Porn Flakery, March 30, 1993

Anybody who thinks that the passage of laws outlawing "pornography" will help curb violence against women-rather than free speech-better think again. Canada's first year of MacKinnon-Dworkin style prohibitions against erotica that "degrades" or "dehumanizes" has led mainly to the suppression of queer mags and videotapes, according to censorship specialist and University of Manitoba law professor Karen Busby. When Winnipeg architecture student Joanne Crozier ordered performance artist Annie Sprinkle and videomaker Maria Beatty's Sluts and Goddesses, how could she have possible imagined that Canadian Customs would confiscate the tape? Crozier had, after all, heard about this engaging primer of pleasure and purification in a Sprinkle interview on the government-operated Canadian Broadcasting Company.

The Canadian Supreme Court's so-called Butler decision established new obscenity criteria last year: Sex with violence and sex that degrades is out; explicit sex-as long as it doesn't involve children-is in. Sounds good in theory, doesn't it? But within a week of the ruling, Toronto police had seized the lesbian s&m mag Bad Attitude from Glad Day bookstore and last month successfully prosecuted the queer emporium for carrying it. (Busby characterized the prosecution as "an almost calculated move to split feminists.") Post-Butler, the government also prosecuted Glad Day for a large shipment of gay male erotica seized by customs in 1991. The presiding Ontario judge ruled that the magazines were "degrading" and "dehumanizing" simply because they depicted sex between men.

Crozier, who has appealed the customs ruling, vows that if her case fails (as, she assured me, "99 per cent do"), she'll appeal again. She'd prefer to go directly to the courts, but that requires more disposable income than she's currently got. She does have the moral support, at least, of Busby, an artists' rights advocate who sits on the boards of the artists' organizations Video Pool and MAWA (Mentoring Artists for Women's Art.) But Busby is also a legal committee member of LEAF (the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund) which pushed for the MacKinnon-esque language in Butler. After a year of prosecutions against women and gays, Busby says she still supports legal limits on pornography. "I'm devastated by the way that the law's been used," she said. "But I'm not ready to give up on it."

FOLLOW UP: February 15, 1994

Joanne Crozier, the Winnipeg student who appealed the Canadian Customs seizure of Annie Sprinkle and Maria Beatty's Sluts and Goddesses self-help video, recently received word that the government agency had inadvertently (cough,cough) destroyed the tape. Adding insult to insult, Crozier's mail from the U.S. has been routinely opened, released, and stamped "Cleared by Customs." An elfish Sprinkle-Beatty managed to smuggle a gift-wrapped version of the tape to Crozier this past Christmas.

Female Gazing, April 13, 1993

Remember last fall's censored "Porn'im'age'ry: Picturing Prostitutes" exhibition at the University of Michigan? Intended to accompany a symposium on prostitution sponsored by the law school's new gender-and-law journal, the show was shuttered by law students who apparently found Veronica Vera's video Portrait of a Sexual Evolutionary objectionable. (They were aided by Catharine MacKinnon, their First Ammendment-phobic prof.) Thanks to active vigilance on the part of women's rights and free-speech groups, the ACLU has negotiated a settlement with U of M giving the artists $3000 and the chance to reinstall the exhibition next fall in conjunction with a symposium about sexual expression and censorship. Exhibition curator Carol Jacobsen called it an "important victory," but also noted that "this was hardly an isolated attack."

FOLLOW UP: Legalities, October 26, 1993

Between the time I write this and the time you read this, "Porn'im'age'ry: Picturing Prostitutes"-the show that was shut down last October by University of Michigan Law School students who absconded with most of it-will have been reinstalled. This time around it comes complete with performance: a law-school sponsored forum to tackle the issues raised by the censoring of the exhibition in 1992. An ideal subject for an impassioned debate, it is likely to be "at best inadequate," according to ACLU Arts Censorship Project head Marjorie Heins. (Heins brokered the March 17 settlement between the school and the Porn'im'age'ry curator Carol Jacobsen, threatened to take the law school to court in August to force compliance with it.) "They've done everything they can to make this a nonevent, to make it toothless," Heins said. Law school dean and forum organizer Lee Bollinger countered that "things started to get out of hand last spring...Jacobsen and the ACLU made too much of an effort to control who was going to be invited."

