ART : COMMENTARY : Faceless Critics, Harmless Art : ‘Corporal Politics,’ an exhibit of works showing the shattered corpus, is a telling metaphor of the political right’s assault

It’s pure coincidence, but the simultaneous showing of a federally terrorized exhibition at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass., and last week’s inauguration of a new President of the United States can’t help but offer a flicker of hope to those who had come to fear for the future of the arts in this nation.

The new President, you know. The MIT exhibition, you might not. Titled “Corporal Politics,” and featuring the works of eight artists, the show looks at 26 paintings, sculptures and installations whose subject is the way in which the human body today is the site of extraordinary social and cultural tumult.

A topic of considerable interest to numerous American and European artists for many years now, art about the body has surely been shaped or inflected by a host of monumental, psychically destabilizing developments that, in recent decades, have converged into a critical mass.

Among them are the titanic struggles over abortion rights; the dense thicket of moral issues surrounding ascendant scientific and medical technologies, such as genetic engineering, organ transplants, artificial insemination and virtual reality, and the wrenchingly personal and numbingly global traumas being visited by the AIDS epidemic.

These and other, similar fissures now fan out through the bedrock of our social landscape. Like the slow grinding of tectonic plates, they regularly cause tremors, both large and small.

These colossal shake-ups have found a variety of artistic forms. At MIT, the eight artists chosen for the show have been assembled because they all employ, to one degree or another, imagery of fragmentation of the human body. The shattering of the corpus functions as a visual metaphor.

For example, Rona Pondick embeds grimacing sets of rubber teeth in small, irregular spheres of bubble-gum-pink wax. Annette Messager suspends from strings hundreds of small, independent black-and-white photographs of male and female body parts to compose a jumbled, flattened globe.

Lila LoCurto and William Outcault encase a stack of four video monitors, each showing a different segment of the body, inside a chain-link fence, which is further encased inside a big, plastic bubble. Robert Gober silk-screens scratchy white drawings on black backgrounds to create “Male and Female Genital Wallpaper,” a domestication of bathroom graffiti that creates a dreamscape environment.

The sexual imagery in Gober’s wallpaper is generally believed to have been a principal fuse that lit an explosive charge last May. “Corporal Politics” had been recommended for a $10,000 grant by a peer-review panel of the National Endowment for the Arts. The panel’s recommendation was approved by the NEA’s presidentially appointed oversight committee, the National Council on the Arts, on a nearly unanimous vote.

Unilaterally, however, Anne-Imelda Radice, then acting chairwoman of the NEA, overruled them both.

Radice’s explanation for denying the grant was blunt: The proposed exhibition “did not measure up” to standards of artistic excellence. What those standards might be she did not say, but the omission was beside the point; you would have been hard-pressed to find a single soul who believed her.

Radice, who resigned Tuesday, is a government bureaucrat with no artistic credentials to make such a judgment. By contrast, Gober is an artist whose work has been regularly displayed in important museum shows--including a solo exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the first time an American artist has been so honored.

Normally, gales of laughter would have greeted Radice’s absurd declaration, but here they were muffled by the horrific ramifications of her deed. It was clear to all that, with this grant denial (and another that similarly overturned recommendations for a grant to Virginia Commonwealth University), federal support for the arts had been converted into a frankly partisan, political tool.

George Bush had been battered on the national scene by archconservative firebrand Patrick J. Buchanan, whose campaign to unseat the incumbent was led by his feverish attacks on the NEA. White House conservatives, determined to remove the agency as an issue in Bush’s reelection campaign, had maneuvered Radice into position. She might not have had artistic credentials for overturning grants, but she did have impressively political ones.

Radice’s assault against the MIT show was among the most outrageous of countless actions that had torn apart the NEA during the previous two years. Throughout the battle, one voice of impassioned reason could regularly be heard emanating from Washington. Poet Donald Hall, whom Bush had appointed to the National Council in 1990, was among the few council members to vigorously challenge and protest the political takeover of the hitherto-independent arts agency.

