O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : When Legal Tender Hits a Sore Spot

Decades ago, the American public thought of art as fancy-pants stuff, a plaything for flute-voiced ladies in white gloves and stuffed-shirt millionaires. Then along came abstract art--obviously a joke, if not a Commie plot. If those bohemians really knew how to paint, they wouldn’t waste their time with such nonsense.

Well, we like to think we’ve grown up culturally since those bad old days. But the four-year firestorm raging over the appropriateness of National Endowment for the Arts support for provocative contemporary-art projects has brought with it a return to the hazy generalizations, snap judgments and smug yahoo-ism of yore.

During the controversy over Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” for example, the vast majority of the public seemed to believe that the work was a vat of urine with a crucifix in it, rather than--as was actually the case--a huge photograph of a crucifix seen through a luminous golden haze.

Few, if any, news accounts mentioned any of the reasons put forward in the art press for considering the work as a meaningful art object with a valid view of contemporary religious practice.

Last week, news accounts of some unusual doings in San Diego prompted a similar outcry and a similar disregard (or ignorance?) of the reasons artists make art.

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Several messages apparently still haven’t gotten through, even to the intelligent and educated segment of the general public. One is that political issues are properly within the province of art-making; another is that valid works of art can consist solely of ideas and actions--providing that they are original and genuinely thought-provoking.

On July 23, three artists--Elizabeth Sisco, David Avalos and Louis Hock--began handing out $10 bills to groups of undocumented workers at a day-laborers’ site.

The project, “Arte Reembolso/Art Rebate,” was partly financed by $1,200 from the NEA--part of a $250,000 grant received by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1989 for “Dos Ciudades/Two Cities,” a multiyear series of exhibitions about relations between San Diego and Tijuana. (According to the terms of the grant, an additional $750,000 had to be raised from other sources.)

By publicly linking three simmering political issues--NEA funding, taxation and new proposals for deterring border-jumpers--the artists tapped some very raw nerves.

On July 31, a page one San Diego Union headline trumpeted, “Migrants Given Taxpayers’ Cash.” Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Escondido) indulged in a spot of political grandstanding by releasing a letter--ostensibly to the NEA--to the media, in which he called the cash giveaway a “contemptuous use of taxpayers’ hard-earned income.”

In fact, the rebate project--one of 37 works in “La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience,” a joint project with the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego--has nothing to do with belittling taxpayers’ earnings.

On the contrary, the piece was intended to emphasize the ways that undocumented immigrant workers contribute to the U.S. economy.

The artists took no fees and spent only about $500 of their $5,000 commission on supplies. The remaining 450 $10 bills, signed by each of the artists, are being given to immigrant workers in a series of giveaways in various San Diego-area locations. (Workers sign for each bill as proof that the transactions actually happened, but they are not asked to produce I.D.)

The point is that the money will circulate through the economy as the workers purchase taxable and non-taxable items. As the artists note in an explanatory bilingual flyer distributed to the workers, “Regardless of your immigration status, if you shop, you pay taxes. Period.”

In a story last week, the New York Times reported that recipients of one of the rebates immediately exchanged the bills for tacos and soft drinks. The reporter erred, however, in saying the workers were “recycling their artworks into the economy.”

The “artwork” in this project is not a signed bill or any other tangible object. Rather, it is an open-ended chain of actions and reactions involving many people.

The piece begins with the money dispersal and continues when people find one of the $10 bills in their purses or wallets, or read about the event in the paper, or watch a news story about it on TV.

These people’s reactions, as they begin to contemplate (or question) the ripple effect of the workers’ contribution to the U.S. economy, are a key part of the piece.

In recent phone interviews, the artists explained that they are updating artists’ traditional use of public space, using the “informational space” of TV as a model.

Rather than sculpt a statue of a famous leader on horseback for a public park, Avalos said, they are “exploring how civic imagination operates in public space--on streets and also in the media.”

So why did the artists sign the bills?

“It was the only thing standing still long enough to put our signature on,” Avalos said. “We go out into the streets, people disperse, and the money moves into circulation.”

