Afterimage, (January 1993)

Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public

During the last three years contemporary art—and contemporary artists—have been at the center of a widely publicized controversy involving the freedom of expression and the limits of state-sponsored culture. This controversy was ignited by attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) by conservative politicians, commentators, and religious activists (e.g. Jesse Helms (R-NC), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), Patrick Buchanan, and Rev. Donald Wildmon). In the course of this debate two antagonistic positions have emerged. On the one hand conservatives argue that individuals shouldn't be forced to pay (through their taxes) for art that offends their religious, sexual, or political values. On the other hand, artists, arts administrators, and sympathetic politicians argue that the selective denial of funding for artworks simply because they offend particular social values or beliefs constitutes a form of censorship.1

These two positions can usually be identified by the category of civil subject invoked by the respective parties. Conservatives claim to be defending the interests of "taxpayers," whose hard-earned income is being expropriated by the state to fund the perversions of a depraved minority under the guise of "art." Arts advocates, on the other hand, imagine a public that is, by and large, more open and tolerant—a body of citizens dedicated to the collective good, but cognizant of its own rich plurality. These terms represent two very different conceptions of the public sphere and the role of the state in adjudicating between individual and collective interests.

The debate over publicly funded art has remained in a deadlock, owing in part to the centrifugal force exerted by these two positions. A number of writers have sought to position this debate within the context of the larger neo-conservative political agenda.2 While these investigations have provided a fuller understanding of right-wing philosophies and tactics they have at the same time tended to forego an extended analysis of the art world itself. In this essay I want to introduce an analytic framework that is less concerned with reading the extrinsic clash of values expressed in the art funding debate than with investigating the social and ideological positions taken up by artists and arts administrators within the institutions of public patronage.

As one reads through the various editorials, congressional statements and tracts that have been generated by the "anti-NEA" forces a central strategy emerges: the constant posing of the "art crowd," "an arrogant gang of parasites," "the art elite," "an elitist cabal," "the art cognoscenti," and "the amoral elite," against "the average American," "rubes," the "common man," "bricklayers," "taxpayers," and "the public." Dissolute artists have raised the "national ire" by "savaging" "one sacred symbol after another." The "11th-commandment" of the arts community is: "Thou shalt grant federal funds to art that's too intellectual for you to understand . . . This keeps high-class art out of the hands of the rabble, who are too coarse to appreciate it and can't tell a Marcel Duchamp from a marcel wave." 3

The dual-pronged characterization of artists as both amoral and elitist is at the crux of conservative attacks on the NEA. Although the arts community spent much of its time arguing that the work of artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe actually performed a kind of moral therapy for society, by providing an outlet for otherwise repressed forms of desire and cultural critique, in many ways the charge of elitism was harder to refute. As Richard Bolton points out in the introduction to Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (1992), "[The argument over the NEA] became a battle for power between two segments of the intelligentsia: the cultural elite and the religious conservative elite. Both sides spoke for the larger public, but neither side seemed to have much connection to this public."4 A number of writers have questioned the extent to which cultural conservatives such as Helms or Wildmon represent any broad popular opinion; what needs to be stressed, however, is that the relationship between Bolton's "cultural elite"—and the non-profit, “alternative” art world in particular—and the public is any less complicated or contradictory.

It is worth noting that the influential direct-mail campaigns mobilized by both conservatives and artists to lobby Congress were orchestrated through a network of sympathetic organizations and individuals; in neither case did the letters represent the unpremeditated outpouring of a “popular” sentiment. This is not to deny that people outside the domain of the arts support freedom of expression, but simply to point out the extent to which claims on either side of the debate to represent a broad base of public support should be viewed with some skepticism.

My analysis will begin with a discussion of the original arguments for public art funding promulgated during the establishment of the NEA in the mid-‘60s. I will then examine the ways in which artists and administrators, in collaboration with NEA program staff, were able to make use of the (deliberately) vague principles contained in the Endowment's founding documents to fashion a fundamentally new, and in many ways progressive, model of arts funding policy. The institutional product of this model—the "artist-run space"—has functioned to buttress the autonomy of the alternative arts sector at the same time that it has provided a site largely insulated from direct political and economic (market) pressures within which a critical aesthetic discourse could take root. Yet ultimately this same insulation has mitigated the ability of arts organizations to develop a strong public constituency outside the alternative arts community itself. It is in part the lack of such a constituency made the alternative art sector particularly vulnerable to conservative charges of elitism.

I. The Origins of Endowment Funding

The establishment of the NEA by Presidential order in 1965 represented the culmination of fifteen years of persistent lobbying by a number of committed arts advocates and politicians, including Senator Jacob Javits (NY), Rep. John Lindsay (NY), Rep. Frank Thompson (NJ), Senator Claiborne Pell (RI), Roger Stevens, Nancy Hanks, August Heckscher (President Kennedy's "arts consultant"), Barnaby Keeney (President of Brown University), Arthur Schlesinger, Jack Golodner, and many others.5 Rather than being the product of a single compelling argument for arts funding, the final passage of the bill authorizing the Endowment was the result of a combination of political factors (including a democratic landslide in the 1964 congressional elections), and a loose ensemble of justifications accumulated over the preceding years.

In his book The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts 1943-1965, Gary O. Larson examines what he calls the "rationale-building process," by which arts advocates constructed various arguments to justify federal art funding:

The rationale [for arts funding] . . . proceeded in a helter-skelter fashion, subject to the mood of Congress and the country, and passing through its various phases—the international prestige argument, the cultural dissemination argument, the economic argument, and, finally, the 'American Civilization' argument—in a cumulative, snowballing fashion, gathering support along the way . . .6

The "international prestige" argument—a relic of what Larson describes as America's "nervous preoccupation with the Communist threat" during the late 1950s and early 1960s —suggested that the U.S. must subsidize the arts in order to demonstrate its cultural superiority to the rest of the world.⁷ The "cultural dissemination" argument was based on the concern that the arts in the U.S. were only available to a narrow social and economic elite. The state must therefore intervene in order to make the arts accessible to a broad geographic and economic cross section of the American public. In 1963 President Kennedy, upon creating an informal presidential “arts commission,” expressed his concern that "children are growing up who have never seen a professionally acted play."8 The "economic argument" was fueled by the controversial "Goldberg Decision" of 1961 in which Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg, called in to arbitrate a strike by the Metropolitan Opera's musicians’ union, declared that "the question before the nation was how to restore the financial viability of cultural institutions," particularly large cultural institutions such as the Met, that were facing "rising costs and increased competition."9 Finally, the "American Civilization" argument represented a melding of concerns about national prestige and the high-minded rhetoric of the Great Society, as expressed in this statement by Representative Torbert MacDonald (D-MA), during the floor debate over the original Endowment bill:

