by Cynthia Carr
At this point, no one at the NEA had seen the art to be exhibited. So, on October 30, Frohnmayer sent Drew Oliver, director of the NEA’s museum program, to New York to look at slides of the work selected by Goldin and to obtain a copy of the catalog text. Artists Space still didn’t have all the work. Before Oliver arrived, Wyatt had gone through the material they did have with the lawyer on her board, who said that the only image that might be problematic was a Hujar photo of a naked baby and advised that they track down the parents. Then Oliver arrived to have a look. Wyatt described him as “pleasant” and “unsurprised by everything.” However, that wasn’t what Frohnmayer conveyed in his book about running the agency, Leaving Town Alive. Oliver “reported back that the images were clearly explicit (that is, they whacked you between the eyes so you wouldn’t miss the point), reflected anger toward society about AIDS, and had some nudity,” wrote Frohnmayer. “Drew thought that a disclaimer was necessary, because the material was cruder and potentially more problematic than Mapplethorpe’s photos.”
Frohnmayer called Wyatt just hours after Oliver left Artists Space to request that the Endowment’s name be disassociated not just from the catalog but also from the whole of “Witnesses.” He wanted both the removal of the credit line from all signage and future press releases and a disclaimer stating, “The opinions, findings and recommendations included herein do not reflect the view of the National Endowment for the Arts.” Wyatt thought that was like saying, we don’t approve of this show, which we had nothing to do with. It didn’t make sense to her, so she refused. But she tried to work out some new disclaimer language that Frohnmayer would accept.
On November 2, she called him with her counterproposal, and Frohnmayer asked her to voluntarily relinquish the grant. She said she would have to consult her board. Frohnmayer then decided that “not acting, particularly when Susan Wyatt had dumped this steaming, writhing mess on my desk, would be a declaration of weakness.” So the next day, when Wyatt was again in Washington for a meeting, he had the NEA legal counsel hand her a letter declaring that “certain texts, photographs and other representations in the exhibition may offend the language of the FY 1990 Appropriation Act”—in other words, the Helms amendment. Frohnmayer acknowledged that the grant for “Witnesses” was made in fiscal year 1989 and therefore not subject to the amendment, but, he wrote, “Given our recent review, and the current political climate, I believe that the use of Endowment funds to exhibit or publish this work is in violation of the spirit of the Congressional directive.… On this basis, I believe that the Endowment’s funds may not be used to exhibit or publish this material. Therefore Artists Space should relinquish the Endowment’s grant for the exhibition.” In addition, he asked Artists Space to “employ the following disclaimer in appropriate ways,” for example, on all its press material: “The National Endowment for the Arts has not supported this exhibition or its catalog.” The Artists Space board met on November 7 to vote unanimously not to relinquish the grant. Not voluntarily, at least. They hadn’t yet received a penny of it.
David, meanwhile, knew nothing of these machinations. He’d signed the waiver accepting financial responsibility for any “damages” caused by his essay, and he thought that was the end of it.
On Monday, November 6, the Los Angeles Times broke the story that the NEA wanted its grant money back. The exhibition was “said to include homoerotic sexually explicit pictures and text materials that criticize a variety of public officials.” David was not named, nor was he aware of this story appearing in Los Angeles.
So he was blindsided on Tuesday when he got a call from the New York Daily News. Was he aware, a reporter asked, that the NEA was about to rescind a grant for the “Witnesses” show because of his essay? The ostensible reason, said the reporter, was that “it’s too political.” The reporter asked, what’s in your essay? David spoke to him at length but would not give him the inflammatory “cannibal” sound bite. Later that night, Susan Wyatt called him. “She tells me not to speak to press—keep focus on show,” he wrote in his summary of events. “I relate reporters remarks mention LA Times story she says story is untrue none of it has anything to do with my writing—it’s the show itself maybe erotic stuff.” Wyatt points out that if she said this, it was because she assumed that the NEA had accepted her proposal to separate the catalog from the grant. Therefore the catalog could not be the problem.
That same night, the city elected a new mayor, David Dinkins, first African American to hold that office. The next morning, November 8, David went out to buy a Daily News, thinking that certainly that story would overwhelm a little item about an art exhibit. He was shocked to see that the Daily News had done a wraparound supplement on the election and beneath that was the regular front page, blaring “CLASH OVER AIDS EXHIBIT.” The story quoted Susan Wyatt saying that she’d alerted the NEA, concerned that Jesse Helms “might not particularly like the artwork.” Then the piece described David’s “photo essay,” conflating The Sex Series with the “Postcards” essay. “His photos include heterosexual and homosexual acts with accompanying text that describes O’Connor as a ‘fat cannibal in a black skirt’ and rips the Catholic Church’s stance forbidding teaching about safe sex practices,” the story said. (The misquote of the “cannibal” line indicates that this reporter did not have the essay but probably had a source inside the NEA.) The only quote from David was “I understand the gallery’s fear. But if the grants have already been given out, is the law now also retroactive?”
