On the right, and into the American arts

In recent weeks, Gary Sinise, the co-founder of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, has been hitting the talk-show circuit to promote his campaign to provide school supplies for the U.S. military to distribute to Iraqi children.

But as he talks to the likes of conservative comedian Dennis Miller and conservative MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Sinise also has been pushing a broader agenda: his view that the American media are either burying or ignoring all the good news about the work of the American military in Iraq.

“The media concentrates on the negative things,” Sinise told Scarborough on a recent show, “and never, never on the positive things.”

Although Sinise emphasizes that he doesn’t see his Operation Iraqi Children (www.operationiraqichildren.org) as a political issue and has no wish to use his fame to “spout politics,” his involvement in the Iraqi cause is part of a burgeoning involvement of conservatives in the traditional liberal enclave of the American arts world. There’s also a notable recent interest in linking the arts to the military campaign in Iraq.

In April, the National Endowment for the Arts announced a new program called Operation Homecoming that would pair such authors as Tom Clancy and Mark Bowden with returning American servicemen from Iraq to encourage the members of the military to write about their personal wartime experiences. The NEA initiative is a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense. And Chicago-based Boeing Co., a major defense contractor, is the principal sponsor.

Sinise’s heartfelt support of the Iraqi military mission -- nurtured, he says, by his two recent visits to American troops stationed in Iraq -- flies in the face of the traditional stereotype of the liberal Hollywood actor. Sinise, whose film credits include “Forrest Gump,” “The Green Mile,” “The Big Bounce” and “Ransom,” has a different set of views.

“We were successful in removing a horrible dictator,” the actor said in an interview recently. “Griping and complaining about it a year later doesn’t serve a real purpose, in my opinion.”

Before Dana Gioia, a poet and former business executive, took over at the NEA, the notion of partnering with the Department of Defense would have seemed unlikely to the agency’s many conservative detractors. But as part of the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities program, the Department of Defense also has signed up as a $1-million underwriter of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s upcoming tour of “Macbeth.” With venues including gymnasiums and aircraft hangars, “Macbeth” will visit a projected 16 U.S. military bases over the next year or so -- beginning after Labor Day at Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery.

“It was very important to Mr. Gioia and to the Department of Defense that we went on the actual bases themselves,” said Kent Thompson, artistic director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. “There will be some very interesting audiences.”

Content restrictions? “Not yet, anyway” Thompson said.

Gioia, who has attracted a lot of praise from conservatives for his refashioning of the NEA, says he made the case for the Defense Department booking on the grounds that young military personnel are bombarded with officially sanctioned pop culture from rock musicians to Hollywood movies to cheerleaders. So why not a little Shakespeare?

“It’s symbolic,” Gioia said in an interview. “The Department of Defense hadn’t ever worked with the endowment before. It’s a reconciliation.”

Gioia has retained many of the NEA’s more traditional programs of support. But over the last year or so, he also has announced programs in which the NEA is not so much making grants to others as running cultural programming itself. That move was essential to calming a hitherto hostile conservative base.

For years, many conservatives have railed against the political leanings of the arts world and opposed the use of public money in arts funding. “The arts establishment is in thrall to left-wing political imperatives,” says Roger Kimball, managing editor of the New Criterion. “It’s a world that has taken as its official motto Andy Warhol’s observation that art is whatever you can get away with.... It shovels you between ennui and disgust.”

It’s axiomatic that much of the mainstream discourse in arts circles would be regarded as the language of the fringes in other fields.

Tony Kushner, venerated as one of the leading American playwrights by a plethora of critics and commentators, has described himself as a socialist writer greatly influenced by Marxist thinking. His recent play, “Homebody/Kabul,” is intensely critical of American foreign policy in the Middle East.

From the subversive political message behind the musical “Hairspray” to Michael Moore’s attack on the Bush team called “Fahrenheit 9/11,” it’s self-evident that in the contemporary arts world, a political liberal happily can float without running into too much debris.

As with Moore’s movie, opposition to the war in Iraq is common among artists.

“The hegemony that conservatives face in the arts field is very similar to what they face on college campuses,” says Tom Ashcraft, the former U.S. attorney for the western district of North Carolina and a frequent conservative columnist for the Charlotte Observer.

“It’s very lonely,” says Don Schwartz, a sculptor based in Connecticut who argues that the liberal dominance of the arts world is a result of liberals disliking economics and thus drifting to jobs in culture.

“It’s very intimidating to be a conservative in the arts. A lot of conservative artists give up.”

That would be just fine with many liberals.

Performance artist Tim Miller had a famous content-related battle with the NEA in the early 1990s. Miller was one of four artists whose individual performer fellowships were rescinded by the NEA after they were charged with obscenity.

“The NEA is now structurally totally predisposed toward mainstream, conservative culture,” Miller said in an interview. “The mere fact that there are no longer individual fellowships to artists -- except for writers -- has systematically made sure of that.”

“Part of the artistic enterprise involves developing a capacity to see things in a different way from yourself, so it tends to attract people on the liberal end of the political spectrum,” says Nick Rabkin, director of the Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago.

Rabkin says he runs into very few political conservatives in the course of his work -- and that’s the way it should be.

“Someone like George Bush sees rights and wrongs, blacks and whites,” Rabkin says. “Artists cannot view the world that way.”

Conservatives reject that view. “The distinction here,” Kimball says, “is between those who want to treat art as an aesthetic enterprise with its own rules of achievement and those who want to enlist art for a political imperative.”

Both Gioia and Sinise argue that creating an NEA partnership with the Department of Defense and raising money for supplies for Iraqi children are not so much political efforts as merely doing the right thing.

“I’m in touch on a daily basis with people in Iraq,” Sinise said.

“A big part of our effort is to extend the hands of friendship between American soldiers and the Iraqi people. There are millions of Iraqis who are happy that we are there and don’t want us to leave.

“This project is a great way to break down any barriers between the Iraqis and the soldiers. Why would anyone not support that?”

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Chris Jones is an arts reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.