Bollinger's plans for the forum were laid out in a January 8 letter to Jacobsen, in which he asked her not only to speak at the public program, but to help organize it. He suggested convening two or three panels (a date in April was initially planned) to explore issues ranging from the potentially chilling effects of expanded prohibitions against pornography to the role of the university in discussing current social issues. From a list of potential speakers solicited from Jacobsen, they settled on Columbia University anthropologist Carol Vance, performance artist Holly Hughes, and Smithsonian staffer Deborah Willis-experts on sexuality, feminism, race, and censorship. Not surprisingly, it proved impossible to organize the program on such a short notice. After the settlement agreement was signed last spring, Vance and Hughes weren 't invited to participate, they said; Willis didn't not return Voice calls for comment.

Instead of several panels, the October 16 forum was to consist of a single panel and a debate between Bollinger and Heins on constitutional issues. (The dean insists that this isn't a First Amendment matter because the students who commissioned "Porn' Im'age'ry" were part of a "private group"-that is a new gender-law journal published by the law school.) Jacobsen will be joined on the panel by the feminist art historian and performance artist Joanna Freuh ("I think they should have asked someone with a censorship background," she told me) and New Criterion managing director Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education. "I don't know why they asked me," Kimball said to me, admitting that he has no special expertise in feminist art, sexually explicit imagery, or censorship. But that seems to be precisely the point of the forum-to distract attention from the actual issues last year's incident raises. "The forum may be a farce," Jacobsen noted, "but at least the artists will be speaking through their work-and [in person] at the opening."

Ceremonies and Censors, May 25, 1993

One way to silence a roomful of arts-organization and foundation honchos is to talk about fist fucking. That's what Laurie Anderson did on May 5 at the Museum of Modern Art. The program at which she spoke was called "On Freedom of Expression," but I'd characterize it as a behind-the-scenes skirmish in the culture wars.

Sponsored by five assets-heavy foundations, the invitational event honored 16 individuals who "made unusual contributions to upholding the principle of freedom of expression." From former Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center director Denis Barrie to Franklin Furnace founder/director Martha Wilson, virtually everyone denied grants during the Frohnmayer regime at the NEA was recognized. Other honorees included a censored art team, theater impresarios whose advertising was banned from buses, and the besieged director of Michigan's Monroe County library system, Gordon Conable. His presence was a reminder that school librarians and film programmers-not to mention pro-bono attorneys and freedom of expression groups-are the foot soldiers in the First Amendment struggle.

As the schmoozy high-mindedness at MoMA reached a fever pitch, I wondered whether Organizing 101 rules would apply: the purpose of political pep rallies is to get those attending to commit to your cause. Appropriately enough, that task was assigned to the charismatic artists near the end of the bill. Anderson slyly invoked fist fucking in her discussion of censorship and social control, while choreographer Bill T. Jones extended the theme with this challenge to the audience: "Can you stick your neck out? Can you speak out in defense of something talking about fist fucking?" Anderson asked the pressing question, "Where were you [cultural leaders] three years ago?"

The meaning of "On Freedom of Expression" emerges when considered alongside another recent awards ceremony, the presentation of ArtTable's Distinguished Service award to NYSCA head Kitty Carlisle Hart on April 29. At that luncheon-lovefest, Metropolitan Museum president William H. Luers disparaged the tiny percentage of NEA-funded artists who might "bring down the whole structure" of the agency. At a spring 1991 reception at the Met introducing (sucking up to?) the NEA's then-new decency czarina, Anne Imelda Radice, Luers huffily deflected Warhol foundation head Archibald Gillies's question to Radice about censorship. Gillies hosted "On Freedom of Expression"; Luers wasn't present.

Was "On Freedom of Expression" a success? The director of a free speech group told me that "several funding sources approached me." MOMA agreed to sign onto the amicus brief in support of the NEA 4 in its upcoming battle with the Justice Department to keep NEA's decency standards unconstitutional. As one of the planners explained to me with an embarrassed sigh, "This worked because you got people who know and rrust each other into the right room together. Then they can support something they wouldn't otherwise." I've never felt so much like a prop.

Biennial to Seoul, February 2, 1993

This year's Whitney Biennial is traveling for the first time-about 10,000 miles. According to two curators who frequently work abroad, the show-the-art-world-loves-to-hate will appear at the Seoul Art Center during the second half of 1993. Museum spokesperson Steven Schlough concedes that the Whitney is "negotiating" to send the Biennial to Seoul, but denies that a final agreement has been nailed down. The curator-sources also inform me that the SAC will pay $700,000 for the exhibition-an unusually hefty fee. (Schlough said that the museum does not ordinarily comment on such matters and all that can be confirmed is that negotiations are underway for a Seoul venue.)

