Whose Art Is It, Anyway?

By MARGARET CARLSON

Art and politics are often a volatile mix. Add sex, and the mix becomes combustible. A case in point: on June 12 Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art abruptly canceled an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's work, which included sadomasochistic and homoerotic photographs. "We really felt this exhibit was at the wrong place at the wrong time," explained museum director Christina Orr-Cahall. "We had the strong potential to become some persons' political platform."

The "persons" Orr-Cahall was talking about are mostly on Capitol Hill, and they oversee the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, which partly subsidized the Mapplethorpe show with a $30,000 grant. The NEA was already enmeshed in controversy over an earlier grant of $15,000 to photographer Andres Serrano, among whose works is a picture titled Piss Christ, depicting a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine. Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in March, produced equally provocative work: his oeuvre includes pictures of nude children in erotic poses, a man urinating into another's mouth, and other violent and homosexually explicit poses. When some of the work was exhibited at New York's Whitney Museum last summer, there were averted eyes, even among those who make a career out of being avant-garde and supersophisticated.

The First Amendment has never entertained a blush factor. Free artistic expression is broadly guaranteed. The question is whether the right of free expression carries along with it the privilege of federal subsidy. New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, who tore up the Serrano catalog on the Senate floor, concedes the artist's "right to produce filth" but adds that "taxpayers' dollars should not be utilized to promote it."

The protest quickly spread across the political spectrum. On May 18, 36 Senators signed a letter asking for changes in the NEA's grant-making procedures so that "shocking, abhorrent and completely undeserving" art would not get money. At the prompting of Texas Congressman Dick Armey, 107 members of the House sent a similar letter to the endowment.

The congressional letters and the Corcoran withdrawal incited the ire of arts partisans who contend that withholding funds or threatening to do so amounts to Government censorship. Political whim, their argument goes, should not be the judge of art. What shocks one generation -- a Madonna set in a shabby tenement, for example -- is treasured by a later one. Moreover, art that flouts convention by dealing with the extremities of the human condition is the work most in need of support.

The other side holds that Mapplethorpe's work is pornography posing as art. His works, this faction contends, should be shown privately, preferably in a red-light district. In fact, some of Mapplethorpe's work is so graphic that if authorities had chosen to do so, they could have prosecuted him for child pornography, which has no First Amendment protection.

The howls of protest from the arts lobby are timely since the NEA this year must undergo its five-year budget review. Congressman Sidney Yates of Illinois, a stalwart supporter of the arts whose subcommittee oversees the NEA, has asked acting endowment chairman Hugh Southern to come up with a way to make the endowment more accountable for its grants without opening the door to congressional micromanagement. Southern says he hopes to produce "something that's agreeable to all parties that doesn't get into any kind of chilling of expression."

Agreeable to all parties, of course, is the rub. It will always be politically safer to fund an exhibit of old masters than an exhibit of unproven work. Two weeks ago at a meeting in his office, Yates confronted NEA critic Armey with a Picasso painting of the Crucifixion, which offended many people in the 1930s. Armey admitted that he was not offended by the Picasso, but did not concede anything about Mapplethorpe. Armey warned that if the Mapplethorpe catalog is plunked down on the table during the debate on NEA funding, its budget would be "blown out of the water."

The Washington Project for the Arts is shopping around for a museum willing to present the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and a laser artist is making plans to project images of Mapplethorpe's photos on the Corcoran Gallery's facade. By canceling the Mapplethorpe show, the Corcoran's Orr-Cahall hoped to deflate the flap and engender serious reflection about what is art, what is not and what the Government should support. Those, she admits, are questions to which "no one has yet found answers."

With reporting by Melissa August/Washington