Whitney Biennial Watching, June 27, 1989

This year's incarnation of the Whitney Biennial is the snooziest in memory. (Yawn.) The only real controversy that the Academy Awards of the art world aroused was the possibility that Francesc Torres's video-installation Oikonomos would be pulled from the show.

The Spanish-born artist fashioned his piece from a 20th century replica of the Zeus From Cape Artemision, which he made to wield a baseball bat, sport a tiny video monitor dangling from its genitals, and hold up a Plexiglas screen on which video images are projected. The Biennial opened on April 27 and on May 11 the lobby gallery housing Oikonomos was closed for seven days. During that time, Torres's embellishments were removed at the insistence of the statue's owner - the Metropolitan Museum. When the gallery reopened, the bat and video monitor lay at the king of the gods' feet, and a photograph of the installation as the artist intended it had been hung.

The work offended the Met not for its oblique presentation of economic disparity in contemporary New York, but for its apparent insolence. Dietrich von Bothmer, chairman of the Met's department of Greek and Roman art, imperiously proclaimed that "universally acknowledged masterpieces of ancient art should be treated with the respect they deserve."

It's a strange assertion, considering that until recently the Met's collection of over 2000 disintegrating casts was housed in a storeroom under the West Side Highway. Since 1975, 273 casts have been loaned to the Queens Museum, which initiated a restoration project - and loaned the bronze cast of Zeus to Torres. (Von Bothmer, by the way, was at the center of the Met's embarrassing series of assertions and retractions about alleged improprieties - and still unresolved ambiguities - in its 1974 acquisition of the ancient Greek masterwork known as the Euphronios Krater.)

Stranger still is von Bothmer's fetishization of the Met's copy of the famed Zeus. He implied that the Whitney's photograph of the piece with bat in hand is an infringement of copyright, a notion attorneys disparage. Art lawyer Barbara Hoffman pointed out that "for the exact-scale reproduction of a work in the public domain [such as Zeus] to meet the conditions of copyright would require that complex difficulties [involved in reproducing it] be overcome...The copyright laws are intended to reward originality and creativity."

Despite von Bothmer's bullying, by the time you read this, Torres's installation will have been returned to its original state. Thank Fort Worth collector David H. Cline for loaning the Whitney another copy of the ancient bronze. (The Biennial will be on view through July 9 and Torres's Oikonomos through July 16.)

Art Chain Gang, March 20, 1990

What's become standard operating procedure for AIDS activists and eco hell-raisers has finally hit the art world. I'm talking about civil disobedience. A March 1 "art chain-gang march" in Los Angeles culminated in the arrest of 27 "art convicts" dressed in black and white stripes and carrying likenesses of censored artists such as Colette and Pasolini. Sponsored by the National Coalition for Freedom of Expression and ACT UP/L.A., the eight-hour agitprop extravaganza was anything but playful in intent: it was designed to focus attention on the impending reauthorization hearing of the National Endowment for the Arts that took place on March 5 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, to protest restrictions on the content of publicly funded art, to end homophobic and racist assaults on art, and to promote increased federal arts funding.

Following a 7 a.m. kickoff at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the chain gang wended its way up Wilshire toward the downtown Federal Building. Linked by a cardboard chain and kept in line by "art police," more than 200 art supporters marched, according to participant Brad Thompson. Art cops and criminals chanted new versions of "Working on the Chain Gang" and made pit-stop press conferences at several locations. At the Macondo Espacio Cultural, Central American-born artist-speakers likened censorship here to repression in their homelands.

When the group reached the Federal Building on Los Angeles Street at 1 p.m., those prepared to be arrested (for real, this time) linked arms and blocked access to the modern office building. Selections from censored literary works were read, and as each participant was arrested, the exuberant crowd shouted its support: "Frida Kahlo was arrested." "James Joyce was arrested." The Ellay 27 were cited for disorderly conduct and blocking entrance to a federal building and fined $25 apiece.

Was the action a success? "It was a beginning," responded march organizer Joy Silverman. "We reached thousands of people and demonstrated that there are other viewpoints than the far right's. We need a variety of approaches-doing civil disobedience one day and getting the endorsement of major institutions the next. We really just wanted to show that art isn't a crime."

