Art attack Essay Example For Students

Art attack Essay The show ended at San Franciscos Theater Rhinoceros one February night like any other. The audience applauded and went home; the cast washed up and headed out. One actor, pleased enough with his performance in a variety of roles in Joe Pintauros Wild Blue among them, a gay uncle making amends with an estranged niece and a gay actor with a younger lover left the theatre around 10:30, and within a couple of blocks was attacked by four men. Faggot! they screamed, as they punched and kicked him. He appeared on stage the next night with 20 stitches in his head. Incidents of violence against gay men and lesbians rose 31 per cent last year, with nearly 2,000 cases reported, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF). Many more incidents go unreported. In one community survey, one out of four gay people said theyd experienced physical abuse; three out of four said they had been verbally abused. Across America, gay-bashing has become a sport. On warm weekend nights, young men fill their trunks with beers and baseball bats and drive into gay neighborhoods, where its open season on queers. Experts explain that typical bashers men between the ages of 15 and 25 are acting out of profound anxiety about their own sexual identity. Gays are achieving more visibility and a modicum of political power: gay rights legislation in Americas largest cities and several states; gay caucuses in churches and synagogues, some of which are ordaining gay and lesbian clergy; graduate students writing dissertations on gay and lesbian themes hoping to get Ph.D.s, and later jobs, in gay and lesbian studies. And in response, homophobes compensate with personal enforcement. They lash out, as if their own sexual insecurity and a perceived threat to their privilege could be beaten into oblivion. Things have gotten so bad in some neighborhoods of San Francisco, says Adele Prandini, artistic director of the gay and lesbian Theater Rhinoceros, Im getting letters from people saying they can no longer come to our theatre because they dont feel safe. A few weeks after the Wild Blue actor was attacked, a gay man was beaten unconscious on the same corner. Hes been in a coma ever since. Public response to such crimes, gay activists charge, ranges from discreet sympathy to utter indifference. The press has often been reluctant to report the gay-related aspects of bias crime. In New York, an anti-bias crime bill has been languishing in the state legislature for years, vehemently opposed by the Republican majority because the bill dares to define gay-bashing as a hate crime. Public schools have caved in to pressure from local religious institutions, refusing to include homosexuals in curricula aimed at combatting prejudice. Indeed, the NGLTF, releasing its annual report on gay-bashing in March, blamed political, religious and entertainment industry leaders for fostering a climate of homophobia in which violent assaults are tolerated and in some cases, even encouraged. This is the real trickle-down effect, Prandini says. The violence outside our theatre happens, in part, because anti-gay hatred is being fanned by people in power. The Vatican, for instance, in its 1986 l etter on the pastoral care of homosexuals declared, People should not be surprised when a morally offensive lifestyle is physically attacked. For gay men and lesbians working in the arts and by extension, all gay men and lesbians this second epidemic reaches beyond beatings outside bars and slurs snarled on streetcorners, to an aggressive strike against their most fundamental rights of expression. The infamous pledge on National Endowment for the Arts applications, for instance, equated homosexuality with obscenity, at the very time, says performance artist Tim Miller, when the need for representation is crucial to the ecology of gay and lesbian life. Little theatres in small cities (the very spaces that would surely be lost if the NEA were to close down, or decide to fund only the Metropolitan Museums and Boston Philharmonics) often must remove the funding credits on programs for Millers performances; still, audiences, especially young audiences, flock to his shows, he says, desperately needing to see images of ourselves other than the monstrous serial killers Hollywood keeps offering up. Of course, homophobia is nothing new in American culture, and the current melee can only be understood in the context of a wider onslaught a retrenchment, really against irreversible changes in Americas population, workforce, family structure and values. Gays, as during the purges of the McCarthy era, remain an acceptable target, especially as they represent, in conservative corners, a nexus of menace: subversive art, rejection of the nuclear family, repudiation of traditional gender roles and now, AIDS. Bashers take swings in a vain effort to stave off change. Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan has, at least figuratively, wielded the bat himself, blaming gay men for AIDS and calling the virus divine retribution on an immoral lifestyle of a pederast proletariat. Most notoriously, he has bashed gays as a means of attacking the NEA. In this instance, the powers that be have been far from indifferent: They have joined the mob. Last February Buchanans campaign aired a television commercial in Georgia that showed frames of dancing men from Marlon Riggss elegiac film Tongues Untied while a voiceover charged President Bush with wast our tax dollars on pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show. Did the President (or any other candidate) publicly reject such a crass appeal to prejudice? No. Politicians make a cold if erroneous calculation that they will lose votes if they champion gay rights, says Urvashi Vaid, executive director of the NGLTF. Buchanans incendiary statements must be challenged by political leaders, but get attent ion only from the gay and lesbian community. Instead, the President responded by dismissing John Frohnmayer as chairman of the NEA, which had indirectly contributed $5,000 to the film about black gay men. Its a mistake, however, to blame Buchanan alone for forcing Frohnmayer to resign. Frohnmayer had been the target of a two-year campaign by Vice President Dan Quayle and then White House chief of staff John Sununu, who wanted to bulldoze the NEA into institutionalizing content-based criteria for arts funding; meanwhile, the justice Department actually suggested that the NEA remove from its mission statement a clause saying that every citizen of the United States is guaranteed freedom of expression. At the same time, the new, nationally organized, high-tech grassroots organization, the Christian Coalition, led by evangelical minister and 1988 Presidential candidate Pat Robertson (who supports Bush over Buchanan this time around), inundated the White House with petitions in February coincidently, just as the Buchanan ad was aired calling for the ouster of Frohnmayer. Certainly, none of these threats to the integrity of the NEA could come as a surprise. Since 1980, when Reagan first proposed dismantling the NEA altogether, the agency has remained an embarrassment to the Republican White House. As with so many other issues a voucher system for parochial schools, affirmative action rollbacks Reagan introduced a proposal that seemed too far out for congressional support. But the Bush administration, often egged on by sensationalist campaigns by the radical Right, has brought these proposals into the realm of respectable discussion, and the longer theyre discussed, the more legitimacy they seem to acquire. With each incremental gain dissent becomes more difficult. Without making a big claim for a causal connection, one may ask whether a climate in which the public has come to accept government restrictions on certain kinds of expression when it comes to art makes, for instance, the Pentagons ability to control news coverage of the Gulf War that much more acceptable. In the ongoing debate  over the National Endowment, proponents of arts funding have emphasized free-speech guarantees in arguing against content-based restrictions. In a stirring speech after his dismissal about Sen. Jesse Helmss attempts to prohibit the NEA from funding obscenity, Frohnmayer himself stated, All of us in government are sworn to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and for two-thirds of both houses to have voted for the last Helms language, which would pass constitutional muster on no level, in my view violates that oath. But artists embroiled in the controversy, as well as gay and lesbian critics and activists, have been frustrated by the arts communitys failure to recognize, name and renounce the homophobia driving attacks by Buchanan, Helms, American Family Association head Donald Wildmon and others. Playwright Tony Kushner points out that arts community leaders dont sufficiently acknowledge the extent to which gay and lesbian artists have been prime targets of the anti-art frenzy. Whats more, instead of understanding how gaybashing sets an acceptable ground for arts-bashing in general, activists explain, mainstream artists have often tried to distance themselves from the work under fire, arguing that most NEA money funds unobjectionable work, such as symphony orchestras and ballet companies. Many are fond of quoting a statistic showing that of the 64 cents each American taxpayer contributes to the NEA each year less than paltry to begin with only .02 cents goes to potentially controversial art. As actor Christopher Reeve told a crowd of some 2,000 rallying in New York against NEA restrictions in 1990, Were not fringe; were mainstream. This line of argument misses the point. For one thing, as performance artist Holly Hughes puts it, That so little money is spent on controversial work, work that challenges our complacency or that makes us look at whats going on in the world, is not something to brag about. For another, it just doesnt wash in Protestant-ethic America. Theres a longstanding mistrust of artists who represent, in our national tradition, the antithesis of all thats encompassed by the phrase traditional family values the cornerstone not only of campaigns of Buchanan, Helms and Wildmon, but the platform on which the American electorate put Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the White House. Artists are traditionally thought of as bohemian, explains Zelda Fichhandler, artistic director of the Acting Company and of New York Universitys graduate acting program. The arts permit maverick styles of living you dont have to have a house and two children to live in the arts world. So were considered nonconformist, nonconventional, even frivolous. Commenting on the pro-Nea mail coming from his constituency last year, one Congress member remarked, Most of my favorable letters are coming from actors and artists and very few from real people. Its no wonder artists arent counted as real people. According to an NEA report developed under Frank Hodsolls chairmanship, only nine American states require