The following is comprised of quotes and sentiments surrounding the scandalous art climate of the early 1990's.
A MIDSUMMER'S NIGHTMARE: A Morality Play
Dramatis Personae
JESSE HELMS: Constipated, unwanted moralist and undersexed right-wing statesman.
2 LIVE LUKE: Unlikely free-speech martyr and undersexed, overrated rapper.
JOHN FROHNMAYER: Chairman of the federally-funded National Endowment for the Arts; King of the Fairies.
THE FAIRIES: A cadre of artists who have known book-burning, blacklisting, and other forms of censorship. List includes everyone from Judy Blume to Frank Zappa. Except maybe Tom Wolfe.
REV. DONALD WILDMON: Fundamentalist minister and founder of anachronistic American Family Association.
[PROLOGUE]
[Scene: The Mississippi study of fundamentalist Rev. Donald Wildmon, fresh from an art foray. On this day he has witnessed works of art indirectly funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Among the works were a few critical of some of our culture's golden calves. He reads aloud a letter that will accompany photographs of said "art" in a package bound for Washington, D.C.]
WILDMON: "Congress has enough sense to fund art, but they don't have enough sense to know what kind of art they are funding. That's weirdo."
[Scene: A Washington, D.C. address, days later.]
MRS. JESSE HELMS: [Opening mail.] "Lord have mercy, Jesse, I'm not believing this . . ."
[ACT I]
[Scene: A chamber in the bowels of the capital. Enter JESSE HELMS, with others.]
JESSE: Gentlemen! We have vanquished the kingdoms of the East. But we must not rest, for this victory has left us without an issue upon which to posture! There lies within our own borders a ripe foe -- "a coalition of homosexuals and artists and pacifists and every other left-wing group." Now alight! -- and let us not dawdle, for it is an election year, and the moon is nigh!
Others: To the media!
[Exeunt frothing]
[ACT II]
[Scene: A cloakroom in the nation's capital, just aft of a National Press Club luncheon. Enter jaded top GOP svengali ED ROLLINS, steering unidentified member of Washington Times' whitebread staff to an obscure corner.]
ROLLINS: [Leaning over the young pawn.] . . . so "crime and drugs have been big for the last two years, but (the problem is that) they haven't gotten more intense." The way we see it [eyes bulging] "there just aren't that many issues left and the NEA is potentially a big one."
YOUTH: Yes . . . the NEA . . .
[Exit trance-like youth, mumbling. Followed by ROLLINS, with visions of Willie Horton dancing in his head.]
[ACT III]
[Scene: A sweltering Florida nightclub stuffed with art patrons. Crowd hushes to dimming houselights. A tender 2 LIVE LUKE eases from shadows into the spotlight.]
LUKE: I would like to take a minute to sing for you a special song I wrote. It's a song about love. I call it "Dick Almighty". [Crowd erupts.] [House lights flare as the Broward County sheriff's department rushes the stage and cuffs LUKE. En route to bringing LUKE in on an obscenity rap, Broward's finest pass by the nation's only known topless doughnut shop.]
LUKE: That's life in America. [Demands one phone call. Calls broker.]
[ACT IV]
[Scene: Same cloakroom as ACT II. Enter suspiciously-dressed member of the media with woeful NEA chairman JOHN FROHNMAYER, who is brandishing a martini.]
FROHNMAYER: Just watch, you said, it'll backfire on them and put the arts on the front pages. Banned art is hot art -- it's ignoring art that is the real danger, you said. Just wait, you'll have to move the Mapplethorpe exhibit to Fenway Park, you said!
[Losing cool now.] Well, look where the hell watching and waiting have got us: Filmhouses are dropping provocative foreign films. A gallery in Richmond boxed up its nudes last week! Who has benefited from [angrily gestures with martini hand. Its contents scatter.] Somewhere, sometime soon, people will begin to burn their back issues of National Geographic! Then it'll be too late!
[Exit media member, leaving FROHNMAYER alone to grope for his olive. Out of the light, in the room's deepest recess, he spies a long forgotten, dust-covered Fedora. When he turns it over he gasps as he reads aloud the faded name stenciled inside.]
FROHNMAYER: Lenny Bruce! Alas poor Lenny! I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. It was Lenny who first dared test the high-water mark of obscenity.
T'was souls like he who liberated popular art from its cloistered abbey, enabling us to laugh together at life's ironies, our own fallibilities. Lenny died so that we might laugh at our sins, and the sins of authority. Whither this laughter amidst a burgeoning theocracy? Whither, indeed. . .
[Lights down. Curtain closes.]
-- -- --
But the show is far from over. Next month the House and Senate will debate the future of the NEA and explore the limits of the right to free expression.
The 1980s were not a good decade for personal liberties. Well-connected fundamentalists like Senator Helms used extortive tactics in lobbying through to the core of the constitution. School prayer, book-banning, flag-burning, abortion; each issue an attempt by the extreme right to re-create a nation in their own image -- and each a "no confidence" vote in the fabric of the American character and Constitution.
Let's draw the line in this first summer of the 1990s. This summer, support the freedom of choice and expression. Examine more closely the issues surrounding an exhibit near you that has come under fire. Determine for yourself if it is "aesthetically viable," and encourage others do the same. Engage in a lively discourse, if you wish. But let narrow zealots know that while their voices will always have a place in our constitutional democracy, their days of theocratic censorship have come and gone.
There has always been and always will be an avant-garde. These fringe voices crying out in the wilderness have long chronicled the most disturbing but completely honest sentiments of humanity. Given that artisans on both sides of the issue offer that art sources itself in truth, what blissful fool thinks all the truths of the human condition can be contained in a legislated gallery?