May 29, 1990

"News" is the plural of "new." As art-bashing becomes a major American pastime, the novelty wears thin. When I suggested a column about censored art (complete with intimations of bestiality) my editor remarked that I've tackled similar subjects recently. He and I like the idea of a monthly censorship watch-brief accounts of the deplorable and depraved in all art forms-but the editorial space has to be found.

Such stories do garner mega-attention at the New York Post and The Daily News. Are the tabloids preoccupied with freedom of expression? Or is it simply that art censorship invariably involves sex and "immorality"? Given the simultaneously salacious and demagogic tone of the coverage, you can bet your Mapplethrope photo the latter is the case. Take a gander at just a few of the authentically weird incidents that have recently come to my attention:

The board of trustees of the city-run Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton, California, pulled a photo of John Lennon by portraitist-of-the-hip-and-famous Annie Leibovitz from a show called "Heroes, Heroines, Idols, and Icons." The ex-Beatle is seen nude in the fetal position, alongside a fully clothed Yoko. Was Lennon's offence nudity, or the impersonation of a fetus? Nobody returned my calls, but the official board-of-trustee explanation was "inappropriateness." The MCC receptionist told me that the picture recently rejoined the show after complaints stemming from local press coverage. Apparently protest can work even in Orange County, but beware the typically censorious board of trustees.

Dr. David Steinberg, president of the Long Island campus of C.W. Post University, demanded that the large drawing in the university collection called The Braid by artist Peter Drake be removed from a study lounge last month. Some eight (out of 8000) students reportedly objected to the depiction of a female nude entering a bath and two male nudes in another room with two dogs.

Of the eight, a few were foreign students who complained about the nudity, and a few Americans upset about what they took to be a representation of bestiality (a bit of a stretch of the imagination). The university's own PR director branded the work "a distraction" and termed this assault on artistic freedom an "act of cultural sensitivity." The work now hangs in the office of ace gallery director Judith Collischan Van Wagner, where it's been viewed by numerous university students and staffers. Despite a year of nonstop artcensorship headlines, it's remarkable that educators rarely seem to consider the notion of using such events to educate their students (or, apparently, themselves).

Vandalism is an extreme form of censorship. On April 13 Allan Frame's photo-work Boys on the Couch was attacked. The double-image of men touching (which was ironically part of the NEA-strafed "Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing" show at Artists Space last year) was hanging at the Max Fish bar on Ludlow Street as part of the benefit auction there for the Tent City homeless in Tompkins Square Park. According to witnesses, the assailants removed the work from the wall, took it outside, smashed it on the ground, and calmly returned to the bar. When confronted by staffers, one smasher reportedly responded, "This isn't art!" Call this yet another reminder of the homophobia that underlies so much recent art-bashing.

These incidents may suggest that Americans en masse aspire to the elevated human-rights standards of the pre-perestroika Eastern-bloc. But it was sexist Soviet censors who pulled Carolee Schneemann's classic, avant-garde film Fuses (1965-67) from scheduled screenings at the Moscow Film Festival last summer. Part of a program organized by the San Francisco International Film Festival that ran the gamut from Trash to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Fuses was screened earlier this month at the Museum of the Moving Image, where I saw it. Given the current climate, its joyously hardcore eroticism was unnerving; might the ubiquitous Jesse Helms be sitting beside me?

It's possible that stories such as these don't deserve more than the few words I've accorded them, but it's inconceivable that such occurrences warrant no attention at all. At this alarming moment of threatened First Amendment rights, supposedly minor matters are far more important than they were just a few years ago.

By the time you read this, the NEA reauthorization bill is likely to be out of committee and headed to the floor of the House, encrusted with crippling amendments that include the elimination of grants for individual artists. Many unprincipled arts administrators have prematurely thrown in the towel and began to help plan for the dismemberment of the NEA. Although National Assembly of State Arts Agencies's executive director Jonathan Katz has taken the heat for a plan to disperse 60 per cent-rather than the present 20 per cent-of NEA funds to state arts agencies, the actual sender of May 10 memorandum outlining this proposal to NASAA members is New York State Council on the Arts executive director and NASAA chair Mary Hays. Some will interpret her actions as realism, others as appeasement; I'd call them the bloodthirsty instincts of a bureaucratic piranha.

