In the line of fire

In the line of fire

The arts community is in an uproar over Speaker of the House
Newt Gingrich’s attempts to terminate both the National Endowment
for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The
Bruin gets reactions from those affected at UCLA and beyond.

"Museums cannot afford to do exhibitions just out of their
annual budget. All exhibitions in all museums of any significant
size have funding that makes those exhibitions possible. And it’s
usually a combination of public and private money."

Stephanie Barron

Senior Curator

20th Century Art, LACMA

By Nisha Gopalan

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, R-Ga.,within less than a
month as Speaker, managed to raise even Republican eyebrows by
blasting federal funding of the arts and humanities.

Gingrich and his supporters introduced two bills into Congress
on Jan. 19 that call for the termination of the National Endowment
for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities
(NEH), the two government organizations responsible for spending
approximately $345 million in grants and endowments each year in
the arts and humanities fields.

"They are simply enclaves of the left using your money to
propagandize your children against your values," Gingrich said in a
Washington Times interview.

As loudly as Gingrich’s voice decrees the NEA and NEH unworthy
of federal money, equally powerful voices from the Los Angeles art
and humanities communities contest the House bills.

Gingrich resurrected last year’s controversy surrounding L.A.
artist Ron Athey to illustrate the questionable nature of NEA
funding.

Athey gained notoriety after the Associated Press ran a story
about his show at a NEA-funded gallery in Minneapolis, where he
performed an African scarification by cutting into another man’s
back. The HIV-positive Athey blotted the blood-pattern on a towel
and suspended that towel into the air.

"I don’t think there’s an automatic right to coerce the taxpayer
so we can finance people to do weird things," Gingrich said.

"Well, we don’t have a choice about being expected to pay for
(Republican senator and NEA foe) Jesse Helm’s salary," says Athey,
artist, author and assistant-to-the-editor at the LA Weekly.

"All you have to do is say, ‘Your tax dollars paid for this.’
And everybody freaks out, when, in actuality, I’ve never been NEA
funded and that show wasn’t NEA funded," Athey says. But because
the gallery received "vaguely 5 percent of their general funding"
from the NEA, NEA opposition manipulated the situation to attack
the NEA.

"I don’t think they (opponents to the NEA) even care what I’m
doing, except that they know it’s a good target against the NEA,"
Athey continues. "They didn’t fund anyone controversial this year,
so they had to indirectly find me."

Those who oppose the NEA garnered support through the
exaggerated accounts of the performance that evoked a picture of
"blood being flung around and that people were running out of
there." In actuality, there was no dripping blood and a few people
did leave, but there was no crowd hysteria.

"Even though it wasn’t my blood, they were worried that they
could catch AIDS from the air," explains Athey who notes that the
original article about his Minneapolis performance was "written by
someone who didn’t even see the piece."

The articles have, according to Athey and supporters of the NEA,
a short-sighted picture of where NEA money goes and is exactly what
NEA/NEH opposition wants the American public to see.

The organization provides only partial funding to galleries and
museums, most being relatively "risk-free."

Even for larger, high-profile institutions such as the Los
Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art (LACMA), the eradication of the
NEA will cause a significant loss to the annual budget. Despite the
opinions by NEA opposition who claim that institutions can find
alternate means of funding, according to Stephanie Barron, senior
curator of 20th-century art at LACMA, difficulties exist in
petitioning private and corporate institutions for funding.

"When you get a grant from the NEA or the NEH, it’s a tremendous
magnet for private and corporate money because, in a way, it’s a
validation that the project is worthy. Getting federal money allows
an institution to go out and fundraise rather vigorously to bring
in outside money," Barron says.

If LACMA is unable to match the lost money, "without question,"
Barron says, the quality and scope of art show will suffer. "I
think it would really change the whole chain of how art is produced
and how it moves into the marketplace and how it moves into the
arena for the public to see it, in terms of contemporary and in
terms of historical art."

