American Canvas: a roundtable on the 1997 NEA report

Brenson: When you talk about the way this book reminded you of the years under Soviet role, I assume that what you mean, along with the repetition of noble-sounding words that are not defined, is the book's view that art must serve some kind of social good and the notion that this social good must be sanctioned by the State.

Lisiewicz: Yes. I had a problem with this totalitarian attitude toward art, communicated silently through the book, even if it claims to speak on behalf of communities. I do believe that art should try to find ways to reach communities and different audiences, but it cannot happen just by saying this out loud. The discussion should start at a completely different level; it should be about how to make a change happen, about structures and mechanisms that define actual art functioning. Setting up the goals, even the most noble and beautiful ones, without a deep, thorough, and honest analysis turns everything into pure rhetoric, which is unproductive.

Brenson: The institutional art world is almost entirely left out of this book. Visual artists are the ones identified with the crisis in the endowment, but almost no visual artists were included in these meetings. And there are no critics, no curators, no art historians. The book takes swipes at institutions and museums all the way through while drawing a clear dichotomy between artists who work in and with the community and what institutions do. Why did the NEA essentially leave out artists? I find just in the question of language alone that that's a real lack, because when you come across the words of the performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, they have a poetry and concreteness that has an ability to convince. The artist's voice is almost completely left out here.

Kim: I think they were trying to distance themselves from the controversial artists. One of the articles that came out just after the book appeared [Andrew Ferguson, "An Era of Tiny Commotions," Time, October 27, 1997, 132] talked about Karen Finley and the chocolate and the sweet potato, and the NEA is trying to say, hey, we're not about that. We're about these other things and communities, and about artists who hook up with churches and serve soup.

Diaz: Malgorzata was pointing out that American Canvas has this utopian idealism behind it. When you're putting the blame on the artist, you're not going to invite him to your party. You don't want any anomalies when you're speaking about utopian ideals. They are trying to distance themselves from the visual arts because of things like Piss Christ, and they're putting the blame for the problems of the NEA on those specific instances. It's set up to be an internal conversation without many interruptions, and there's very little debate. There's very little discussion about the visual artist and his aesthetic skills. There isn't even any consideration given to how artists relate to the community. It's just assumed that they do. Right now I'm showing Karen Finley at my gallery in Texas. I have a problem with seeing how her work is supposed to relate to my community, yet I think it's meritorious work. What does a white, educated performance artist from New York have to do with poor Mexicans in the south side of San Antonio? Not much.