Le Boycott, June 26, 1990

When three Jewish members of Nice's city council quit to protest Mayor Jacques Medecin's alliance with the racist right, the mayor responded by observing that "I don't know any Jew who will refuse a gift offered to him, even if he doesn't like the gift." The French section of the International Art Critics' Association and a group of artists retaliated with a boycott of all Nice art institutions, including the new Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art slated to open on June 21. Arman courageously pulled the retrospective of his art that was to have inaugurated the museum in his hometown. Solidarity comes from U.S. comrades-in-art who've joined le boycott-Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, George Segal, and Frank Stella.

September 25, 1990

...But the best news of the season is that art-world wills seem to be stiffening in the face of the censorphilia that dominated last season. This month's most provocative show may be "Censored/Censured" at the new Baltimore alternative space, BAUhouse. It examines 10 years of mid-Atlantic-region censorship/censureship, and what's surprising is that so many of the exhibited works offended their censors on nonsexual and nonreligious grounds. Plastic guns, images of dead babies, and a painted list of actual jailhouse dos and don'ts (it was deemed "depressing") were a few of the reasons artists in this show were (re)moved. The show's criteria for inclusion? Works ejected from exhibitions, works moved within shows for political reasons, or works forceably altered by those who disapproved. And what's executive Director Pat Creswell's rationale for doing the show? "We're too new; we haven't had the opportunity to turn down grants yet."

One of the 28 artists in the "Censored/Censured" is New York State Council on the Arts visual arts director Carlos Gutierrez-Solana. You may recall that his elegiac AIDS installation at 1708 East Main gallery in Richmond last spring prompted a "cover-up" by city officials of his on-window drawing of a figure with an erect cock. What's gone unreported in the New York press is that Gutierrez-Solana and the gallery (represented by ACLU) took the case to federal court in June. The coplaintiffs won a restraining order from prosecution and a declaratory judgement that the work is not obscene. The installation was uncovered and the run of the show extended into mid-July.

Another largely unreported story involved another image of a stiff prick and resulted in another victory of artistic freedom. The defendant was "one obscene photograph" by well-known photographer and former Eastman House curator Walter Chappell, which was confiscated by customs agents in Houlton, Maine, last January. On July 26, U.S. Attorney Richard Cohen dismissed action against the 1962 photo of Chappell and his infant son following an investigation revealing that the subjects were father and son, and the widely published image possesses artistic value. Citing the landmark, obscenity-defining Miller v. California ruling, Cohen made it clear that this is one federal official who knows that the equation of art and pornography is the ultimate contradiction.

Wojnarowicz Redux, January 12, 1991

The latest round of the ongoing David Wojnarowicz-Donald Wildmon grudge match recently ended in a draw. American Family Association head Wildmon had his wrists slapped in a New York district court ruling of September 19, for distributing the same pamphlet violating Wojnarowicz's rights that he'd been ordered to stop circulating over a year ago. The artist/activist got a letter of apology from Wildmon, but his motion to hold Wildmon in civil contempt was denied. Nor was Wojnarowicz awarded court costs and attorney's fees for (pro bono) co-counsels Kathryn Barrett and Jonathan Olsoff. In case you've forgotten, back in 1990 the Bible-thumpon' Wildmon "appropriated" fragmentary porno stills that were tiny parts of Wojnarowicz 's "Sex Series" prints. Re-contextualized in ADA's anti-NEA pamphlet, they made the artist look like a pornographer. Wildmon was found to have violated the New York Artists Authorship Rights Act in June 1990, and two months later was enjoined from distributing the pamphlet and ordered to send a "corrective mailing" to each of its recipients. Wojnarowicz was later awarded $1 in token damages (!), but despite the 1990 ruling, the AFA admits to having since sent out two copies of the pamphlet-which is what brought them to court.

