Angry citizens speak out: take this art and shove it

Insight on the News, August 21, 1995 by Eleanor Kennelly

Aformer Cambridge, Mass., city councilman removed two dildos from an art display at the City Hall Annex. For that, he nearly went to jail. Citizens in Kansas City, Kan., erupted in anger last year when stick-figure statues of sexually aroused men were displayed in the City Hall lobby. Officials draped the offending parts with garbage bags. In Washington, students at the University of the District of Columbia protested the school's proposal to spend $1.6 million to acquire feminist artist Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, a massive installation depicting women's genitalia on plates.

Local disputes about public art are more frequent and more hostile than they once were, say observers. People for the American Way, a liberal watchdog organization that began to track public-art disputes in 1991, announced in March that art is "under siege" at schools, in malls and in workplaces across America. The organization describes a "rising censorship success rate" in a report titled "Artistic Freedom Under Attack, 1995," which found that citizens managed to remove disputed artwork or limit access to it in more than 80 percent of 104 documented cases last year.

Leaders of such challenges bridle at the accusation of censorship, even if they agree that tension about bad art has escalated nationwide. "It's not censorship," says James Cooper, director of the 15-year-old Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., an organization that has emerged as a leader in the movement among art professionals who say they want to restore standards and values to art. "The issue is quality. The issue is aesthetics. The issue is, is it good art and does my community want it?"

Ever since controversial photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano kicked off a firestorm over publicly financed art in 1989, many artists have deliberately tested the boundaries of community standards. Today, more and more citizens are expressing their distaste for the outre, and spontaneous protests have become the vehicle for their outrage. In Cambridge, for example, Councilman William Walsh fielded 14 complaints in one hour, prompting him to act.

Not that spontaneous protests have long-lasting effects. Walsh returned the dildos to the City Hall display, and the exhibit was restored within a day, with screens to shield the work and a sign warning of lurid content. Artist Hans Evers sued for "malicious de-struction of property." Walsh, who refused to plead guilty despite a judge's advice to do so, was tried and acquitted in April. In Kansas City, officials removed the plastic bags from Richard Bay's stick figures -- one of which was described as a "foot-long penis sticking straight out of a 4-foot man" -- when the American Civil Liberties Union objected to censorship.

But art controversies increasingly become legal disputes, according to Marjorie Heins, director of the ACLU's 4-year-old Art Censorship Project, who notes that the organization is handling 20 such cases. One pending ACLU suit originated in a small building -- part golf shop, part public art gallery -- located in Baton Rouge, La. The gallery features local artists. Most of its funding comes from the Baton Rouge Recreation and Park Commission. About a year ago, the commission received complaints about two drawings by Roberta Cohen: Confronting Your Fears showed a male figure with an erect penis strangling a woman; The Telephone Call depicted male and female figures in bed watching a naked man fly.

The artist described her pictures as a protest against family violence. Park officials and others considered them lewd. When Cohen refused to take down the offending drawings, the park closed the gallery until the exhibit was removed. Cohen, in turn, sued the commission in federal court for violation of her First Amendment rights and in state court for breach of contract. The federal lawsuit was dismissed, but the case still is pending in state court. So far, Baton Rouge has spent $15,000 defending itself. "The park's intent was never to sponsor avant-garde art that pushes the envelope of public sensitivity," explains Louann Greco, attorney for the commission.

The same battle lines drawn again and again in local disputes show: Modern artists imagine no truth besides their own invention, complain critics. Art is what its creator declares art to be, respond artists. Yet artists working on public projects used to feel a sense of responsibility to the community: Art should enhance public life, and artists should take seriously the power of their work to influence cultural life. Some recent artistic standoffs seem to be a rough articulation of a growing public expectation: Expression and responsibility should be tied together again.

Why has the public exorcism of private demons become de rigueur? According to art critic Robert Hughes, the "culture of therapeutics" has given any self-described victim, or political message-maker, a claim to public attention. After homoerotic photographer Mapplethorpe became a cause celebre, he spawned thousands of eager imitators, most with far less technical ability, whose subsidized work might show up at the local mall. Shock art is standard fare in museum shows such as the Whitney Museum of Art Biennial, supposedly a showcase for cutting-edge talent but increasingly a predictable survey of New York art-world orthodoxy. The last exhibit, which closed in June, included a photographic self-portrait of Catherine Opie in which her chest is tattooed with the word pervert, her arms are studded with 46 syringes and her head is concealed by a full-face leather mask.