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The rebate project leaped onto the news pages with impeccable timing, just days before Gov. Pete Wilson announced a program intended to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of unlawful residents and to cut off health and education benefits to illegal immigrants.

Wilson also seeks to to use the North American Free Trade Agreement--which would liberalize U.S.-Mexican trade restrictions--as a carrot to urge Mexico to limit immigration into the United States.

The artists also link worker migration to international trade, but in a radically different way.

They state in their handout that immigrants are “vital players in an economic community indifferent to national borders.” To bolster their view, the artists cite such sources as RAND Corp. reports on immigration.

One quote they include, from the July 13, 1992, issue of Business Week magazine, states that there are about 11 million immigrants in the U.S. work force, “earning $240 billion a year and paying more than $90 billion in taxes . . . outweighing by far the $5 billion that immigrants receive in welfare.”

Politically motivated criticism of the “Arte Reembolso” has centered on the audacity of giving away money that was--in part--received from a government agency. Yet the use of government money is central to the meaning and impact of the piece.

As Avalos said in a recent phone conversation, “It’s really just recirculating money among taxpayers, so it has to be tax dollars. Artists are not separate from the taxpaying community.” In fact, Avalos suggested, the San Diego Union headline might have made more sense had it read, “Taxpayers Given Taxpayers’ Cash.”

“As taxpayers,” he continued, “we need to ask ourselves why was it there was barely a whimper for all the billions flushed down the rat hole of the savings-and-loan bailout. . . . (What) if we started talking about the vitality of people who are willing to come to this country, and the benefit to us if we invest in their health, education and welfare?”

Other critics of the project have suggested that the three artists were wrong to provoke further NEA backlash with such a controversial piece at a time when the future of the NEA remains shaky.

Apparently compounding the situation, the NEA wasn’t even aware of the content of the work it was indirectly funding. (The piece was commissioned years after the grant was applied for, and the museum didn’t know what form the piece would take until it was completed.)

This view, however, seriously misconstrues the way artists work and the responsibility they have to be true to their beliefs and working methods.

If the artists had self-censored their project to be more publicly acceptable to a granting agency, their work would have been dishonest--surely the worst quality any work of art can embody. They also would have been tacitly supporting the notion that politicians should be determining artistic merit.

Artists engaged with social issues cannot be compared to elected officials trying to appeal to voters by offering something for everyone. Political expediency is actually the polar opposite of contemporary artists’ overriding aims: to betray the very institutions that foster them, and to undermine the very notion of a single central authority.

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Kathryn Kanjo, assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, remarked last week that she doesn’t believe the “Art Rebate” piece exists “just to be daring. It exists to offer an opportunity for counter-debate to what is often seen as a one-sided argument about migrant workers.”

As she confirmed, the three artists were commissioned specifically on the basis of their provocative art and strong critical reputations.

One of their most memorable pieces dates to 1988, just before Super Bowl XXII came to San Diego.

A poster reading “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation”--a grimly ironic variation of the city’s cheerful promotional slogan--was carried on the back of 100 buses (half the city’s fleet), as if it were a routine paid advertisement.

On either side of the central image--a U.S. Border Patrol agent handcuffing two men being removed from a bus--were photographs of the hands of a dishwasher and a chambermaid. Adding insult to injury, from the city’s point of view, the project was partly financed by an art fund supported by San Diego hotel-room taxes.

Interestingly, this piece resulted in angry editorials from San Diego TV and radio stations, much as “Art Rebate” was decried by The Times in an Aug. 6, 1993 editorial entitled “Bad Show.”

“When a politician says something, it gets on the front page. If you’re an artist, you end up on the art pages,” Hock said last week. “Doing a piece that’s provocative provides a means of contesting the illegitimate claims of politicians relative to undocumented workers . . . in the same context” as the news stories.

Added Sisco: “Our project has scored a point, because every single article mentions that the purpose of the piece is to show that undocumented workers contribute to society. (The message) is getting out there. That’s a line you haven’t heard (before), and it’s being said over and over again.”