That day, Frohnmayer issued a statement announcing that he would withhold payment of the grant to Artists Space: “What had been presented to the Endowment by the Artists Space application was an artistic exhibition. We find, however, in reviewing the material now to be exhibited, that a large portion of the content is political rather than artistic in nature.” This statement did not mention David or any other artist by name. Nor did it mention the catalog. But when a reporter from the New York Times called him, Frohnmayer declared, “There are specific derogatory references in the show to Senator Helms, Congressman Dannemeyer and Cardinal O’Connor which makes it political.” When Wyatt spoke to the reporter, she clarified that these references were not in the show, just in the catalog—“strong statements written by the photographer David Wojnarowicz.”
When that story ran on November 9, the show hadn’t even been installed, and the catalog, if printed, was not yet available. David would not tell the reporters calling him what was in the essay. He had started recording his phone calls with them and others apropos the controversy. Phil Zwickler also came by that day and filmed him as he talked on the phone. His emotions ranged from rage to consternation to sorrow. Occasionally Zwickler panned over to the television, where the Berlin Wall was coming down.
Cardinal O’Connor released a statement that day: “Had I been consulted, I would have urged very strongly that the National Endowment not withdraw its sponsorship on the basis of criticism against me personally. I do not consider myself exempt from or above criticism by anyone.”
Wyatt called David with the news. She’d been telling the press that she was sure David would be happy about the cardinal’s gesture.
“I find his benevolence questionable,” he told her. “If he would completely reverse the church’s suppression of safer-sex information and back off from abortion clinics, I would extend my appreciation to this man. But I think it’s a political tactic, and I won’t be fooled for a second.”
Wyatt told him that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat from New York, would get up on the floor of the Senate to support Artists Space but had to see David’s text first.
David replied, “You think he’s going to get up in support of—”
“Yes I do,” Wyatt said.
“Those quotes?”
“I do.”
“About Jesse Helms?”
“I absolutely, honestly do.”
“It’s hard for me to fathom,” David told her. “They couldn’t get behind a bunch of
photographs. Why would they get behind something that is more direct?”
Wyatt called him back later that evening to thank him for challenging her. “It helped me,” she said. “It made me think about why a politician has to read a text before he can support freedom of speech.”
Cookie Mueller died of AIDS on November 10, 1989, at the age of forty.
On Sunday, November 12, the New York Post, a right-leaning tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, ran an editorial titled “Offensive Art Exhibit”—about the show no one had yet seen. In high dudgeon, the Post declared that funding anything that criticized Cardinal O’Connor was like funding work that glorified Hitler. David clipped this and wrote along the edge: “Just one of many articles and editorials distorting issues.” Later he used the editorial in a lithograph, printing a voodoo doll on top of it.
On Monday, Frohnmayer told the press that he regretted using the word “political” when describing the problem with the Artists Space grant. His reason, more precisely, was that between the application for the grant and the installation of the show (not yet seen), there’d been “an erosion of the artistic focus.”
The next day, conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein informed the White House that, because the NEA had canceled the grant to the “Witnesses” show, he would decline the National Medal of Arts, which he was scheduled to receive that Friday,
Meanwhile, David was getting increasingly frustrated with Artists Space. “Tired of restraint of Susan while bigots speak unrestrained,” he wrote in his notes. He thought they should fight the NEA. Legally, they had a case. Wyatt said Artists Space did consider a lawsuit, though she did not mention this to David. The lawyer advising her warned that it could take years and drain the organization’s resources. Also, the NEA was an important funder for them.
David hadn’t gone into much detail in his essay about what the “fat cannibal” had actually done. He decided he better get the facts out. David went to see Ann Northrop at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, an agency serving LGBT youth. Northrop worked there as an AIDS educator for teenagers in the metropolitan area. She was also very active in ACT UP, which was then planning its Stop the Church action aimed at Cardinal O’Connor and Catholic conservatism. David wanted to talk to Northrup about the campaign against the church, and they had a long conversation. David also consulted with ACT UP compatriots Jim Eigo and Richard Elovich. He then created “The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet” with specific information on the villains—not just O’Connor, Helms, and Dannemeyer but also Mayor Ed Koch and others. He followed that with “Additional Statistics and Facts,” much of it about the Catholic Church. As someone who had been a sexually active teen, David was especially incensed about the archdiocese’s lobbying against teaching about safe sex in public high schools. As someone who had been a hustler, David was outraged that at Covenant House, the church’s safe haven for teenage runaways, residents could not get safe-sex information or condoms.
On Wednesday, November 15, Frohnmayer came to Artists Space to meet with thirty-five members of the arts community, including Nan Goldin and David. He was one of several to read a statement to Frohnmayer. It said, in part:
What is going on here is not just an issue that concerns the “art world”; it is not just about a bunch of words or images in the “art world” context—it is about the legalized and systematic murder of homosexuals and their legislated silence; it is about the legislated invisibility and silencing of people with AIDS and a denial of the information necessary for those and other people to make informed decisions concerning safety within their sexual activities.… I will not personally allow you to step back from your original reason for rescinding the grant, which was that my essay and the show had a political rather than artistic tone. You are now attempting to jump from one position to another … hoping to come up with one that sticks. It is obvious that you are in bed with Helms and Dannemeyer, and that your ignorance or agenda, both of which I find appalling, are clearly revealed by your actions.