In his decision, Judge William C Conner, found no "willfulness" on the AFA's part and concludes that the "mailings were mistakes from which no malevolence may be presumed" (!!). Wildmon's letter of apology assures Wojnarowicz that "this will never happen again." Wojnarowicz concurs: "He's onto other people now and I'm sure he'll make lots of money."

Some Print, Others Won't, February 19, 1991

The printer who refused to print the Heresies collective's nudity-filled "Sex Issue" of 1981 was ahead of his time. During the 80's, printers have become the new censors-and formidable obstacles to the publication of controversial art images. Afterimage coeditor Grant Kester, who informally surveys the problem, reports that "every month or two we hear from an editor who can't get a publication printed or an artist having trouble with an exhibition announcement."

Kester is an ex-staffer at New Art Examiner, which regularly publishes pictures of censored art. The Chicago-based monthly has paid dearly for its policy of allowing readers to make up their own minds about artworks in the news. To find printers lacking Jesse Helms's censorious instincts, it has twice conducted expensive searches since 1988-each time with only partial success.

The Johnson Press promised to "print anything," according to NAE managing editor Allison Gamble, then balked at a reproduction of Lynda Benglis's infamous Artforum ad-with-dildo from the mid-'70s. The same company later rejected photographer Joe Ziolkowski's image of two embracing men with shadowy erections, as well as Robert Mapplethorpe's Honey, the photo of the little girl with lifted skirt that occupied center-stage at the Cincinnati trial.

What's a publication to do? "Once a printer has your boards," Gamble observed, "there's rarely time to switch." A blank spot appeared on the page where the Benglis image-or NAE's typeset statement that the printer objected to the prining of the image-should have been. (Johnson Press did not return the Voice's call for a comment.) Last year, NAE switched to the Ovid Bell Press. But the Fulton, Missouri, printer caved in when confrointed with photos of a Gran Fury installation that included a picture of an erection. Press owner Bell told me that decisions about printing images are made by "two or three of us who get together and pitch pennies at it... We consider the concept as art. Nudity doesn't bother us, an erection might, and we draw the line at perversion." What is perversion? "You caught me in the middle of a column of figures. It's hard to focus on that now."

Printers aren't the only culprits, either. Melissa Harris, guest editor of Aperture's current "Body in Question" number, said that the photography journal's mailing house quit because of the issue, although they did distribute it. Dennis Cunningham, Commonwealth Mailing Service sales manager, noted that "we considered the magazine pornography-nudity, homosexuality, a woman sucking a man.... Things are tight now, and staff are laid off, but I'd rather starve than touch this stuff."

Not surprisingly, it's the usual anti-status-quo feminist, lesbian/gay, and AIDS-related works that set off the censors. (St. Paul's Artpaper had to use blackout bars to "sanitize" safer-sex images so last October's issue could be printed; Gay Presses of New York dropped Pavel Tchelitchew's watercolor of 69ers from its 1988 reissue of Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford's novel The Young and Evil for lack of a cooperative printer.) The two most frequently contested images I heard about were the Benglis and Mapplethorpe pictures. The Whitney Museum of American Art has tried to publish both; the former for its 1989 "Image World" catalogue and the latter for its 1988 book, Robert Mapplethorpe.

According to Doris Palca, the museum's head of publications and sales, a Connecticut printing firm (now defunct) convinced the museum that Mapplethorpe's Honey would open it up to prosecution for child abuse. The Whitney capitulated. "I'm not proud of the way we handled it," Palca commented. "When the Benglis situation came up, I told the [different] printer, 'We're not taking it out,' and he backed down." Did management claim that the pressman simply wouldn't print the objectionable images? "Don't they always?" Palca laughed. "And then women go to these plants and you can't even look at the walls-they're covered with pinups!"

More War, March 19, 1991

The six antiwar protesters in the Assyrian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum on March 2 solemnly began to read. Snippets of Iraqi poetry-ancient and contemporary-alternated with discomfiting facts about a war already laid to rest in American consciousness. The reminder that there was "1 bombing run every minute of every day against the people of Iraq" segued into a 4000-year-old lamentation for the city of Ur: "In all the streets and roadways bodies lay. In open fields that used to fill with dancers, the people lay in heapsÖbodies dissolved-like butter left in the sun." After eight minutes, the performers were hustled out of the museum by nervous security honchos fingering handguns.

