‘Too Shocking to Show’ Shows Up in Brooklyn : Performance art: The program at the Brooklyn Museum features artists whose work is caught up in the debate over funding.

“Hi, I’m Scarlet O,” said the woman, dressed first in a man’s suit and tie, and later, in almost nothing. “Sexuality, sensuality, is my art. It’s my passion.”

While those words introduced only one of the performance artists who appeared Sunday at the Brooklyn Museum, they might have stood for a good part of “Too Shocking to Show.” The ironically named program featuring four artists whose sexually explicit work has involved them in the ongoing, bitter national debate over federal funding for the arts.

Probably the best known of the performers were Holly Hughes and Tim Miller--both members of the “NEA Four,” artists whose requests for grants were denied by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990, sparking their pending lawsuit against the NEA. Also on the program was writer Sapphire, whose poem “Wild Thing,” about the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, appeared in an NEA-funded literary journal and was subsequently condemned by anti-blasphemy crusaders.

As for Scarlet O’s work, it was viewed on videotape by an NEA advisory council early this year, leading to the loss of a recommended NEA grant for the Franklin Furnace, a Manhattan alternative-arts space that sponsors her performances.

If Franklin Furnace lost out on a $25,000 grant, it gained an ally in the Brooklyn Museum, which joined with the performance-art space to produce “Too Shocking” (without NEA funds). It was, as Bob Buck, the museum’s director, told the audience Sunday afternoon, “the first time the mainstream institutions were linking with the alternative spaces (on the subject of) First Amendment rights in the arts.”

The link between the two very different art spaces was engineered by artist Joseph Kosuth, who sits on the Franklin Furnace board and created a 1990 installation about art and censorship for the Brooklyn Museum. Kosuth suggested that the museum host what eventually turned into “Too Shocking to Show.” The audience that goes to alternative spaces, after all, is relatively small; at the Brooklyn Museum, performance art could be introduced to a wider, less devotedly avant-garde audience. An audience that might be asking, “What’s it all about?”

So, what was it all about?

A brief rundown of topics covered Sunday would have to include the following: Heterosexual seduction. Broccoli in garlic sauce. The unlikely, but not impossible, association between the aforementioned broccoli and the aforementioned heterosexual seduction. (If you don’t believe the twain can meet, you have to see Scarlet O’s “Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” from which she performed excerpts for the Brooklyn crowd.) The joys and terrors of lesbian and gay relationships, respectively recounted by Hughes and Miller--the latter, in a performance that was verbally choreographed to the pulsing crescendo of Ravel’s “Bolero.” The trick of feeling comfortable in a less-than-perfect body, the sort displayed, virtually in the buff and with considerable elan, by Scarlet O.

The afternoon also saw Sapphire (the pen name of New York poet and performance artist Ramona Lofton) do a mesmerizing reading of “Wild Thing,” which is written from the viewpoint of a teen-age participant in the notorious Central Park “wilding” rape. While the youth’s rage, hatred and confusion figure large throughout the poem, its most controversial lines include a reference to “Christ” performing oral sex on a child. (Lofton/Sapphire has said that she was writing about the sexual abuse of children and had taken the reference from a real instance of such abuse by a priest.)

NEA spokeswoman Jill Collins declined to comment on “Too Shocking.”

But the museum’s director, Bob Buck, did comment on the NEA. Though the agency often seemed to take it on the chin Sunday, Buck insisted in a question-and-answer session after the show that it wasn’t really the bad guy. “We here at the museum feel very strongly that the National Endowment is as much a victim as we are,” Buck said.

Whether Sunday’s audience saw the NEA as victim or victimizer, they seemed to see the performance as daring, certainly, but not really “too shocking to show.”

“I loved it. I thought it should be funded,” said Rachael Star, a schoolteacher from Queens, though she expressed some “distaste” at the idea of making art out of a subject as heinous as the rape and beating of the jogger.

Harriet Haritos of Brooklyn, who said she and her husband have conservative taste in the arts, was nevertheless taken by the gentleness of Hughes’ performance. “She’s sneaky, in that her demeanor is not at all off-putting,” Haritos said. “I was thinking, ‘There’s a lesbian Garrison Keillor.’ ”

And then there was Bess Fox, also of Brooklyn, who at 83 confesses to being “prudish.” But she wound up enjoying most of “Too Shocking.” “We must encourage art,” she said, because out of that, “some wonders may come. Who knows?”