Now Hall has written a brief but extraordinary introductory essay to the catalogue for “Corporal Politics,” which is being published this week. It’s the capper to a spate of remarkable responses to the Bush Administration’s political manipulation of the NEA. These have included a $7,500 protest award to the List Center from the celebrated young playwright Jon Robin Baitz, himself the recipient of an NEA grant; an unsolicited gift of $10,000 from the rock band Aerosmith, and the protest refusal of a $39,000 NEA grant from the venerable independent Boston publishing house Beacon Press.

Beacon also joined with MIT to publish the contested exhibition’s handsome 70-page catalogue. It includes insightful essays by UC Berkeley professor of history Thomas Laqueur; the show’s curator, Helaine Posner, and List Director Katy Kline. Still, Hall’s is the zinger.

The decision to invite the outspoken National Council member to contribute an essay was inspired. I haven’t seen the show, but the catalogue is evidence enough that the List Center responded to the brutal political attack without intimidation, recasting it instead as an opportunity for enlightened response.

Donald Hall pulls no punches. His essay, pointedly titled “Art and Its Enemies,” starts out with this scorched-earth sentence: “In 1990 fundamentalist preachers (aka fundraisers) joined with bigoted politicians and columnists to attack the National Endowment for the Arts.”

He goes on to name names. Wickedly describing Buchanan, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the Rev. Donald E. Wildmon and columnist George F. Will as “intellectual capons,” he disgustedly--and with a refreshing blast of common sense--observes that their claims of outrage over supposed NEA funding of “pornographic art” are disingenuous nonsense.

The indisputable proof? “Nothing the NEA has sponsored would sell for a nickel on the remainder table of your neighborhood porn shop.” Connoisseurs know what they’re looking at, in other words, whether art or porn.

By sharp contrast, the aforementioned gentlemen--together with political commentators Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Calvin Thomas and James J. Kilpatrick, all of whom have weighed in with condemnatory observations about the operation of the NEA--are not artistic people for whom the arts are at the center of the examined life. They’re political people. It’s politics, not art, to which they’ve devoted their lives.

Which is fine, as long as they don’t then set themselves up as authorities on subjects about which they know virtually nothing. These folks will yap on furiously about the horrors of a plastic crucifix submerged in urine or a woman’s body smeared with chocolate or an exhibition of photographs of naked men, but I’d be willing to bet you that almost none of them has actually seen the works of art about which they’re so pleased to pontificate.

I don’t mean they haven’t read descriptions, seen pictures in magazines or taken phone calls about those works of art. I mean they haven’t actually gone to the galleries, museums and artists’ spaces where they’ve been shown, haven’t compared what they’ve seen to countless other works of art from global history, haven’t spent years thinking about the complex ways in which, as Hall puts it, “art extends human consciousness, exploring difficult feelings, making public our grief and our fear, our insecurity and our pride, our sexuality and our fear of death.”

Instead, they rant, blithely unaware that, as Hall continues, “art upsets us in the cause of expanding and extending human consciousness.” They don’t know that, because art is not what these folks do. Politics is.

“Abolition of (federal) support for the arts is the capons’ true agenda,” Hall writes, and of course he’s correct. Yet public approval of federal support for the arts is vast. Even after two years of trumped-up arts-bashing, a 1992 Harris Poll showed that 60% of Americans still favored federal support for the arts. That the capons know they can’t hope to come even close to winning their political argument on its merits just meant that another, less forthright strategy had to be undertaken.

That strategy led to the politicized takeover of the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Arts. Like George Bush with a hostile Congress, Radice thus faced an American public that was opposed to the political agenda for the arts that she represented. So she followed George’s proven lead: She used her veto power, overturning grants.

Hall is particularly sharp in his excoriation of Radice, deftly dismantling her uninformed observations about art in a free society and exposing how these utterances actually represent the political manipulations in which she has been engaged. It’s a terrific performance, and one that we can only hope will stand as an example for other, more timid members of the National Council on the Arts.

By the end of this year, 10 of the 25 seats on the National Council will be vacant, their six-year terms waiting to be filled by men and women of distinction in the visual, literary and performing arts. Perhaps President Clinton can take a cue from the tremors registered in the proliferation of art that concerns itself with the human body, and find a way to clone Donald Hall. Failing that, let’s hope his new appointees will at least pay close attention to “Art and Its Enemies.”

“Corporal Politics,” MIT List Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, Mass., through Feb. 14.