On the Controversy at the National Portrait Gallery

Last Tuesday, under pressure from GOP leadership, officials at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC removed the David Wojnarowicz’s video installation A Fire in My Belly (1987).  The four-minute excerpt from the original thirty-minute video was included as part of the NPG’s well-received exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The exhibition examines the role gender and sexuality – particularly homosexuality – plays in the production and reception of American portraiture. Co-curated by NPG curator David Ward and the highly respected scholar Jonathan Katz, “Hide/Seek” shook the Gallery from its conservative stupor and delved into themes relatively common in academia.  An open-letter circulated by NPG researcher Jenn Sichel describes the exhibitions as “a look at how artists navigate around a complex set of codes that govern sexual expression, how they circumvent and/or use these code to express their own silenced desires and how they’ve dealt with love and loss when AIDS ravaged the community.”

Wojnarowicz’s video is a response to the AIDS epidemic that swept through America in the 1980s, and was made in honor of Wojnarowicz’s partner, artist Peter Hujar, who died of AIDS complications in 1987 (Wojnarowicz himself died of AIDS in 1992).  Fire in My Belly is a meandering, stream-of-consciousness work which uses the iconography of the crucifixion, circuitously commenting on the suffering of marginalization. According to the Catholic League, the video is “hate speech... designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians.” 

What’s so offensive? The eleven seconds during which ants crawl across a crucifix.  There is, of course, some irony in the Catholic League criticizing a work deeply indebted to the very long iconographic tradition of the Man of Sorrows – an irony, which in most cases, would be laughable. But this time, ignorance had some very real consequences. 

House Speaker-Elect John Boehner (R-Ohio) called the exhibition a misuse of taxpayer money. Boehner’s spokesman, Kevin Smith, said in a statement that “American families have a right to expect better for recipients of taxpayer funds in a tough economy.” Smith then clarified with a threat: “Smithsonian officials should either acknowledge the mistake and correct it, or be prepared to face tough scrutiny beginning in January."  Both Boehner and Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) demanded that the entire exhibition be pulled because Wojnarowicz’s installation is “an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season.

So, added up, that's homosexuals, Christmas, and lefty artists - the GOP’s favorite trifecta.  Though Boehner and Cantor are hiding behind the thinly veiled excuses of the Catholic League, this is not about images which are offensive to Christians — museums all over the world are filled with grotesque images of Christ’s suffering (seventeenth-century Spanish artists were enthralled with the gory details of the crucifixion). Nor is it about Christmas. It’s about the representation of homosexuality in American culture.  “Hide/Seek” is an exhibition that’s long overdue, and The Smithsonian was wrong to cower to the demands of the so-called culture warriors. 

Twenty-one years ago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, under similar pressure, took a huge hit to its credibility when it canceled an exhibition of new works by the gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Ten-plus years later, I worked for the very talented curator who was fired over the cancellation, a decision she deeply regretted making and from which her reputation still suffered.  She didn’t regret the decision solely because of the impact it had on her career, but rather because she had violated what curators are fundamentally charged to do: decide on, and contextualize, the expressions they think matter most.  Curators should be committed to the ideas that art reflects, however controversial or unpopular they may be. It’s the audiences’ job to decide on the merits of a curator’s arguments and judge those choices for itself.  In that regard, the Transformer Gallery in D.C. should be celebrated for immediately installing Wojnarowicz’s video (it began screening on Thursday).

Cantor has said that taxpayer-funded museums should reflect “common standards of decency.”  But, as I’ve expressed here many times, I doubt such “common standards” exist now.  Homosexuality is a not only part of American culture. It has and continues to play a sizeable role in the production and reception of art.  To leave out subjective experiences of identity would be to deny the realities of the lives of artists, and would elide majors contributions to the history of art (Leonardo, Caravaggio, Andy Warhol, etc.).  And to those who express offense over the expression of lived experiences, I suggest following Blake Gopnick’s advice: “vote with [your] feet, and avoid the art [you] don’t like.”