With the passage of this legislation the United States will take a further step along the path which saw us, first a fledgling Nation [sic] groping for our bearings, next a young, vigorous people, flexing new-found muscles in a display of industrial strength and now, finally, a nation in its prime, combining raw physical strength and abundant energy with an active interest in developing our national interest.10

At its inception, arguments in support of the Endowment, particularly those designed to persuade and cajole skeptical congress people, were founded not on a definition of art as a self-evident public good, but on its potential usefulness within the matrix of state policy and ideology. Significantly, in none of these early arguments are artists themselves considered to be the primary recipients or beneficiaries of government largesse. During the 1950s, art is seen as a cultural weapon in the Cold War. And during the 1960s it provides an additional justification for the expanding domain of state “responsibilities” within the Great Society. A key section of the Goldberg decision drafted by Goldberg’s aide at the time, future New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, asserts that “we must accept the arts as a new community responsibility. The arts must assume their place alongside the already accepted responsibilities for health, education, and welfare. Part of this new responsibility must fall to the Federal government, for precisely the reasons that the nation has given it a role in similar undertakings.”¹¹

In fact the relationship between the Endowment and the Great Society would prove to be of considerable importance. Some Endowment advocates even justified public art funding on the basis of art's role in channeling social unrest and reintegrating the disenfranchised. According to then New York congressman Hugh Carey, speaking before Congress in the mid-‘60s, "an outpouring of creativity (stimulated by the NEA) [would] . . .do far more than even the Civil Rights Act to bring them [the ghettos] into the mainstream of American culture." 12

Although conventional histories often describe the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson as the creation of a handful of committed politicians and administrators, their roots also lie in the specific political and economic context of the mid-1960s. According to historians Francis Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, the social legislation that constituted the core of the Great Society (for example, the creation of the Office of Economic Opportunity, and projects such as Community Action Programs (CAPS) and Model Cities) was motivated in part by fundamental changes that were taking place in the electoral base of the Democratic party during the 1950s and 1960s. In their study of welfare policy in the United States, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, Piven and Cloward analyze post-WWII demographic shifts and observe that with the increasing migration of southern blacks to the North, "blacks came to be located in states of the most strategic importance in presidential elections."¹³ In response, the Democratic Party began to tentatively endorse pro-civil rights platforms and legislation during the mid-to-late 1950s. This response cost them support among white southern democrats, especially among conservative Democrats, or so-called "Dixiecrats" who began to abandon the party. With the loss of votes in the South, the Democratic Party was increasingly reliant on the black vote concentrated in the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Piven and Cloward argue that Great Society social programs were designed, in part, to consolidate and enfranchise increasingly militant black urban voters—to effectively bring them into the Democratic Party.

Great Society bureaucrats were worried that existing municipal political machines would absorb federal money meant for urban blacks. "The problem was solved," as Piven and Cloward write, "by diverting a large portion of the new funds to a host of intermediaries other than local government, including private social agencies, universities, and, and new ghetto agencies."¹⁴ In their attempt to reach the new urban constituency Great Society programs developed the notion of "maximum feasible participation" (MFP) to involve inner city blacks directly in the process of deciding what to fund. Community Action Program staff members spoke of "empowering" the urban poor and allowing for their "self-determination" through a form of "citizen participation."¹⁵ However, from the point of view of government administrators, this strategy backfired, because “the federal programs channeled funds directly to groups forming in the ghettoes, and they in turn often used these monies to harass city agencies . . . the new agencies began to organize the poor to picket public welfare departments or boycott school systems.”16 This experiment in "participatory democracy," although highly influential, was short-lived. The encouragement that MFP policies gave to urban political militancy soon brought the wrath of conservative congress people and city officials down on the Office of Economic Opportunity for supporting a process which Nathan Glazer described as "the government conducting guerrilla warfare against itself."¹⁷

With the election of Republican Richard Nixon in 1972, and the subsiding of widespread urban rebellion and property destruction, the constituency for Great Society social programs and urban reform lost its electoral value. A number of Great Society programs (Model Cities, CAPs, etc.) were either eliminated or severely curtailed under the Nixon administration's "New Federalism."¹⁸ This dismantling of Great Society programs reached its apogee in the early years of the Reagan administration when massive cuts were made to income maintenance and social services programs whose initial impetus derived from the Johnson administration. By the mid-80s the Great Society had become a highly charged symbol among resurgent conservatives of the perceived excesses and failures of liberal social policy.¹⁹ If the constituencies for CAPS and Model Cities programs were considered relatively insignificant by the Nixon administration the same could not be said of the constituency for arts funding. The liberal aura surrounding the NEA was used to cultivate a decidedly different group of voters; not the urban black population, but liberal, upper-class whites. Thus the budget of the NEA (which Patrick Buchanan described as a "Great Society Jewel" in his 1992 presidential campaign), increased exponentially under Nixon, from $8.3 million in 1970 to $80 million in 1975.²⁰ White House staffer Leonard Garment, in an influential memo to the president urging him to support increased Endowment spending, pointed to the electoral benefit that this gesture would provide:

For an amount of money which is miniscule in terms of the total federal budget, you can demonstrate your commitment to “reordering national priorities to emphasize the quality of life in our society.” [. . .]

The amount proposed . . . would have high impact among opinion formers. . . Support for the arts is, increasingly, good politics. By providing substantially increased support for cultural activities, you will gain support from groups which have hitherto not been favorable to this administration.

We are talking about the vast majority of the theatre board members, symphony trustees, museum benefactors, and the like . . . It is well for us to remember that these boards are made up, very largely, of business, corporate, and community interests.²¹

Garment's comment offers us a useful example of the mobility of political discourse in the hands of an experienced political manager. Support for arts funding provided Nixon with a rhetorical platform from which he could express his commitment to "reordering national priorities" for, as Elaine King remarks, "a small investment of political capital."²² The liberal and humanitarian values associated with the Great Society (or what we might call the "aura" of Great Society policy) had, in effect, migrated from Johnson's (defunded) social programs to the Endowment and the principles of public art funding and cultural support. In the process they were detached from their original constituency and used to buttress Nixon's electoral base among art patrons. This shift also accounts, in part, for the fact that the NEA's budget actually grew slightly during the early to mid-1980s when President Reagan was slashing food stamp programs, health care for the poor, and federal funding for school lunches. Both the political clout of the art establishment, and the comparatively organized lobbying mechanism that it was able to mobilize—as compared to, say, working class school children, the homeless, or welfare recipients—protected the Endowment's budget.

