A review of Jane Alexander's Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics and Michael Brenson's Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America

"[Pronouncements like Mayor Giuliani's call for a commission to determine decency standards] have been known to leave in their wake a significant moral residue that lives on to haunt the very institutions that appear to have succeeded in surviving the censure mounted against them...the N.E.A. exists today as an enfeebled federal bureaucracy that very few people in or out of the arts give a damn about." Hilton Kramer (New York Observer, March 14, 2001)

Hilton Kramer's remarks reveal an ethical conflict of interest in his failure to disclose his role as morality policeman in the right-wing assault on the National Endowment for the Arts--he spurred the elimination of critics' fellowships in 1984--but his conclusion about the current effectiveness of the federal arts agency seems unfortunately accurate. Two recent books, Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics by Jane Alexander and Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America by Michael Brenson, attempt to explicate this sorry state of affairs. They're an oddly complementary couple: Brenson's book focuses on the history of the often controversial individual artists' fellowship program, while Alexander's barely mentions the elimination of these Endowment-defining grants.

Command Performance begins with Jane Alexander's upbringing and ends with her departure from the NEA in 1997 after serving as its chair for four years. Like Leaving Town Alive, by her predecessor John Fronhmayer, Alexander's memoir is essentially a bildungsroman, a coming of age story in which an idealistic agency head loses her innocence in the snakepit of corruption and ambition that is Washington. Frohnmayer attempted to whitewash his hapless record; at least Alexander is more self critical. (She castigates herself for dissing performance artist Annie Sprinkle in a letter to Jesse Helms' staff and characterizes the NEA after the 1996 elections as "on life support.") Such memoirs constitute a genre like Presidential Libraries, predictably packed with self promotion and lacking a clearly identifiable audience apart from "posterity."

In these pages, Alexander comes across as warm-hearted and genuinely sensitive to the plight of artists, and those interested in her family and professional life on stage and screen will find lots to read. For the rest of us, the book's chief virtue is the insight it offers into the political jungle. Presumably never-before-published letters between Endowment- and Helms staffers remind us of the seige mentality at the NEA after the election of the Newt Gingrich's "Contract-With-America" class of '94. Advice on how to be an effective chair comes to Alexander from many quarters. Roger Stevens, the former NEA head, counsels her to speak directly to the President. It took nearly two years for her to squeeze a meeting onto the Oval Office schedule, and for her troubles Alexander received only the warning she'd already heard everywhere: The public is simply not going to stand for funding controversial art. She (pop) psychologizes that Bill Clinton is such a "people person" that art's inherent remove doesn't interest him.

Alas, Alexander comes off as much a naif as an innocent. In referring to Ron Athey's controversial performance at the Walker Art Center that involved the blotting of blood, she observes that "My hunch was that the rampant homophobia among conservatives was fueling the outrage over Athey." A hunch? She soon recounts an event in Topeka, Kansas at which picketers from the religious right hold signs reading "FAG-JANE-NEA." She also swallows the Clinton Justice Department's explanation for appealing to the Supreme Court the so-called NEA 4 decision, which had been decided in favor of the artists whose grants had been denied on political grounds. The administration's can't-lose spin? The Justice Department was attempting to obtain a definitive ruling in favor of free expression. Surprisingly, her never-articulated views on artistic quality lead her to the conclusion that current art is "tame" and we no longer "have a Shakespeare" today. Perhaps this is why she proudly waxes about educational collaborations with the Health and Human Services Department and cultural tourism initiatives with the Department of Commerce, while glossing over the loss of individual artists fellowships in just a few sentences.

Of course, the Culture Wars did not erupt full-blown in the 1980s. Both Brenson and Alexander discuss the difficulties the NEA faced during its reauthorization process in 1968. Although at that time "radical" art had nothing to do with identity politics or AIDS, Congress found the individual fellowship program and individual artists themselves troublesome. Michael Brenson, in his dense and meticulously researched inquiry, quotes Congressman William A. Steiger, a self-styled advocate of the arts, who asserted that federal arts dollars should be given to "those institutions, organizations and groups that have legitimate reasons for their existence." In other words, fealty to the American ideal of support for the individual rarely matters in the face of larger, more conservative and influential entities with power and money. In the 1990s "those institutions" included the state arts agencies, some of whose staffs shamelessly supported the siphoning off of funds from the NEA to their own organizations.