Another reminder that life is cheap, but masterpieces dear. The readers belong to Artists and Writers Out Loud (AWOL)-a direct-action group that was joined at the Met by a contingent from the like-minded Poets Against the War. (Members of both read on the sidewalk after being ejected from the museum.) None of the protesters believe that the Gulf War is actually over, at least not in the Gulf. "We want people to start thinking about the effects of the war," PAW organizer Hal Sirowitz told me. "Thousands of kids will be dying in Baghdad because no hospitals or sewage systems remain. We're concerned about a long-term occupation, too."

AWOL is translating these concerns into projects such as "Out Loud: Artists Engulfed Against War," an open, non-juried exhibition at Art in General gallery, April 13 to May 11. PAW is staging antiwar readings at the Knitting Factory on Thursday nights in March, and at Wetlands on April 17. (For information about the AWOL show and the group's weekly meetings call Lisa Maya Knauer at 533-3032; for PAW info call 274-1324.)

Icon, July 9, 1991

Who can forget these horrific images from Vietnam? Self-immolating Buddhist monks. A napalmed little girl running-blazing-down the street. The mass of bodies that's come to stand for the My Lai massacre. If any image from the Gulf war assumes such iconic status, it may be Ken Jarecke's picture of a hideously scarred Iraqi soldier killed in a truck not far from Kuwait City.

But unlike those mementos from Vietnam, Jarecke's potent photo never reached the public for which it was intended. New York editors at Associated Press removed the photo from their wire; senior staffer Tom Stathis explained that "we decided it wasn't right for our members...too graphically violent." The photographer's agency, Contact Press Images, did not allow what spokesperson Diona McCaskie described as "antiwar propaganda groups" to use the picture. One of those groups, Refuse and Resist, sponsored an ad hoc band of activists that projected Jarecke's image on the sides of the CBS, ABC, NBC and United Nations headquarters on the evening of June 3. (Christo, Kurt Vonnegut, and painter Ellen Phalen. funded the effort.)

The negligible response to that sortie, however, paled beside the controversy generated by the initial publication of Jarecke's image on March 3 in The London Observer. Harold Evans, president of Random House and former editor of The Times (of London), wrote an eloquent defense of the photo's publication: "No action can be moral if we close our eyes to its consequences... Would those who object to the Iraqi photograph have decried a lack of 'taste' if a newspaper had published pictures smuggled out of Belsen in 1944?" Or as Jarecke told me, "If you're big enough to start a war, you should be big enough to look at the consequences."

September 17, 1991

Censors never take vacations. Even in absolutely queer Fire Island Pines, bare (male) buttocks can offend. Broadway ad agency LeDonne Wilner & Wiener's sexy pro bono "teaser" posters for a benefit production of the musical Babes in Arms were torn down and the agency's postteaser posters (modified rear nudity) went unused. A few weeks ago, Sylvan Cole-a private art dealer and president of the sponsoring Fire Island Pines Arts Project-told the Fire Island Tide-that the replacement poster was "a compromise well taken." Now he tells me, "I made a mistake and I apologize. I thought I'd be a Solomon and it backfired."

Bad Nudes, February 4, 1992

Now that eroticism and pornography have been conflated, what's the puritans' next gambit? Attack any image of the naked human body. Whether reading Playboy in a Berkeley diner or gazing at Francisco Goya's Naked Maja in a Penn State classroom, art and nudity buffs, beware: no nudes is good nudes.

Prof. Nancy Stumhofer's Goya bashing-her university-supported contention that teaching in front of a Maja-repro constitutes sexual harassment-has drawn sharper comment from the British press than from its American counterpart. The Independent polled art mavens about the tempest-in-a-classroom. Former Victoria and Albert Museum director Roy Strong called it "a bizarre manifestation of feminism," while novelist Anita Brookner tartly observed that "this woman must be cracked." The Art Newspaper's highly critical report led with the neocon opinion that "the Nineties sees the U.S. dominated by a craven fear of offending against 'Political correctness.'" A preemptive strike to ensure that our p.c. paradise doesn't get exported?