The value of art for the state is always expedient—that is, it is always related to art's capacity to generate or enable certain forms of symbolic speech on the part of legislators and politicians acting within the highly circumscribed environment of public policy formation. A useful analytic framework for considering this symbolic function is provided by Raymond Williams in his essay, "Reflections on the State and Cultural Arena". In this essay Williams examines what he calls the "theatrical aspect" of cultural policy: “ . . .an arts policy of a certain kind turns out when examined to be not a policy for the arts but a policy for embellishing, representing, making more effective a particular social order or certain preferred features in it."²³ Although Williams is referring primarily to the orchestrated "display" of state power in various cultural rituals and institutions (e.g., the opening of Parliament) his observations can be usefully applied to the 'performative' aspects of policy. Public policy debates are one of the central theaters within which the "play" of participatory democracy is acted out, and policy models or "rationales" are the scripts that are performed in this theater. They are a key part of the system by which the state generates consent for the expenditure of public funds. The advantage to thinking about debates over the Endowment as in terms of their performative aspect is that it helps disabuse us of the notion that there is some necessary or direct connection between the statements made by the various actors in these debates and the actions they might really take, their own relationship to the constituencies they claim to speak for, and the political, ideological, and material forces that actually impinge on their decision-making.

There need be no direct relationship between the “signifiers” of political discourse and the actual behavior of politicians. Politicians and political managers, from Roger Ailes, who had Nixon's campaign staff reading extracts from Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media during the 1968 presidential campaign, to the late Lee Atwater, and George Bush, have labored under no delusions about the exercise of political power in this respect. Dan Quayle can excoriate the "cultural elite," even as his own family owns a chain of newspapers, or attack Vietnam War draft dodgers, even as he waited out the war in the National Guard. Quite often in the recent debate over the Endowment, arts advocates have displayed a surprising degree of naïveté about this dimension of the political process. They devote an inordinate amount of time to logically refuting conservative attacks on the Endowment as a haven for deranged and immoral artists, without realizing that the more important task is to ask why these characterizations, as simplistic or illogical as they may appear, have been so effective; who listens to them and why? And what can be learned from them?

II. The Artists' Space Movement and the Discourse of Professionalism

The recent attacks on the NEA have been directed at a relatively small segment of the Endowment's budget devoted to smaller, "artist-run" visual arts and media arts organizations and the artists they support—in particular, those funded under the visual arts, media arts, inter-arts, and theater programs. Examples of these organizations include Franklin Furnace, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Washington Project for the Arts (WPA), The Kitchen, NAME gallery in Chicago, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts in Winston-Salem, NC, and Installation gallery in San Diego, among many others. As opposed to the opera companies, symphonies, ballets, and major museums that receive the bulk of the Endowment's funding, most of these organizations either didn't exist prior to the establishment of the NEA, or would not have reached their present level of development without drastic increases in Endowment spending during the 1970s.²⁴ During the tenure of NEA director Nancy Hanks the NEA's budget grew from $11 million in 1969 to $114 million in 1977.²⁵ Under the influence of program directors including Brian O'Doherty, Henry Geldzahler, and Jim Melchert the NEA effectively enfranchised an entire network of exhibition spaces, media centers, presses, publications, and service organizations devoted to "alternative," non-market oriented artists and art works.

Although by the mid-‘70s no one was naive (or opportunistic) enough to suggest that an artist-run exhibition space would prevent ghetto uprisings, the movement did, nevertheless, cloak itself with much of the rhetoric of the '60s in general, and the Great Society in particular. "The expansive idealism of the late '60s," according to the Washington Project for the Art's Ten Year Document (1986), "led to the climate of self-determination necessary to form the artists organizations of the early and middle '70s."26 And according Brian O'Doherty, one of the Endowment's first program directors, " A lot of radical energies of the 60's fed into alternative spaces."27 The Endowment’s Workshop Program, established in 1972, was instrumental in funding many of the early artists' spaces. The NEA guideline booklet describes the Workshop Program in terms of the importance of "artists' self-determination," and of the "non-commercial, bare-walled, ripped-out, 'alternative space,' run by artists for artists . . ."28

This description evokes images of a virile, aggressive, bohemian avant-garde; bare-knuckled artists literally ripping a space for themselves out of the fabric of the decaying metropolis as a refuge from a banal and indifferent art market.29 As it turned out, the bohemia conjured up in the Endowment's guidelines was largely populated by white, middle class artists, and their "ripped-out spaces"—at least those that survived—would, within the next decade, become well-established and in some cases even well-funded venues, often located in the midst of extremely valuable, “revitalizing” downtown neighborhoods. Further, the "alternative" sector, far from rejecting the art market, would come to function as a highly effective "farm team" system for the commercial sector, with selected artists being called up periodically to exhibit in the big leagues.30

If the alternative space movement represented an avant-garde it was a singularly institutionalized avant-garde. The artist space movement developed its own distinctive philosophies, professional etiquettes, communications networks, and hierarchies. The individuals who founded and ran these organizations were soon transformed from artists into artist/administrators or in less flattering terms, artist/bureaucrats. This new managerial class rapidly assumed all the accoutrement of professionalism. They formed their own organizations dedicated to advancing the interests of the field (the National Association of Artists Organizations [NAAO], the National Alliance of Media Arts Centers [NAMAC], etc.), and, more importantly, they came to conceive of themselves as possessing special skills, and of their work as deserving of professional respect.

Most attempts to understand the relationship of the alternative sector to the larger public culture focus primarily on the role of the artist and artistic production. However, it is important to bear in mind the significance of the institutional network of the alternative sector and, more specifically, its status as a particular bureaucratic structure in the hands of a particular administrative class. When looked at in this light, it is possible to raise questions about the discourse of professionalism and issues of autonomy, not from the point of view of the artist as a vaguely defined (and highly mythologized) social type, but in the context of a more contingent and specifiable set of bureaucratic drives and rhetorics.

The position occupied by the artist/administrators of the alternative sector, both in terms of their administrative ideologies and in their relationship to forms of public and private patronage, can be more clearly understood through a comparison with the larger class of professional and managerial workers in the United States. This group, variously labeled the New Class (André Gorz, Alvin Gouldner), the Coordinator Class (Donald Stabile), and the Professional-Managerial Class (Barbara and John Ehrenreich), has been the subject of considerable study by historians and social scientists.³¹ It encompasses a broad range of intellectual and cultural producers whose livelihood derives primarily from their ability to create and regulate a set of analytic or symbolic discourses—in fact, Robert B. Reich refers to this class as “symbolic analysts.”³²

Barbara and John Ehrenreich trace the emergence, and subsequent growth, of the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC) to a combination of factors that began to plague the capitalist economy in the early twentieth century. First, the increasing technical complexity of industrial production required the supervision of a growing cadre of highly trained technicians, engineers, and scientists. At the same time, growing militancy and resistance on the part of industrial labor—in the form of highly disruptive strikes, unionization, and political organization—was posing a threat to the accumulation process. The PMC emerged, as the Ehrenreichs argue, “between” capital and labor. It was a mediating class whose role was, in effect, the “reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”³³ PMC professions, from social work and advertising to scientific management, were oriented around a “politically motivated penetration of working class community life,” resulting in the “social atomization of the working class: the fragmentation of work . . .in the productive process, a withdrawal of aspirations from the work place into private goals, the disruption of indigenous networks of support and mutual aid, [and] the destruction of autonomous working class culture.”³⁴

While the PMC, like the working class, was employed by capital, its relationship to the working class was, nevertheless, based on an “objective antagonism.” As the Ehrenreichs express it, “Real life contacts between the two classes express directly, if sometimes benignly, the relation of control which is at the heart of the PMC—working class relation: teacher and student, manager and workers, social worker and client, etc.”³⁵ At the same time, the PMC—especially during its initial consolidation as a class during the Progressive era—often expressed solidarity with labor. Its belief in a set of rational “solutions” to social problems led it into conflict with the capitalist class, whose interests in rationalization did not extend to any serious questioning of the larger social implications of the accumulation process.