The tour's most troubling aspect is its potential for censorship. Korea is distinctly puritanical. Several Korean Cultural Service staffers characterized Korean norms as far stricter than Japan's, where images of pubic hair are officially verboten and some subjects, such as World War II, are unofficially taboo. Will the Whitney allow the SAC to pick and choose the art they want from the Biennial? Now that New York museums are increasingly doing business overseas, it's time for them to guarantee that artists' First Amendment rights automatically travel with their artworks.

Censor Sensibility, June 12, 1993

What's censorship and who's a censor? For some of us, moving a controversial artwork from a prominent to an obscure place in an exhibition fits the bill. But what about a juried show in a mall that excludes nudes? Or an art institution that never shows the work of artists of color? And let's not even mention self-censorship.

Antonio Muntadas's The File Room may be the first artwork-cum-exhibition to grapple systematically with such matters, while documenting 500 years of art censorship and human rights violations. (Included topics range from Inquisition-era book-burnings to Persian Gulf media censorship.) An interactive data base, the Room will allow both on-site and remote access. The temporary installation of metal file-cabinet walls punctured by computer terminals will eventually assume the dematerialized form of an electronic archive. Its Randolph Street Gallery producers plan to send the Room on tour after its Chicago debut next May and find a permanent home for it. Although some exhibition logistics are in flux, now is the time to send accounts of your experiences with censors to Muntadas c/o Randolph Street Gallery, 756 North Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago IL 60622. . . . If you can't wait a year, ACLU staffer Marjorie Heins's new Sex, Sin and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars is a painless trip through the thicket of legal issues that define the shape of culture clash, American-style.

Megabytes should be reserved in The File Room's data base for Canadian Customs' recent transgressions. My March column about the agency's confiscation of Anne Sprinkle and Maria Beatty's Sluts and Goddesses videotape generated voluminous mail-most of it from Canada. Ever since the Canadian Supreme Court's MacKinnon-esque Butler decision last year outlawed depiction of violent and degrading sex (but left their definitions dangerously open to interpretation), the customs jackboot has stomped down hard on feminist and queer material. bell hooks's Black Looks: Race and Representation was recently detained but released, while Black Men/White Men (which includes writing by Langston Hughes) and Lovers (nonporn fiction by Tee Corinne) have been seized-that is, banned. One reader sent me Blueboy's safe-sex guide in which terms including (presumably) "anal" and "fucking" were meticulously blacked-out, demonstrating all too literally that censorship can kill.

Summer Reruns, September 28, 1993

...And then there's always-in-style queerbashing: After designer Tibor Kalman and 42nd Street Development Project president Rebecca Robertson nixed Donald Moffett and Mariene McCarty's twin portraits of murdered gay Navy man Allen Schindler and his killer from the 42nd Street public-art extravaganza, Creative Time (also involved in the public-art fest) stepped in to fund the project. Aptly describing Kalman's actions to New York magazine as ""censorship," a CT spokesperson expressed amazement that he "would stoop so low." Admirably strong words, considering that Kalman is a CT board member.

October 23, 1993

More censorship: photographer Barbara Alper shoots on the street, off the TV set (a recent series examined Gulf War media coverage), and some times at sex clubs. She's done the circuit from Chippendale's and Hellfire to Bangkok and private boudoirs, and her sex-image appreciators include the New York Public Library (which owns 20 prints), Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale, and London's Akehurst Gallery, which wanted to represent her. But the gallery lost interest in supporting Alper when 40 slides and a valuable exhibition print were seized by British customs around September 1. According to her American counsel, Ira Lowe, British law is quite similar to ours, and the images (some of s&m, but none of penetration) have obvious artistic value. When it comes to artists exploring sexuality, harassment remains the m.o. of customs in the English-speaking world. Not many can afford to fight back, but Alper is undaunted. She told me that she's retained Mark Stephens as her London counsel. "He got Mapplethrope images into U.K., and his firm is named-get this-Stephens Innocent."

March 8, 1994

Indoor public art is often controversial, too. Ironically a show of erotic art presented by the National Museum and Archives of Lesbian and Gay History at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in the West Village was vandalized by presumably queer center users. The show, called "OUThouses," was mounted to celebrate the center's newly revamped first-floor bathrooms. Art collective fierce pussy was invited to take over the woman's room; Big Dicks Make Me Sweat Productions was given the men's. Because of construction, pussy's piece wasn't ready for the exhibition's informal February 13 opening. But according to a press release issued by the show's volunteer curator Seth Gurvitz, 25 to 30 of Big Dicks's erotic photo-and-text works were removed almost immediately after installation by a member of Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, one of the many 12-step groups that rent meeting space from the center.