Meanwhile, in the Village, the intolerant have been having their way with artist Scott Tucker's collage at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. Created for the 1989 "Center Show," the depicted (aroused) genitalia have been crudely defaced, presumably by the center's lesbian and gay clientele. Why hasn't the work been restored or removed? And what plans have been made for Keith Haring's historic men's room mural homage to polymorphous perversity produced for the same exhibition? LGCSC board president emeritus David Nimmons lamented the vandalism and explained that the site-specific works were intended to remain up only for a few months, a condition of which all the artists were aware. The Haring mural will "definitely be protected and preserved," Nimmons said, adding that a conservator has already been consulted.

A poster for Franklin Furnace's latest enterprise-A January 23-24 performance/symposium called Explicit Sex: Art or Phallacy?-drew fire from Michael Miller, Associate Dean of NYU's Tisch School of Arts, whose Performance Studies Department cosponsored the event. What was the problem with the image-free flyer? According to FF director Martha Wilson, Miller demanded that it be displayed only in "reputable institutions" and was fearful that the title would attract "42nd Street types." Miller told me that he didn't want to extend an open invitation for the public event following the City College tragedy. "This is for people with a serious interest in performance," he sniffed. (FF made no attempts to assess the seriousness of those making reservations.)

Censorship Redux, June 23, 1992

Not many arts administrators (or non-arts administrators) seem to have paid much attention to the past three years of art-bashing. Some of the former continue their arrogant "I know what's offensive" ways; many of the latter rely on Republican-style, slash-and-burn techniques to act out their powerlessness at artists' expense. The censorship drums never stop beating.

Some current imbroglios: "Seeing Red White or Blue-Censored in the USA," a thoughtfully conceived exhibition of 55 artists' work ranging from Phillip Pearlstein's clinically observed nudes to Alice Sims's bear-rug-style photos of her kids, raised quite a ruckus during its just-finished run at Anchorage's Visual Arts Center of Alaska. Robert Mapplethorpe's image of his handiwork with a bullwhip predictably annoyed the local American Family Association, while Dread Scott's What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?-the apparent artistic equivalent of screaming "fire" in a crowded theater-even more predictably infuriated Alaska's Veterans of Foreign Wars.

VFW state commander George A. Pikus pulled off the first of several thefts of Scott's flag, each of which was followed by the donation of another flag to the center by a Scott supporter. According to Alaska district attorney Edward McNally, it is now up to the state to decide whether or not to prosecute. Don't bet on even the misdemeanor charge under consideration: McNally told me that Alaska statute defines theft as "permanently depriving an owner of property" and VFW members left cash deposits and written promises to return the flags. McNally also noted that "the First Amendment cuts both ways," implying that theft might be constitutionally protected in such a case! Bear in mind that this non-NEA-funded exhibition came complete with communications mechanisms including a questionnaire and an NEH-funded program of speakers keynoted by born-again First Amendment advocate John Frohnmayer.

Locally, artist Bailey Doogan had two of the four drawings in her show at the Irish Arts Center in Hell's Kitchen removed by IAC executive director Marianne Delaney on May 17. Delaney, a self-proclaimed liberal and feminist, maintains that the works-two large scale nudes-were "offensive," ineffectual as feminist statements, and "interfered with people's rights" in the overcrowded gallery space that is actually a dance studio and theater lobby. The removal of the art surprised Doogan and curator Mary Ann Wadden, who resigned her unpaid post in protest. Doogan reclaimed the remaining drawings on May 24; her work can be seen at the Alternative Museum through June 20.

Speaking of nudes, according to artists Christopher Tanner, Barry Bridgwood, and Martin Wong, Graham Modern gallery director Lisa Travers has been forced to resign by gallery vice-president Cameron Shay for organizing the "Man Revealed" exhibition in which the three artists are represented. "We're talking nudity, not sex here," said Tanner. "And homophobia." Travers would not comment; Shay called the allegations "untrue."

