You may have seen the recent headlines about a major Washington, D.C. museum bowing to pressure by yanking a video from its exhibit. Well, we have just learned that a Lower East Side gallery has begun to show the 20-minute video in its entirety.  This screening happens to coincide with my Sat. Dec. 18 Soho/ Lower East Side gallery tour, and our group will be there front and center.  Tear yourself away from holiday shopping for just the short length of my tour, because for contemporary art-lovers who value REAL freedom (not the Republican kind), this video is a must-see.

The religious right wing, along with its strongest ally – the re-invigorated Republican Party – is once again flexing its considerable muscle against contemporary art.   The piece in question was part of a show addressing issues of sexual and gender identity, and the artist was gay, having died years ago from complications related to AIDS.  The scene that the Catholic League most objected to involved a crucifix that a man was envisioning as he himself was dying of the same disease.  The incoming Republican House Speaker John Boehner had thrown his full support behind the museum’s action, strongly implying that its future federal funding could be jeopardized.

The Washington museum’s recent actions feel like deja-vu all over again.  In the 1980s, the National Endowment for the Arts funded Robert Mapplethorpe’s Project X photos to be part of a larger traveling museum exhibit.  One stop was supposed to be the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C., which had agreed to display the work, until religious right-wing groups such as the American Family Association raised a stink, leading the museum’s board of directors to cancel the show.  Later on, a Cincinnati museum director actually had to go to trial over exhibiting the same show, though the judge eventually dropped all charges.

At around the same time, religious groups and Republicans vilified “The Piss Christ,” a photo by Brazilian artist Andres Serrano that featured a crucifix submerged in urine.  As my gallery tour attendees witnessed a couple of years ago, when this photo appeared in a Chelsea gallery, it turns out to be an aesthetically stunning work, practically glorifying religion if you didn’t know what the liquid was.

In 1990, four artists who had been awarded grants from the National Endowment of the Arts had their grants revoked by the then-current chairman of the N.E.A., who was serving under a Republican president.  Three of the four artists were gay, naturally.  Eventually all four artists won back their grants by court order, but congressional funding of the N.E.A. nosedived afterwards and has not recovered since.

And in the year 2000, NYC’s Republican mayor Rudolph Giuliani tried unsuccessfully to shut down a Brooklyn Museum show entitled “Sensation,” that included as one of its works an image of the Madonna that was surrounded by elephant dung (a material, it turns out, that certain African tribes use with the intent to honor).  Later on Giuliani tried to cut off ALL public funding to that museum and thereby shut it down for good.

The most recently censored art by a Washington museum – the one we will see for ourselves on Saturday – has all the markings of the previous controversies.

Rafael Risemberg, Ph.D.
Founder and Director
New York Gallery Tours