art classes in high school; more than 80 per cent of Americans have had no lessons in visual arts, ballet, creative writing, art appreciation or music appreciation. In Cincinnati in 1990, of 50 prospective jurors being considered for the obscenity trial of the Contemporary Arts Center, which had exhibited Robert Mapplethorpes photographs, the New York Times reported, only three had ever been to an art museum. With the examples of contemporary Western Art, as EssayThe U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the law was, indeed, unconstitutional, but when the case moved on to the Supreme Court, no majority decision was reached. With Justice Powell absent due to illness, the Court was divided four-to-four, which meant that the ruling reverted to the Appeals Court decision and was therefore thrown out. Echoing one of Platos and later antitheatricalists biggest objections to actors, arguments supporting the statute focused heavily on the idea of role models. Just as Plato warned that art threatens the state by acquainting the public with evils that otherwise remain in the world of dreams, advocates of the Oklahoma law worried that pro-gay teachers, straight and gay alike, might give innocent pupils wicked ideas that would otherwise never occur to them. The Supreme Court hearings were a very scary moment, recalls Hunter, who attended the oral arguments in 1985. This should have been a blindingly simple First Amendment decision. It was amazing that four Justices could find those kinds of restrictions on speech to be constitutional. A year later, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Court, in upholding Georgias anti-sodomy laws, ruled that the right to privacy does not extend to gay men and lesbians. Indeed, the Court opinion explicitly stated that certain sexual acts were no business of the state when performed by consenting heterosexual adults, but could be deemed illegal when engaged in by partners of the same sex. Thus gay and lesbian expression of the most intimate kind was officially excluded from constitutional protection. Describing or depicting such relationships, then, could easily be banished to a realm beyond the compass of the First Amendment. Certainly the aids  epidemic has brought these issues to the surface, as it has increased the visibility of gay men, for better and for worse. If a centuries-old association has linked gays to the arts, a simple syllogism of popular understanding now links the arts to AIDS. Crudely put, the reasoning runs: Arts=Gays; GAYS=AIDS; therefore, ARTS=AIDS. Never mind that this hysteria-driven logic is based on stereotypes and incomplete information, it goes a long way toward explaining the rancor toward art that deals with sexuality. Antitheatrical tirades over hundreds of years have often used disease imagery to denounce the dangerous contagion of the stage. Most virulently, the 17th-century English Puritans railed against the Elizabethan playhouses as hotbeds of impurity and contamination, both literal and figurative. As illness itself was considered a moral sentence, a sort of physical manifestation of evil inclinations, disease and blasphemy were wrapped up together in harangues against the theatre. Perhaps the most extreme example of the periods countless pamphlets calling for abolishing theatre (which was achieved with the closing of the playhouses in 1642) was William Prynnes Histriomastix (1633), a venomous and voluminous diatribe whose repetitious and remonstrative rhetoric prefigures that of Jesse Helms so precisely, its tempting to think that the North Carolina senator has studied it. In the extended title alone Prynne fulminates, That popular Stage-playes (the very Pompes of the Divell which we renoun ce in Baptisme, if we beleeve the Fathers) are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly Spectacles, and most pernicious Corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable Mischiefes to Churches, to Republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men. And that the Profession of Play-poets, of Stage players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of Stage-playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians. He filibusters on paper in this manner for hundreds and hundreds of pages. Some 300 years seem to vanish when Helms stands on the Senate floor waving this or that federally funded abomination or obscenity, instructing women to leave the room, describing how ill he feels at even contemplating such filth. Repeating this now trademark and highly theatrical trope, Helms has wagged Mac Wellman scripts, phone sex ads, Mapplethorpe photos, Public Broadcasting videocassettes, and has called for the banning of them all. One of the first props Helms brandished in what has become encore after encore of outrage, was a safe-sex comic book published by Gay Mens Health Crisis. In the battle over this audience-specific manual, AIDS and gay expression converge, and the question of government funding for objectionable material is played most blatantly in this double context. The controversy over the GMHC booklet, says Cindy Patton, author of Inventing AIDS, came at the end of a longer struggle between community health agencies and the Centers for Disease Control. In its first grants to community-based organizations for educational materials, the CDC included a line taken from obscenity law stating that any material produced needs to conform to community standards of decency. Some gay and AIDS activists objected, but there was little fuss surrounding