The center's deputy director Robert Woodworth refuses to point the finger at SCA. Nor has he (or anyone else at the center) apologized to the artists or taken any steps to educate this community about legal ways of expressing strongly held opinions. (The centers powers-that-be did forbid the curator from speaking to the press.) "Artists know that we are not responsible for their work since we don't have an actual gallery space here," Woodworth legalistically noted, missing the point about ethical responsibility. Big Dicks's Joe E. Jeffreys told me that he and his partner John Burger will reinstall their show, and that the center had taken some action-a new sign posted outside the bathroom announces the sexually explicit images inside and urges the potentially offended to use the second floor men's room instead. "But that," Jeffreys laughed, "is the bathroom with the Keith Haring mural of men sucking and fucking."

Family Values & Stone Walls, July 12, 1994

Where do you draw the line between curatorial discrimination and censorship? Consider the Smithsonian's National African American Museum Project's treatment of New York artist Ricardo Zulueta. Last January curator Deborah Willis invited Zulueta to participate in an upcoming show called "Imagining Families: Image and Voices." According to the artist, Willis gave him the go-ahead for a piece about animals, like chimpanzees, whose familial behaviors have been studied. But according to a letter from Willis to the artist, written after the animal series had been nixed, Zulueta's decision to submit artworks picturing the chimps constituted an unanticipated--and unacceptable--change.

Although Willis did not return repeated Voice calls for comment, Shireen Dodson, the museum project's assistant director for planning and administration, illuminated the controversy. She corroborated Zulueta's account of a conversation between them during which both she and Willis rejected his work: "Yes, I said to him that this piece is inappropriate, that there are historical comparisons between African Americans and monkeys, and it's offensive."

If this reminds you of the Helms-D'Amato school of Washington art crit, you're not alone. On Jun e 23, the ACLU Arts Censorship Project wrote Willis a letter noting that "as curator you will be more aware that many people of the complex reactions inspired by art throughout history, and by the impossibility of imposing any one meaning on a work...The best course is not to impose political litmus tests on artistic works..." Willis did not respond, but Claudine K. Brown, Smithsonian Deputy Assistant Secretary for Arts and Humanities, wrote to the ACLU that, "The work which he [Zulueta] ultimately sent...was not the work which was originally discussed and was not deemed to be an acceptable substitute for this exhibition." The National Campaign for Freedom of Expression has also contacted the project on the artist's behalf.

Another kind of stonewalling may also be operating here. Zulueta said that during his first discussion about the show with Willis, she told the gay artist that nudity and homosexual imagery were taboo. (Willis has written admiringly-if blandly-of Zulueta's nude imagery in Nueva Luz: "Each photograph is tightly constructed and is symbolically representative... Zulueta's psychologically and politically charged images comment upon the socio-sexual political relationships within our society.") Dodson denied Zulueta's charge: "We have no issues or policies about nudity or explicit homosexuality." Why would an artist fabricate such an assertion? "It may be the only way he could get attention," she opined.

Maybe. But you don't have to search too far for more plausible reasons for a museum to censor itself and gay artists. How about the House vote on June 23 that punished the NEA with a 2 per cent ($3.4 million) budget cut in retaliation for the Walker Art Center's support of a $125 (re)grant to HIV-positive artist Ron Athey for his recent body-and-blood performance work? "Does a bloody towel represent the ideas of American people?" asked Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla), who offered (a failed) amendment to cut the federal art agency's budget by 5 per cent. Jane Alexander's principled defense of Athey in April has been her finest moment as NEA chair; her insipid and diversionary statement that a 2 per cent budget cut is "preferable to proposed larger cuts" preceded the Senate Appropriation Committee's June 28 5 per cent cut. (Whatever the ultimate size of the axing, the real-dollar buying power of the NEA's budget has dropped around 50 per cent since 1979.) Manhattan representatives Carolyn Maloney and Jerrold Nadler, by the way, struggled heroically to fight the cuts.

The timing of this House action on the eve of Stonewall 25 was surely coincidental, but it's also emblematic of recent responses to queer culture. As lesbian and gay art grows increasingly visibly and viable, hostility has dramatically increased. At the NEA, for instance, the Expansion Arts Program last year refused to spread its multicultural umbrella over queers, and the Justice Department is currently spending tax dollars to fight the invalidation of the agency's Helms-esque "decency language."