The ambivalent position of the PMC between capital and labor, combined with its command of what it imagined were objective, scientific forms of knowledge, endowed its members with the belief that they spoke from a neutral or transcendent position within the social order. Their opinions and perspectives were assumed to represent neither of the two contending classes, but rather, those of the “greater society.” As the Ehrenreich’s note, “The claim to high ethical standards represents the PMC’s persistent reassurance that its class interests are identical to the interests of society at large.”³⁶ Despite its occasional alliances with labor during the Progressive era, the PMC realized that is survival depended in the last instance on its command of technical and analytic systems and bodies of knowledge. Thus, according to the Ehrenreichs, “The profession . . . was the characteristic form of self-organization of the PMC”.³⁷ A provisional inventory of those factors that characterize the professional discourse of the PMC include 1) a desire for professional status and autonomy (such that only other members of a given profession are capable of judging the performance of that profession); 2) a belief that the members of that profession are involved in an ethical mission to “reform” the larger social order, and further, that they occupy a class-transcendent position and thus speak from the perspective of society as a whole against the specific interests represented by other classes; 3) the ability to produce and regulate particular forms of symbolic and analytic discourse—as in the legal profession, engineering, advertising, and the like; and, finally, 4) a relationship to disenfranchised constituencies that conceives of them as a mass to be variously regulated or empowered.

I would contend that we can understand artist/administrators as a segment of the PMC. They are the managers of a particular form of cultural capital that is generated at the intersection of two discourses—the discourse of fine art, with its demand for freedom and autonomy, and the discourse of public funding, which imposes conditions of accountability and which requires the artist/administrator to take up a position relative to “the public.” The extent to which the characteristics of the PMC listed above correspond to the rhetoric of the alternative art sector’s administrative class is striking. The desire for professional status and autonomy (in which only artists are in a position to judge the work of other artists) is emblematic of the artist’s space movement. This aspiration for professional status is often expressed through comparisons with other fields. Charlotte R. Murphy, the Executive Director of The National Association of Artists Organizations (NAAO), testifying before the Congressional Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, compares the "artistic laboratories" of the alternative arts sector with "laboratories for investigation within our nation's scientific and corporate communities . . . Just as industry and science recognize their future success as dependent on a solid commitment to experimentation, and the accompanying possibility of failure, so must the arts. . ."38 And Karen Finley, in a statement following former NEA director John Frohnmayer's decision to withhold her Endowment grant in June of 1990, insists, "Art is a profession and has experts, as do other areas."39 Finally, Susan Wyatt, testifying on June 19, 1991 before the House Subcommittee that oversees the Endowment, grounds her defense of professionalism in the arts with a rather remarkable comparison to opera, an unusual institutional model for the supposedly egalitarian artists space to aspire to. As Wyatt continues:

The notion that someone who has no expertise and knowledge of the arts can judge one proposed opera over another is absurd. In our society we acknowledge professionalism in many different fields, why not the arts? Who can truly argue they understand better than a qualified curator which paintings should be in a show or which organizational structure and long range plan suits a dance company better?

Surely if we as taxpayers demand the best for our money we must insist that our dollars are spent by those best qualified to make such judgments . . .40

At the center of the alternative sector's concern with professionalism was a strong desire for autonomy; autonomy from government interference, from the demands of the art market, and from the limitations of consumer culture. As Stephen Kahn notes in "Communities of Faith, Communities of Interest," (M.A. thesis, Wesleyan University, 1986) "The artists starting these spaces wanted the space to be a vehicle for artists, not dealers, collectors, critics, or audiences. To 'sell out' to any of these other constituencies would be to forfeit their autonomy as artists . . ."41 The fact that alternative sector artist/administrators were actually able to achieve a high degree of operational autonomy—that is, to use Endowment funding more or less as they saw fit—was due to a combination of factors. Chief among these was their discursive skill, that is, their ability to create the ideological packaging necessary to justify the expenditure of state, and also private foundation, monies on their activities. In effect, their survival depended on their capacity to construct narratives that positioned their own institutional activities in relationship to a larger set of cultural goals associated with federal or private funding mandates. Second, the alternative sector, due to its relatively small size in relationship to other areas of Endowment funding, was protected, or camouflaged, by the presence of highly visible and credentialed museums, operas, and ballet companies. And third, these artist/administrators were able to retain institutional independence because of their close involvement with the formulation of Endowment funding practices through the peer panel and policy review panel system.

The discursive powers deployed by the alternative sector in its quest for autonomy are clear in the process by which arts administrators worked to transform and negotiate the funding paradigms of the Endowment. Although, as I have noted, the initial justifications for the Endowment’s existence were subject to a lengthy process of Congressional debate and review, the actual purposes of the NEA, when finally codified into an act, were, according to Elaine King's unpublished dissertation on the NEA, "deliberately written very loosely."42 In King's interview with Livingston Biddle, Claiborne Pell's aide (and a future director of the NEA) who drafted the language of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, he observes: “We knew that there would be a lot of opposition and we knew there had to be a lot of freedom for the arts, the writing of this act had to be done carefully, allowing for broad interpretation of the arts on many levels.”43 Thus, the act calls for only the most general goals—first, to make the arts more widely available; second, to strengthen cultural organizations; third, to preserve our cultural heritage for present and future generations; and fourth, to encourage the creative development of talented individuals—with very little idea of how these goals would be achieved or even defined. Due to what King describes as the "open-endedness of the Act" considerable discretionary power would lie with the actual implementation of the NEA's legislation through the specific procedures and guidelines governing the Endowment's daily operation.