this demand until the mid-80s, when the Los Angeles County Board of Health pulled a pamphlet on how to clean intravenous drug works saying it would be offensive to people who saw it. Suddenly it became clear that the community standards in question did not belong to the community to whom a publication was addressed, but to anyone who might come across it. In debates on every Aids-education funding bill that followed, Helms was able to attach riders prohibiting federal funding of any material that promotes ho mosexuality or promiscuity. His success stems from labelling such a pamphlet pornographic. You use that word, says Holly Hughes, and its like a blanket of panic has been thrown over the work that keeps you from seeing whats going on from seeing the lifesaving value of safe sex education, or, in the case of labelling our performances pornographic, from simply seeing what the work is like. According to Patton, Helmss ability to establish this obscenity precedent within public health added a pseudo-scientific basis to a more general queasiness about queer expression. I dont know if anyone ever said that Mapplethorpe is depicting things that cause AIDS, but there was already a public health doublespeak in place for imagining that. In terms of the NEA debate, Patton adds that people who defend the generally mainstream nature of the art the agency supports, talk about how this inappropriate art slipped through the cracks. Theres a tacitly homophobic implication in this image bad art snuck up from behind and buggered us. On a deeper level, theres a metonymic structure whereby public health concerns are available as a kind of justification: If obscene art can slip through this way, theres the possibility of other transmissions. It all adds up to a grand teleology: If degenerate art continues, it will end with everyone getting AIDS. Such degenerate art poses other threats as well, threats that have been decried throughout the centuries of antitheatricalism, and that are particularly tangible at this moment in American history. As borders dissolve, or are at least disputed, across the globe, the boundaries by which people situate and define themselves also enter a state of flux. The only boundaries people can rely on, it seems, are those delineated by their own skin. People steel themselves in gender divisions a major American preoccupation these days, as the abundance of scholarship and performances involving cross-dressing suggest. Confronting homosexuality challenges the certainty of such divisions, however, and calls into question the only distinction that seemed sure. Of course, theatre has always been a place of border-crossing, of transgression, as Plato and so many after him recognized. Attacks on theatre were most vicious when it flouted borders of sexuality, the most flagrant threat to the social order. In Histriomastix, for instance, Prynne charged theatre with impugning the moral precept of each individuals absolute identity. God, he rants, hath given a uniform and distinct and proper being to every creature, the bounds of which may not be exceeded Hence he enjoynes all men at all times to act themselves, not others. Its no surprise that much of what Prynne and his cohorts take issue with is the practice at the time of boys playing women, and of sexuality run amok. The category of homosexuality wasnt really available to them as a concept, explains Jonathan Goldberg, author of the forthcoming Sodometries, an examination of the spectacle of sodomy in the Renaissance. But its clear that theyre objecting to men having sex with each other, to a category of debauchery that violates certain limits. The current attacks,  says Michael Kahn, artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C., are not about art. Theyre about sexuality. And thus as Kahn knows because hes currently directing Measure for Measure theyre also about government. As Michael Wamer, author of Fear of a Queer Planet, sees it, America is caught up in a deep cultural struggle over what democracy means. Will it be defined by the conservative view, which sees the highest possible degree of agreement among state, media and public opinion and implicitly, the arts as its greatest achievement? Where having more than 90 per cent of the populace supporting the Gulf War is seen as a sign of a good democracy? Or will we have a democracy defined by the greatest separation among state, cultural production and media, with little emphasis on mainstream or majority views? Where diversity flourishes? This is the question being waged on the battleground of the queer body. Artists are apt to lose if only because we tend to prefer the latter idea of democracy while insisting were full participants in the former. Artists are incredibly stupid about politics, suggests Tony Kushner. One reason Wildmon and Helms are so successful is that theyre right: The arts in this country do represent a largely liberal humanist viewpoint. You cant do a pro-Klan play in a resident theatre without everybody quitting. But were unwilling to articulate our ideology, to say: |Yes. This is what we stand for. Its the human way to be. In Measure for Measure the unruly polis is turned over to a law-and-order government, which tries to impose strict restraints on rampant sexuality, source of joy as well as transmitter of disease. Its clear enough that Angelos absolutist reign is cruel and ineffectual, though Shakespeare, naturally, doesnt offer any solution other than the ordering and restorative powers of theatrical art itself.