Brenson's primary aim in Visionaries and Outcasts is to understand why, at the inception of the NEA in 1965, visual artists were valued as vital members of American society and vilified as self-indulgent, even disloyal troublemakers thirty years later. For the fiscal year 1996 budget, Congress drastically reduced the NEA's funding, eliminated individual fellowships for visual artists (but not writers), and promised the elimination of the agency. Brenson commendably takes a long view on the social context that enabled the current Culture Wars. Postwar attitudes about modern art were embodied in Congressman George A. Dondero notorious observation that "Modern art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress." But Brenson might have taken an even longer view: Assaults on contemporary American art (and abortion) can be traced back to Anthony Comstock over a century ago. As a special postal inspector, Comstock denounced the plays of George Bernard Shaw, instigated the arrest of the art dealer Herman Knoedler, raided the Art Students League in 1906 for its use of nude models, and cautioned that "obscene, lewd and indecent" photographs are "commonly but mistakenly called art." Plus ca change…

What, then, accounts for the sea change in attitude during the 1960s? Cold War politics. The now well-known funding of Abstract Expressionist exhibitions by the CIA was about to be revealed in the early 60s and the Kennedy-, Johnson- and Nixon administrations all supported a federal arts agency both as an emblem of American freedom and a symbol of their own liberality. Interestingly Eisenhower's famous warning about the military-industrial complex was widely paraphrased by planners of the NEA and numerous cultural commentators of the day. Art would be useful, they believed, in leavening a society fixated on science, technology and materialism. From our current, techno-gilded-age perspective, such idealism is refreshing, to say the least.

In its chronology-defying structure (the chapter on 1995, for instance, is followed by a second chapter devoted to the Peer Panel Process, which begins in the 80s), Visionaries and Outcasts offers a comprehensive history of the individual artists' fellowship program. Brenson introduces the visual art program directors-Henry Geldzahler ("autocratic"), Brian O'Doherty ("dictatorial"), James Melchert (committed to diversity and stengthening the "field"), Jacob Lawrence ("ineffective spokesman for the field") and James Rosenquist ("fixated on…resale rights.") He describes the evolution of the peer panel process from nomination to application procedures, and the expansion of the awards from the undifferentiated category of art, meaning painting and sculpture, to the genres familiar today such as photography and conceptual/performance art. Despite Brenson's criticisms of individual directors, it's largely a record of thoughtful NEA personnel and public-spirited, artist-panel members. The difficulty of being a panelist was best expressed by Brenson's interview subject, artist Newton Harrison, who, as chair of the visual arts policy panel, sat in on many peers panels in 1978. "The charge to the panels, sometimes unspoken, sometimes spoken, was to choose the best work but be careful how you define best," Harrison told Brenson. "Look for the greatest creativity. Don't be afraid to fund something that's crude, that feels very creative against something that's very refined." Brenson also chronicles the increasingly nasty, anti-artist tone of the NEA chairs's influential advisory group, the National Council on the Arts.

The inability of the NEA to continue to directly support experimental art and individual artists reflects both the political demonization of artists by the right and Americans' perennial ambivalence toward artists, whether perceived as visionaries, outcasts, or (more recently) corrupt art-world insiders. The tensions of 1968 presaged congressional conflicts to come, yet nobody within the NEA seemed to grasp how the agency might have been preserved in its originally adventurous form and spirit. Hindsight may be easy, but if we can turn back the clock to 1977 when the NEA budget stood at $124 million (it is currently around $100 million) I'd offer this advice to any NEA chief: Fund projects in each of the 435 congressional districts and support every artist's right of free expression.