As already mentioned, artist/administrators were able to play a crucial role in formulating these procedures and guidelines because of the 'participatory democracy' of the Endowment's peer panels and policy review panels. Policy review panels for individual programs, which reviewed changes in granting policy and program organization, are composed of program staff and artists. And the peer panels that make the actual selection of grantees and which recommend funding levels are composed entirely of artists and arts administrators (until the recent 'lay person' provision). In line with the alternative sector's drive for professional autonomy, these panels are premised on the notion that only artists possess the necessary "expertise" to make informed decisions about arts funding. Although the decisions reached by both the policy review panels and the peer panels are subject to approval by the NEA's director and the National Council, until the recent controversies it was relatively unusual for their actions to be vetoed. These mechanisms, which the Endowment's drafters had devised in order to insulate the NEA from congressional tampering, created a situation in which artist/administrators from the alternative arts sector, in conjunction with the NEA's program staff, became de facto policy makers. This is why the reassertion of the powers of the National Council over the peer panel system has been a major goal of conservative attacks. The report issued by President Bush's 1990 Independent Commission on the Endowment expressed "concern that the panels that make recommendations for grants had come to dominate NEA grant making," and advocated "sweeping reforms" in Endowment procedures to reinforce the powers of the NEA's presidentially appointed director and National Council in making funding decisions.44

Through the mechanisms of NEA policy formation the managerial class of artist/administrators, and the NEA's staff, transformed the relatively amorphous funding philosophy of the Endowment into a highly nuanced funding paradigm centered on the "artists space," and artist-run organizations. The artist-run space, as I've noted above, was intended to reject the banality of the market and provide support for a vital, alternative culture in which artists were responsible only to themselves and their own interests. A key component of the institutional model of the artist’s space was the 'invention' of a new civil subject—the "cultural worker." With the cultural worker model artist/administrators appropriated the existing language of Great Society programs that sought to "empower" the poor and working class beneficiaries of government assistance by directly involving them in funding decisions. They performed a strategic substitution in which the artist became the disenfranchised citizen in need of "empowerment." Alternative sector artists were taken to constitute a special class of citizens who were being systematically exploited or neglected by the art market. Thus, artists must "take over" the cultural apparatus that is founded on their own creative labor—they should serve on boards, make administrative decisions, form peer panels to dispense grants, and so on. Renny Pritikin, the director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco and a long-time figure on the alternative arts scene, is surprisingly frank about this appropriation:

The objective [of the artists space movement] was self-determination. Artists took this rhetoric, originally intended to address disenfranchisement from political decision-making processes, and applied it to the microcosm of an art world that had effectively placed artists in a passive and victimized role, identifying that condition as a political one. As an alternative to such a condition, artists proposed to create their own ground for displaying their works both for their peers and any interested audience.45

In the second sentence of this statement, it is unclear just who was experiencing the original 'disenfranchisement' that the rhetoric of participatory democracy sought to challenge. The rhetoric itself is disembodied, and, conveniently, becomes available to artists. Thus artists "took" the political rhetoric that was "originally intended" to address the disenfranchisement of the poor and working class, and mobilized it to their own ends. Rather than the chronic unemployment and poverty faced by the urban poor, artists have to confront an uncaring art world that has "placed" them in a "passive and victimized role". But the victimization of a fine artist by the art market is surely of a somewhat different order than, for example, the victimization of the rural poor by the processes of agricultural modernization under capitalism.⁴⁶ The experience of an artist whose work is rejected by the gallery system is simply not interchangeable with that of the poor or working class, whose relationship with the market economy far more profound consequences. Taking up the position of an artist in our society has a great deal to do with acculturation and access. Thus, one chooses to become an artist as a result of several related factors; having even the limited leisure time to pursue art, having access to various forms of art education—often graduate-level training, and coming from a social background that makes the idea of becoming an artist at least thinkable.

At the same moment that artists, like the PMC, want to identify with the working class and speak as “cultural workers,” they also imagine that they are engaged in an ethical mission to reform society and speak not as artists per se, but as representatives of the “greater good.” Being an artist provides one with a transcendent platform or identity from which to engage in moral rhetoric on behalf of a whole range of disenfranchised others. These two rhetorics—that of the artist as worker and the artist as transcendent subject (which I will explore in the final section of this essay)—oscillate together in the discourse of the alternative sector. A statement to John Frohnmayer by the NEA's 1990 "New Forms" panel suggests the ease with which artists and arts administrators identify themselves with various groups that experience social exclusion and oppression: “. . .as committed arts professionals we hereby make common cause with all Americans—the poor, the old, the sick, the homeless, the unschooled and the unemployed—who are being systematically disempowered.”47

This statement assumes, first, that "committed arts professionals" share some kind of implicit bond with the groups that make up this veritable catalog of victimization, and second, that they can construct this bond through a simple declaration of solidarity. Why should someone who is living on the street necessarily have any more in common with an arts administrator than they do with an accountant? The issues that most preoccupy arts administrators, such as the expenditure of federal funding for the arts and debates over the freedom of expression, are of relatively little concern to someone who is without food, shelter, or a job. If there is a solidarity being experienced it is largely on the side of the artists.

In fact, the objective social and economic position, and the cultural cachet, of artists often place them in direct conflict with the needs of the poor or the homeless. Sharon Zukin's book Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change examines the extent to which artists, and a bohemian art culture, were integral components in the gentrification of lower Manhattan in the 1970s.48 Exhibition spaces in urban centers such as New York, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, played a key role in the cultural redefinition of "downtown" as a hip, cosmopolitan place for young professionals to live. In the case of Washington, the presence of cultural institutions such as Warner Theater and the Washington Project for the Arts, and a smattering of artists studios, in a formerly marginal area of off Pennsylvania Avenue provided the incentive for the packaging of a full-scale "Downtown Arts District," centered around the establishment of “arts-related retail” uses such as movie theaters, restaurants, and book stores.49 Alternative exhibition spaces, such as the Washington Project for the Arts, whose programming often took up an adversarial stance towards the machinations of corporate capitalism, effectively functioned to facilitate this process by exchanging the "cultural capital" of their avant-garde status for reduced rents and other forms of “protection” from the skyrocketing property values brought about by the development process.

What is striking about the "artists space" funding model, as compared with discussions surrounding the formation of the Endowment, is the central role assigned to contemporary artists as the beneficiaries and constituency of public funds, and the relative indifference to the putative audience for publicly-funded works. It is emblematic that in the Pritikin quote cited above the question of a potential audience, apart from other artists ("their peers"), is left unspecified. The tendency to elide the public in the calculations of the alternative arts sector is also evident in a widely-circulated letter (January 31, 1992) to the NEA's National Council, written by Pritikin while he was the chair of the Visual Arts panel that approved grants to Franklin Furnace Archive in New York City and Highways in Santa Monica that were subsequently denied by the council. In Pritikin's statement the "arts community" is substituted for some putative larger public as the "constituency" of Endowment funding: “the Council's rejection of these two grants denies the validity of your own processes, work by dedicated professionals replaced by a whimsical irrationality which will alienate every applicant, the very constituency of citizens you are meant to serve“ [emphasis mine].50