Artworkplace, November 10, 1992

Forget Mapplethorpe X-travaganzas. The art-censorship arena of the '90s is no longer the museum but the workplace. Such sites sabotage conventional wisdom about what's public, what's private, and whether citizen-workers need to be protected from contemporary artworks about race and sex.

You may recall a November brouhaha about work by an art collective called SOL Concepts. This Latino group was invited to show its paintings at police department headquarters in order-ironically-to improve community relations. But during the week the show opened, the department removed the paintings featuring images of a cop being shot, a pistol-packing priest, and an African-American figure paired with an ape. (Artist Hugo Bravo claimed the figure/ape image is a study in color contrast.) With a little help from People for the American Way and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, SOL Concepts is suing "as soon as the complaint is ready," director Richard Zuluaga said.

The complaint will charge the NYPD with violating the artists' First Amendment rights and breaching an (oral) contract with them, according to the People for the American Way legal director Elliot Mincberg. The former refers to the content-related removal of the works in a public place, the latter to the NYPD's "approval of the artworks in slide and actual form." Although the NYPD did not return Voice calls for comment, NYPD deputy commissioner of community affairs Wilhelmina Holliday told me in November that censorship wasn't "the point...we're not going to insult police personnel." SOL member Bravo offered the equally legitimate (opposing) viewpoint: "We're just reflecting reality." Who's at fault? Whoever undermined the process by twice approving the works. (Why doesn't the mayor direct his Department of Cultural Affairs to issue guidelines for the exhibition of art by city agencies?)

Ironically, SOL Concept's champion within the NYPD was the same Hispanic Society that led a successful (and ugly) campaign to pressure artist Richard Haas to repaint a panel of his Percent for Art-sponsored mural on the White Street Detention Center because of allegedly racist images. Pistol-packing priests are okay, but people of color selling fruit alongside the homeless aren't?

Another variation on the contentious art-in-the-lobby theme is "Repair Work," a show that's up through February 19 at 31 West 52nd Street's Lobby Gallery. A sometimes difficult seven-artist exhibition of neoconceptualist works on environmental themes, "Repair Work" was curated by Eva Mantell and Thelma Mathias. It's not surprising that a few hostile viewers added their own debris to Mathias's trash bins packed with Dean & Deluca coffee cups and titled We've had our coffee; we've cut down the trees, or that corporate types are miffed by Tony Kosloski's anticapitalist installation. But it is remarkable that discussion between the artists and the building's work force has been discouraged by Hines Interests, the management company that invited the artists to show their work and approved their proposals for the site-specific pieces.

According to Mantell, after being advised of rumblings by viewers, the artists proposed a tour of the show for building tenants. Hines rejected that opinion. The artists then wrote an innocuous four-item questionnaire (it begins by asking viewers how the exhibited works make them feel), which Hines removed from the gallery. And with it-apparently-went any chance of dialogue about environmental degradation of artistic elitism. Hines staffers Deborah Tomasi and Todd Adams would not comment.

Censorama, November 10, 1992

Censorship can also slip in through the back door of your property-oriented legal system, suggests attorney John Koegel. He's been representing artist Jeff Koons in his losing court battle with photographer Art Rogers over Koons's unauthorized use of a photograph by Rogers. Rogers v. Koons is essentially over-the Supreme Court recently refused to hear an appeal, and a trial date to determine monetary damages will be set on November 20-but Koegel believes that this "ground-breaking" case may impact on Dennis Oppenheim's conflict with The Walt Disney Co. over the artist's use of Mickey Mouse in his recent sculpture Virus.

Koegel disparages Disney's tough-guy zeal deterring any nonlicensed use of the cartoon characters: "Of course it's legitimate to go after products that unfairly compete, but an artwork is discussion and commentary. Disney's gone after three day-care centers that had drawings of its characters on the walls. If Mickey Mouse isn't part of the American cultural dialogue, then how do you account for Disney promoting itself through a new Hyperion Press book of Claes Oldenburg's-and other artists'-works called The Art of Mickey Mouse?"

Museums: In & Out, December 22, 1992