Dear John...
Village Voice, 1995
A review of John Frohnmayer's Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior. Houghton Mifflin, $22.95
Readers of John Frohnmayer's Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior may suspect something's amiss when the former National Endowment for the Arts chair revealed that he "expected to be Washington's darling." He's recounting a moment--in September 1989--that's just five months post-Piss Christ, two months after the Mapplethorpe flap at the Corcoran, and two months before his own trial by (self-ignited) fire at Artists Space. At this early point in the book you want to give the ex-NEA head the benefit of the doubt simply for coming clean about his embarrassing naÔvetÈ. But Frohnmayer's recollection also signals his disingenuous attempts to position himself as a country lawyer cast adrift in a sharky sea of bloodthirsty politicos.
This "innocent abroad" motif is one of two related and hackneyed tropes around which he's organized his dishy-sounding but ultimately juiceless memoir. (The title recalls Julia Phillips's Hollywood tell-all, You'll Never eat Lunch in This Town Again.) Leaving Town Alive is also a faux bildungsroman, a heroic coming of age. The book's cover copy tells us that Frohnmayer "entered the fray a First Amendment moderate [and] emerged a free-speech radical." Both self-serving narrative devices are designed to transform a bureaucrat who vainly tried to please the right and the left into an "art warrior" whose values jibe with the more liberal ethos of the Clinton era. Although this Nixonian ploy has won Frohnmayer plenty of lecture gigs, it can't begin to sanitize a record of dithering indifference to the First Ammendment.
For nonexpert readers, Frohnmayer's chronological account will seem overlong and torturously detailed. Subjects like his inability to hire his lieutenants of choice because of the White House's politicized personnel policies may be unfamiliar, but they won't startle the average reader. Arts advocates and culture-war buffs, on the other hand, will be shocked at Frohnmayer's want of specificity and insight. Supposed revelations on the order of "I was to find that [NEH head Lynne] Cheney has become the darling of the conservatives" reveal only that he tended to tune into the conventional wisdom years after it had been broadcast. Like the former NEA chief himself, this book isn't likely to satisfy any constituency.
Taken at face value, Leaving Town Alive does at least offer a rationale for Frohnmayer's seemingly incomprehensible policies and pronouncements. They were motivated less by shifting principles than by shifting strategies designed to get and keep the NEA job. From the outset, he lied like a Watergate plumber. He assured the White House that he was a team player ready to subordinate his own views to the administration's, but he confesses with neither remorse nor explanation that "in retrospect, I had lied...I was not a team player." After George Bush sent a note stapled to a David Wojnarowicz image of a junkie-Christ, he told the prez he was offended by the image, but he tells us that "this, and other works, did not offend me."
His duplicity sometimes victimised artists. He nixed a grant to eco-artist Mel Chin not because of a lack of artistic quality, as he stated at a time, but because he "had never vetoed a grant that the council had approved. I wanted to do some muscle-flexing..." Despite his disgust with putting politics first, he managed to ignore what's obvious to readers: He, too, is a thoroughly political animal (who isn't in Washington?), though a highly ineffectual one.
He will, of course, be remembered as the wishy-washy federal-arts-agency counterpart to his hapless boss in the White House. Bush's flip-flops on issues of principle like abortion parallel Frohnmayer's remarkable "flexibility" on such key matters as the relationship between art and politics. During the Artists Space brouhaha, for instance, he told the Voice that "any show that is primarily intended to make a political commentary must be privately funded." The same week he opined in The New York Times, "obviously, there are lots of great works of art that are political." Coming from an attorney whose self-described specialty is "litigation, libel, slander and First Amendment," Frohnmayer's frequently contradictory statements demand explanation. In Leaving Town Alive they're barely even acknowledged.
And that's the real problem with the book: Frohnmayer's denial that his tenure as NEA head was a nearly unmitigated disaster. Frohnmayer seems to include among the "accomplishments" in his prologue the diversion of a full 35 per cent of NEA funds to state art agencies, or as he puts it, "partnerships with state and local governments." Although there are few actual accomplishments to appropriate, Frohnmayer does find plenty of blame to assign and responsibility to deny for the drubbing the NEA took. He castigates not only the obvious right-wing and fundamentalist targets, but also the New York Times and real First Amendment warriors such as former National Association of Artists' Organizations head Charlotte Murphy, who called Frohnmayer's defense of artists "too little, too late." It's an m.o. weirdly reminiscent of poor, out-of-the-loop George Bush, the patron Frohnmayer so unattractively reviles in Leaving Town Alive. At least Bush had the grace to leave town. Frohnmayer remains, where he's no doubt perfecting his whine-of-the-WASP for a book promo tour.