Within the rhetoric of the artists space movement, artists seemed to believe that by rejecting market values they would effortlessly shed their own cultural privilege and operate in a utopian, state-funded, mini-public sphere, founded on "sweat equity" and collectivity. But the withdrawal from the elitist art market into a nonprofit enclave doesn't necessarily bring the artist any closer to various segments of the non-art public—nor does it allow artists to transcend their own class and cultural privilege. The empowering gesture of artistic self-determination tended to gloss over the very real schisms between the artist and society at large. One has only to look at alternative space exhibitions from the late ‘70s and early '80s such as Donald Newman's "The Nigger Drawings" exhibition at Artists Space in 1979 or, "No Japs at my Funeral" at the Kitchen, for an indication of the extent to which some members of the alternative sector felt that their self-evidently progressive cultural politics entitled it to employ virulently racist language to promote their work.51

Owing in part to the very autonomy that they were so anxious to achieve, alternative arts institutions were never called upon to question their own assumptions about audience, and public perceptions of their cultural work. An interesting example in this regard is the Blues Aesthetic exhibition held at the Washington Project for the Arts in the fall of 1989. The exhibition’s curator was able to develop an art historical theme—involving an ostensibly inherent African American creative geist based in blues music—benign enough to attract generous sponsorship from a corporation (Ford Motor Company) that was anxious to overcome the bad press it was receiving for its poor treatment of black autoworkers. As part of the exhibition, the WPA commissioned several “public art” projects that were sited in downtown Washington. Although the exhibit was heavily contextualized for an art audience, through an extensive series of lectures, film screenings, and publications, there was little or no attempt to create any context for the people who actually lived in, or traveled through, WPA's downtown neighborhood. One of the public projects was a billboard size painting by New York artist David Hammons, showing Jesse Jackson in white face, blond hair, and blue eyes, with the slogan, "How Ya Like Me Now?" The painting referred to the difficulty Jackson was having, as an African-American, in getting the Democratic party to acknowledge the fact that he spoke for, and to, a significant bloc of potential voters through his "Rainbow Coalition."

As the work was being installed a number of young black men in the area first confronted the installation crew, left, and then returned with a sledgehammer to destroy the piece. Irony turns on a very fine axis, and, in the absence of any further explanation, and in the presence of an all white installation crew, the "audience" for this work drew its own conclusions.52 How do we account for the apparent failure of what would appear to be an exemplary alternative space project involving a politically committed black artist? Hammons, who was on a Prix de Rome at the time, wasn't present during the installation to provide any context. In addition, there was no real attempt at public education or outreach to the surrounding community before the piece was installed which might have given it some contextual foothold (for example, introducing Hammons’s work and Hammons as an artist to people in the area before the installation began). I'm not trying to justify the destruction of Hammons's piece; I only wish to point out that the WPA saw its role in the production of a "public" artwork as being confined to the process of commissioning and installation. But a gallery-installed work whose meaning is apparent to an audience schooled in the ironic codes of the alternative sector may be quite oblique to passersby on the street outside.

The Hammon's incident reflects the general condition of most current public art that simply imposes highly-coded gallery or alternative space works on a site occupied by an undifferentiated public, assuming that these works enjoy some kind of universalized capacity to communicate across cultural and institutional boundaries. In the absence of any developed theorization of this cultural gap, the alternative arts sector is by and large unwilling to acknowledge the contingency and the specificity of its own languages and modes of representation.53

III. The Rant Performance and the Implied Viewer

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the constituency for alternative arts organizations such as Artists Space in New York, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Hallwalls in Buffalo, or the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C., was—by and large—not a local or regional community (aside from a local art community), but a national network composed of other alternative spaces, artists, and publications—and the funders and foundations that these spaces rely on for support.54 With the recent controversy over the NEA art works that had been incubated and circulated within the alternative arts enclave for years were brought before a large public for the first time—in reproductions in Time and Newsweek, in exhibition catalogs waved on the floor of the U.S. Senate, on the evening news, and through the huge number of curious visitors that many of the embattled exhibition spaces attracted as a result of conservative attacks. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati had a record 81,302 visitors in seven weeks, and the Washington Project for the Arts had more viewers in four weeks (50,000) than they normally had in a year when they exhibited the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition.55

According to Susan Wyatt, the former director of Artists Space in New York City, which organized the controversial "Witnesses: Against our Vanishing" exhibition: “We had always allowed ourselves to believe that the art we show speaks best to a particular audience, one which carefully follows the developments in the art world; in this sense our major audience was not a general audience. For the six-week run of the Witnesses show, we had a general audience for the first time . . .”⁵⁶ I want to examine the implications of this statement for works produced in the alternative sector. How has the relative isolation of the alternative arts sector shaped the way in which these works "speak" to a "particular audience"? And how has it contributed to the ability (or failure) of these works to be legible beyond the alternative sector itself? In particular I want to look at the specific rhetorical positions that these works take up in relationship to the viewer. It is my contention that many works produced in the alternative sector function not by directly addressing an alternative arts audience, but by speaking to an imaginary spectator whose (conservative) preconceptions are meant to be transformed by the experience of the art work, and further, that the spectacle of this displaced rhetoric performs an explicitly therapeutic function for art world audiences. By studying what we might call the "implied viewer" of these works we can learn a great deal about how the alternative sector perceives the public, and its relationship to this public. In particular, we can see how the partial, and problematic autonomy of the alternative sector discussed above both enables and constrains this relationship.

There are a number of widely practiced modes or genres of alternative sector art. Two of the most prevalent are the 'rant' performances of artists such as Karen Finley, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Holly Hughes, and the late David Wojnarowicz, and the "moral/didactic" installation (MDI)—exemplified in the work of artists such as Group Material, Richard Bolton, and Martha Rosler. The MDI bombards the viewer with information about a particular issue or set of issues, such as homelessness, anti-Communism, corporate capitalism, censorship, U.S. foreign policy, etc., usually in a highly dense and layered installation format combining video, audio, written material, and newspaper articles.57 In these installations the artist functions as the coordinator of an idealized mini public sphere in which controversial issues—normally suppressed by the mass media—can be openly engaged. The MDI ostensibly works to encourage and contribute to a critical consciousness or attitude on the part of the audience.

Although most often manifested as staged performances with minimal props and costumes, the rhetoric of the "rant" also extends to written works—Wojnarowicz's catalog essay for the Witnesses: Against our Vanishing show is a good example—and installations, such as Barbara Kruger's exhibit last year at Mary Boone gallery, which featured a floor-to-ceiling "barrage of moral provocation."58 The key elements of the rant include polemical statements, often with a direct address (for example, Karen Finley's attack on President Bush in her recent Lincoln Center performance: "I want to see him suffer!" "I want to see him hurt!"), and a general excess of aggressive, highly affective language. The rant is usually theatrical and may include incantory or cadenced delivery, chanting and other spoken elements that owe as much to Beat-era poetry readings as to performance per se.