Frohnmayer was told by others: “You have politicized the NEA.” “You are a coward.” “You have sold out the artists of this country; you should resign.” Near the end of the meeting, David confronted him again, asking, “What do you think of men who love men and women who love women? What do you think of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women?”
Frohnmayer told him, “I refuse to answer that; that is private.” The new chair of the NEA was a former chair of the Oregon Arts Commission and a Portland lawyer. Though appointed by President George H. W. Bush, he was no right-winger. He was more like the new recruit sent to the front, taking a few bullets and endangering those around him. Under Frohnmayer, the NEA began trying to anticipate and parry critiques from the far right—and learned the hard way that there was no appeasing them.
Few on the “art” side of the culture war saw what was beginning here, while the far right found a uniquely exploitable world: skilled professionals making highly charged imagery they could take out of context. The right-wing frothers soon learned that, yes, nuance could be crushed, intimidation would work, and facts did not matter. Right-wing media would get the lies out unchallenged. (Early fomenters of crisis were the Washington Times and the New York City Tribune, both owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church.) Meanwhile, the Frohnmayers and Wyatts of the art world thought they could reason with the right, thought truth would change perceptions. They thought this was an episode, not the beginning of a train wreck. But David, with his rebelliousness and his passion and his hair-trigger temperament and his illness, which had made him even more sensitive to the total blockage in society—he got it immediately.
That day at Artists Space, Frohnmayer got his first look at the show, scheduled to open the next day. “It was a bleak and disturbing exhibition,” he wrote. “One could find some penises and some scatological language, but the intent was far from prurient. It wasn’t as crude as Drew Oliver had described, but more oppressive and hopeless and depressing.”
That night David went to Cookie’s funeral at St. Mark’s Church, an event that went on for hours because so many people wanted to speak about her.
The next day, November 16, Frohnmayer restored the grant, specifying that the money could not be used for the catalog. Some fifteen hundred people mobbed Artists Space that evening for the opening of “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” while Art Positive, a collective organized to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts, demonstrated against the Helms amendment out on the street.
David did not attend.
Allan Frame, who had photographs in the show, said, “The whole fanfare was about him so I thought, ‘Wow—he’s not even there.’ I went home that night and called him. I’m glad I did. He was just alone at home. Nobody had called.” Frame had had little contact with David since directing Sounds in the Distance.
But David had considered attending. Phil Zwickler came back to document the day, and David told him he’d been up all night finishing a personal statement about the controversy and “The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet” to slip into the catalogs. He could drop that off before the opening, but realized there might be cameras around that night. He didn’t want his face out there. As he told Zwickler, “If a nutcase like Dannemeyer can occupy a position in governing this country, imagine what’s walking around the streets.”
Besides, he had another statement to finish, this one to the Artists Space board, detailing his distress over its agreement to separate the catalog from the show for funding purposes, thus severing his words from contact with taxpayer dollars. He didn’t know that Wyatt had suggested this herself back in October. He thought that Artists Space had given Frohnmayer a way out by agreeing to it. If the board had said no, David wrote in his statement, “[Frohnmayer] would have had no choice but to agree to fund the entire show with catalogue included thus sending a message across the board that we still retain our civil rights and our constitutional rights even in the face of possible loss of funding.” H
e delivered it to Artists Space the next day.
On November 22, conservative columnist Ray Kerrison compared David and his supposed religious bigotry to Louis Farrakhan (leader of the Nation of Islam and a notorious anti-Semite) in the New York Post. The same day, in his syndicated column in the Post, Patrick Buchanan attacked David, the NEA, Frohnmayer, and “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” which he described as “a New York exhibit of decadent art, i.e. photos of dying and sometimes naked homosexuals.” Buchanan also invoked Farrakhan, who’d been condemned by liberals for calling Judaism “a gutter religion.” Now none of those liberals would stand up to David and “the militant homosexuals’ rhetoric of hatred against Roman Catholicism.”
David worried about the impact this firestorm would have on his retrospective in Normal. That day, he composed a three-page single-spaced letter to the dean of Illinois State University’s College of Fine Arts, explaining why it was important to him that “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell” be included in the “Tongues of Flame” catalog.
“Have you ever woken up one morning and read in the daily paper that you have lost your constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of your privacy?” he wrote. “I did—within the last four years the Supreme Court made such a decision in regards to homosexuals.” He laid out facts and statistics about AIDS, about the Catholic Church’s stance, which he regarded as “murderous,” and about the actions of Helms and Dannemeyer, which had also cost people their lives. He did not consider his outrage over these issues to be radical. He knew that the dean and Illinois State University might now be under pressure because of the NEA funding for “Tongues of Flame.” “I sympathize with what that pressure feels like, in which our individual characters are called into question in a political climate that seems to care little about the basic issues of truth contained in what I might have to say.… I would appreciate your help in supporting my right of free speech under the First Amendment.”