"Museums cannot afford to do exhibitions just out of their
annual budget. All exhibitions in all museums of any significant
size have funding that makes those exhibitions possible. And it’s
usually a combination of public and private money," Barron
says.

If a well known institution such as LACMA will face obstacles in
obtaining private and corporate funding, one should consider the
difficulties faced by smaller establishments.

NEA contributions constitute a small, yet crucial 15 percent to
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions’ (LACE) overall budget. LACE
represents the smaller and lesser known establishment that presents
new artwork of any media, granting opportunities to cutting-edge
artists.

"For something that takes significant risks," says Easton?,
"it’s less likely that there will be corporate money
available."

But Easton looks to the motivation behind the bills’ creators,
"Is this supposed to be a moral statement or is anybody really
imagining that this is going to help balance the budget? It’s (NEA)
a relatively small program." Yet it bears a large impact on both
smaller and larger museums.

On a wider scale, the potential elimination of the NEA also
affects "opera, ballets, community groups, regional theater and
community art centers in small towns," LACMA’s Barron says.

Consequently, the introduction of these two House bills have
beckoned innumerable voices, from groups whom the eradication of
both the NEA and the NEH will affect, to speak up.

Watchdog and advocacy groups such as the National Alliance of
Artists Organization, the American Association of Museums, the
Alliance of American Art Museums, the College Art Association and
the Association of Museum Directors, have all reacted to this
recent congressional news by organizing opposition, some sending
lobbyists to Washington, D.C.

On the university level, voices are equally strong.

"What concrete good the NEH has done," says classics Professor
Bernard Frischer. "It probably represents half of the funding spent
each year in this country on research in the humanities."

The accomplishments of UC Irvine Professor Theodore Brunner, who
in 25 years put all of Greek literature (9,400 texts by 3,200
authors) onto a compact disc, illustrate the fruits of the
government’s funding.

"The lion’s share of funding for this project, which has
revolutionized the field of classics, was borne by the NEH,"
Frischer says.

Henry Hopkins, chair of the UCLA art department and director of
the UCLA at the Armand Hammer Museum, draws attention to the fact
that the "economic impact of the arts is real … The Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York has become the most popular international
tourist attraction in the city." Hopkins says that for every dollar
contributed to the Met, the Met returns five dollars.

The amount the United States invests per year in the NEA
($167,000), Hopkins adds, "represents less than one-fourth of what
the city of Berlin now spends on art subsidies annually for a
population that is less than two percent of the whole United
States."

"And yet the new Republican majority on Capitol Hill,
representing billions of American citizens, would destroy not only
the NEA, but also the NEH … along with it," continues Hopkins,
"not because of the number of people the arts serve, not because of
the money returned to the communities we serve, but simply because
we rattle our cage by provoking thought."

Members of the UCLA academic senate (that consists of UCLA
faculty), of which both Frischer and Hopkins are members, submitted
a resolution on Tuesday that officially opposes the House bills and
expresses support for President Peltason’s efforts to preserve the
NEA and the NEH in their present states. The resolution passed with
a unanimous vote.

"I am extremely gratified by the strong support given by the
colleagues who took the podium to speak and, of course, by the
unanimous vote in favor of the resolution," says Frischer, who
introduced the resolution onto the academic senate floor.

A similar resolution passed on Jan. 28 at UC Santa Barbara.
Faculty have introduced a similar resolution at the UC Berkeley.
And other UC schools have coordinated efforts to oppose anti-NEA
and anti-NEH efforts.

The unified fight amongst UCLA faculty against the abolition of
the NEA and NEH illustrates the fervor with which arts and
humanities groups fight the House bills. In fact, the majority of
United States citizens seemingly support federal funding of the
arts and humanities. Frischer points out a recent poll published in
the New York Times in which 80 percent of the survey participants
were in favor of a government role in the arts and the
humanities.

The results of that poll coupled with the collective efforts to
preserve the NEA and NEH may soon prove that the Republican
majority, led by Gingrich, is actually in the minority.