?”--Smoke hopes audiences will contradict the NEA and answer “yes.”

“I am not totally crushed when something like this happens--it has brought me a lot of attention, so I’m not completely disheartened,” said Smoke, a Milwaukee native who will receive his MFA in studio art from UCLA in June. “I do feel somewhat guilty that other artists will not benefit from Highways being funded, but I don’t think my work was (of low quality). I think any gay artist doing meritorious work would have been singled out.

“But viewers come expecting the sex now, in the same way that I think the (NEA) was looking for something wrong. I feel that does a disservice to my work because people come expecting the art to be more sexually explicit. Or they look at it one-dimensionally, only seeing the sexual component and not seeing the arguments I’m trying to make.”

Smoke, whose works were also criticized by the American Family Assn.’s Rev. Donald Wildmon after a 1990 exhibition in Louisville, Ky., said: “I feel like what I do is very powerful, pointed and insightful, and I’m not going to self-censor my work. I’m going to continue to make work that deals with myself, my sexual orientation, my race and my community. My work is very usual--these are the kind of pictures that come to me everyday in literature about gay men. These are not erotic fantasy photos, these are about real life and real people . . . they just happen to be about gay people.”

Mark McFadden, an assistant professor of art at UCLA who has known Smoke and his work for three years, supported Smoke’s contention that it was the content, and not the quality of his work, that the NEA objected to.

“The intolerance they showed (in singling out Smoke’s works), the fear and the ignorance, is pretty prevalent in society today and it almost to be expected,” McFadden said. “His work absolutely (meets standards of artistic quality), both formally and conceptually. In fact, it stands out in terms of his abilities to present information to the viewer and to carry on in terms of the social and political issues he’s presenting. It’s well thought out, complete and takes on issues that need to be dealt with.”

The three works that sparked the NEA’s objections contain erotic photographs of gay men in sexually explicit positions. But those photocopied photographs are obscured and abstracted by underlying magazine-style photographs of decorator homes and furnishings. The works, which also contain related text, come from a series which Smoke describes as an attempt to “explore gay men’s fetishism of the home (and) counteract our relative invisibility within magazine images of architecture, interior design and art.”

A dozen of the 17 works on view at Highways contain such erotic photographs, but others are comparatively tame object-and-text works comprised of ceiling fans, a desk and computer terminal and a stove top and rubber gloves.

“I play with very common domestic objects,” says Smoke. “I can take an icon like a stove but use the (burner) inlays to tell a story of someone else’s life. So it will be both comfortable and uncomfortable. The stove would not be threatening to anybody, but yet some people are afraid of the piece. . . . I like to mix the ultra shocking and the ultra comfortable at the same time.”

The exhibition opens with “Trick of the Trade,” a Duraflex print of a bare-bottomed young man spread out on red, white and blue bedsheets. The man smiles up sweetly at the camera, evoking memories of a ‘70s “Love, American Style” advertisement.

Other works include a tabletop on which two loaves of white bread sit in a breadbox topped with the word Means printed boldly in green. The piece, Smoke says, signifies the privileged financial status of many gay couples in which both partners are high wage earners by virtue of their being white men.

Smoke, a 26-year-old who describes himself as “precocious,” ranks the most explicit works in the show as among the most humorous. In “Decorator Home 32,” for instance, the 66x42-inch collage juxtaposes one photograph of a man sucking on his own finger with another of a couple engaged in oral sex. Once again, the shock of the photographs is paired with other elements: a roll of toilet paper embossed with the words Bless Our House, and a towel rack bearing fluffy yellow His and His towels. Beneath it all is the phrase, “Now it is a work of art,” which Smoke says quotes a gay magazine advertisement touting the value of certain bathroom fixtures.

Smoke, who last year curated the exhibition “Who’s Caring? Resources for and Responses to Woman With HIV/AIDS,” at the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, hopes his works will prompt an “alliance” with the women’s community.

“Domestic matters are really important--women’s work has been undervalued for too long. And now there are men making a point of perfecting that devalued work,” says Smoke, asserting that gay men make up a majority of interior designers, artists and even architects. “I’m saying that your homes are made comfortable by gay men; we design and shape and fashion society to make (others) comfortable and in turn we are made to feel uncomfortable.

“I invite everybody to come and see for themselves,” says Smoke, whose exhibition includes postcards addressed to the NEA for gallery visitors to sign stating that they “have found the artistic quality in Joe Smoke’s work.” Smoke hopes to gather 1,000 of the cards before the show’s end.

“As a gay man and a taxpayer, I want to know that the millions of gay and lesbian people in this country are represented in public art. I’m not calling for gay men to lead the art world, I’m just calling for diversity. We deserve our fair share.”

“Can You Find the Artistic Merit in this Picture?” works by Joe Smoke, at Highways, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, (310) 453-1755), through March 29. Open Mon.-Fri., 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. and before performances.