Although the rant and the MDI employ two very different discursive strategies, in each case the relationship of the artist to the audience is that of a moral guide to the inequities of life under late capitalist patriarchy. The artist provides the audience with information or a perspective on social issues and experiences to which they are assumed not to have access. Further, the artist's relationship to this information or experience provides a kind of model (of sensitivity, of outrage, or of involvement) that the audience can emulate and take inspiration from. Thus, what is “on display” in a Group Material installation is not simply information about a particular issue, but also Group Material itself as an exemplary body of committed cultural activists. Although the MDI merits a much closer study, it has been the rant, thus far, that has gained most of the attention in the arts funding controversy. In addition, it offers what I feel is the most paradigmatic expression of the underlying cultural attitudes of the alternative sector.

A mythology circulates around the rant, promulgated by the artists themselves, and by sympathetic critics, that purports to describe its effect on the viewer. This mythology describes an often aggressive process in which the artist literally forces the viewer to confront various forms of social oppression and discursive violence or misrepresentation experienced by women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the poor and working class, the homeless, immigrants, and others. The excess of affective language in the rant, for example, seems designed to overcome the indifference of the dominant culture to the issues of exploitation and oppression being explored by sheer rhetorical force. Thus, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco will "unleash the demons of [colonial] history," not in order to "scare" their "Anglo-European" audiences, but in order to "force them to begin a negotiation with these . . . demons that will lead to a pact of co-existence."59 The performances of John Malpede's Los Angeles Poverty Department (described in one review as a performance group made up of homeless and the formerly homeless, founded by a "disillusioned New York performance artist"), "forced the audience to see the consequences of street violence. . ." The criticisms directed in this performance against the objectification of the poor was "so thoroughly pounded in that one could only feel rage."60 Karen Finley's performances deliver "an undeniable visceral punch . . ." She "pulls the audience into one of her hell holes of life," and "she pulls us into her visions."61

An influential prototype for this mythology can be found in critical readings of Barbara Kruger's work during the early to mid-‘80s. Although Kruger has for some time been comfortably ensconced in the art market, her earlier work was exhibited widely in the non-profit sector (she was showing at Artists Space as early as 1974), and is clearly indebted to the cultural concerns of the alternative arts movement (Kruger's image as an "alternative" or non-profit artist was paradoxically demonstrated by the uproar in the art world over her move from the comparatively low-profile Annina Nosei gallery to the rampantly commercial Mary Boone gallery in 1987).62 Kruger's rise to art-world prominence in the mid-‘80s was fueled in part by widespread critical endorsement from figures such as Craig Owens, Kate Linker, Hal Foster, Jane Weinstock, and others. These critics described her work as a kind of counter-ideological machine, capable of relentlessly "disrupting" the viewer's perceptions through the cunning deployment of appropriated images and personal pronouns. Her image/text pieces were endowed with the power to provoke the most remarkable kinds of transformations in the viewer's relationship to the mass media. According to Craig Owens, her work "forces the viewer to shift uncomfortably between inclusion and exclusion."63 And in Jane Weinstock's view, Kruger's work "literally positions" the viewer, "you are positioned," and "linguistically placed."64

But this "orthopedic" aesthetic—in which the work seeks to “adjust” the viewer’s subjectivity—assumes a singularly naïve and ill-informed audience. The same hapless, usually male, viewer is incessantly "positioned" and "placed," and his preconceptions "disrupted," by the same static strategies and rhetoric. In addition, this critical interpretation overlooks the actual dynamics of art world viewership. No one, certainly not in an alternative arts scene (where the visual and textual rhetorics employed in Kruger's work are most intelligible) that considers itself to be a bastion of non-conformity and progressive politics, would want to admit to being so ignorant of conditions of social oppression, or so complicitous with the representational discourses of patriarchal power. Ken Johnson, writing on Barbara Kruger's recent installation at Mary Boone gallery, observes:

The curious question . . . is why, subjected as we were to such insulting, punitive, censorious and preachy rhetoric, was it so much fun? The answer, in part, is that it didn't feel as if Kruger were attacking us personally. Rather, the installation spoke to a fictive person, an imaginary someone who embodies the dark side of American society. That someone is, of course, a white male power figure . . . We only wish that Jesse Helms had been there to share this experience.65

Johnson's observation is striking. The implied viewer for Kruger's work, as for the performances of Finley, Wojnarowicz, Gómez Peña, or Hughes, is often a mythical father figure conjured up out of the artists imagination to be shouted at, attacked, radicalized, or otherwise transformed by the work of the performance. It is a viewer whose presence is presumed by the work's mode of address and whose outraged reaction is constantly solicited, but who, owing to the hermeticism of the alternative sector, seldom arrives at the performance. Thus, the actual reception of these works has been largely rhetorical. The audience for a performance by Finley or a Kruger installation knows that it isn't the "real" target of the outraged pronouncements on sexism or racial oppression. Rather, they consume the work simultaneously in the first person and the third person; imagining themselves as the intended viewer while at the same moment reassuring themselves of their own ideological superiority to this point of view. This kind of displaced, performative rhetoric provides viewers with the spectacle of moral outrage. Far from disrupting the viewer's perceptions of social violence, this spectacle can just as easily provide the opportunity for a fundamentally aesthetic or delectory encounter—this is the "fun" provided by Kruger's ostensibly scorching social critique at Mary Boone. The potential for aesthetic consumption is in effect even in the case of an audience outside the alternative sector, which presumably might hold some of the conservative opinions these works seek to disrupt. Karen Finley's recent performance at Lincoln Center elicited this reaction from New York Times theater critic Stephen Holden:

Her furious cry from the heart was so intense that it reduced the audience to a stunned silence, and it demonstrated that Ms. Finley has grown into a performer of spellbinding charisma. Her rants, with their repeated key phrases and incantory rhythms echoing the more stentorian verses of Allen Ginsberg, are a powerful fusion of political rhetoric, poetry and shamanic outpouring. Even those who hate her ideas are likely to be shaken by the conviction of her performance.66

All the cornerstones of the rant mythology are here. Finley's "shamanic outpouring" (reminiscent of Allan Ginsberg) "reduced the audience to a stunned silence." What is especially fortunate for Lincoln Center's well-heeled theatergoers is that they can savor Finley's "spellbinding charisma" and leave the superfluous "ideas" behind. It is the experience of the performance that conveys her conviction not any potentially disagreeable political message that might lie behind it. Finley will, as one Newsweek story has it, provide a "One Woman Tour of Hell."67 The use of the word "tour" is telling. In fact, it lies at the very basis of the way the rant functions for viewers who come to consume the spectacle of the committed artist.

Far from providing a shocking departure from traditional aesthetic modes the rant actually recapitulates a very conventional relationship between the viewer and the artist, derived from Romanticism, in which the artist enjoys a privileged access to the truth of social oppression. In fact, the belief that it is the particular job of the contemporary artist to act as the conscience of society has become a commonplace in current debates over the function of the arts. Thus, we find an organization as stalwartly bureaucratic as the National Association of State Arts Agencies suggesting: “ . . .that art, especially contemporary art, has a special capacity to touch a raw nerve in society. A work of contemporary art has the power to expose a community to a whole set of social, moral and ethical issues that might otherwise remain unexpressed or avoided . . .”68 An extreme version of this model imagines the artist as a kind of trans-historical shaman. Performance artist Jeff McMahon, in a letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Education protesting content restrictions on Endowment funding, argues that “Great civilizations have always realized that there are some people; artists, priests, medicine men and women, 'great speakers,' who are in touch with mysteries, languages, and experiences that are not comprehensible or palatable to one and all. The speaker may be Moses, it may be Valcav Havel or David Wojnarowicz.”69

At the center of the "rant" is the notion of the performance as a cathartic event in which artists becomes a channel or medium for the congealed residues of both their own and other people's experiences of social oppression. Thus, "women, AIDS victims, and the homeless," according to a recent article on Karen Finley, "are all swept into the circle of her rage and despair."70 "The only reason I feel comfortable around the broken, the inebriated, the drunken, and the addicted," according to Finley in her performance A Suggestion of Madness, (1989) "is because it looks like what I feel inside."71 And Gómez-Peña, in a transcript of a recent performance, enumerates the "sources" that infuse his performances:

during my exorbitant journey beyond the limits of Western culture I learned quite a few things from quite respectable individuals. the Mexico City bums taught me to walk without leaving a foot-print. the Chamula Indians taught me to curse the divinity when necessary . . . the Chicano's taught me to articulate my pain with maximum quality and minimum resources, my black colleagues taught me to detect the spiders of racism on the spot. my red colleagues taught me to remain still in the face of danger. my feminist comrades taught me to distrust men without visible weaknesses. Tonight I put all this knowledge on a plate and serve it to you with all my affection. But watch out! it might be poisonous to some of you.72

In this statement Gómez-Peña, who is otherwise so cognizant of the mechanisms of cultural appropriation, becomes something of a flaneur himself, journeying "beyond the limits of Western culture," collecting the experiences of his "feminist comrades," his "black colleagues," and "Mexico city bums," to be reprocessed into performance works and "served" to audiences at venues such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Contemporary in Los Angeles, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Painter and journalist Margaret Spillane, in her essay, "The Culture of Narcissism," suggests the contradiction that exists between the artist's privileged social status and their ostensible identification with the poor and the dispossessed. Describing one of Karen Finley's performances, Spillane points out how this presumed identification founders on Finley's reductive notions of the "underclass," noting that, "the individual victims she promised to evoke—the battered child, the exploited female service worker, the person with AIDS—turned out to be carelessly assembled amalgams of bourgeois Americans' cultural shorthand for those they believe exist beneath them."73 As Spillane argues, "It's entirely possible to be a member of an oppressed minority and still participate in the privileges of the dominant culture."74 Gómez-Peña, widely courted by the non-profit art world, is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship with access to audiences and communications networks throughout the country. He has acquired a level of cultural capital that makes it increasingly difficult for him to identify himself unproblematically as a megaphone for the oppressed.

The artist has emerged in recent alternative sector works as the new universal subject, able to embody (or at least speak for) any number of subject positions and identities, simply by virtue of being an artist (in the introduction to Culture Wars Richard Bolton warns of the danger of the artist posing as a "Christ-like stand-in for all oppressed people."75) In this view, the artist occupy a kind of transcendent, Cartesian position, from which they are empowered to make an unlimited range of moral judgments on the surrounding social order without having to account for their own cultural position and privilege. This "transcendence" is the product of two related ideological moments. The first is the displacement or mobilization of the artists' identity effected by the "cultural worker" ideology discussed in the preceding section, and the second is the emergence in recent art world rhetoric of a vulgarized identity politics. This identity politics, especially evident in debates over multiculturalism, is premised on the belief that your political or social position as an artist is constituted entirely through essentialized categories of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. It fails to account for the way in which other vectors of class or cultural privilege might contribute to, and complicate, the formation of the artist's identity.

These two moments coalesce in a figure like Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ (1989), provided the pretext for Donald Wildmon's initial attack on the Endowment. The alternative arts sector has championed Piss Christ as a "disturbing and challenging artistic statement, [that] explores how spiritual belief has been exploited and spiritual values debased."76 And Lucy Lippard has argued that Serrano's work, ". . .is part of the 'polyphonous discourse' many Third World scholars have been calling for; he challenges the boundaries formed by class and race, and between abstraction and representation, photography and painting, belief and disbelief."77 In images such as Piss Christ Serrano addresses issues of faith, desire, aesthetic beauty, and the body in a way that is both visceral and complex. Serrano himself has been anxious not to ascribe an overly literal "political" content to these works, stressing instead their "ambiguity."78 But this ambiguity can at times give way to works that replicate highly exploitive representational codes. For example, the large color photograph Heaven or Hell (1984), features Leon Golub, dressed as a cardinal, standing next to a naked, apparently beaten, woman hanging by her wrists, with "blood" splashed on her breasts. Even Lucy Lippard, who has long been sympathetic to Serrano's work, has raised some question about this picture, in which Serrano employs a blatantly exploitive image to ostensibly "criticize" the Catholic church's attitude towards women. In a subsequent interview Serrano displays a striking level of unselfconsciousness about his creation of this image, choosing to simply ignore the possibility that he might need to re-think the ways in which he represents women in his work:

I never thought of it [an "erotic" content] as far as that picture was concerned. Then my friends would see it and say 'she has nice breasts.' I never saw it that way. I've been looking at pornography since I was a kid, but to me that was not an erotic pose. [. . .] Sometimes it’s hard to be politically correct and also be true to your own instincts, as far as sexuality is concerned.79

Serrano's sexual “instincts” just happen to express themselves in a conventionally exploitive image of a woman as the objects of violence. Serrano fails to consider his own sexual or cultural privilege in manipulating existing representations of women, or, in the case of a more recent body of work, the homeless. Serrano's discussion of this work, which involves making photographic “portraits” of New York's homeless, is worth quoting at length:

I've just completed a new series that refers to the portraits [Edward Curtis] did of American Indians. I went around and found homeless people in the subways, in the street, in the parks. I even found people looking through garbage. I was looking for the hard core homeless that sometimes even the homeless don't want to talk to. We set them up in subways in situations and took their portraits, studio portraits . . . Basically, I gave them a fee to pose for me for 15 minutes, and had them sign model releases.

I took pictures of one woman who I'm sure was a crackhead. She had problems focusing her eyes. Her head and eyes darted very quickly. But she's one of my favorite models. She's beautiful.80

While Serrano argues that these images resist dominant representations of homelessness ("I think you're talking about a certain prejudice if we think these pictures are bad because they homeless aren't being portrayed like they really are. What does that mean?")81 it's hard, based on comments such as the one above, to not view him as another kind of flaneur, wandering the streets of New York with studio lights and an assistant in tow, to produce what he describes as "collaborative" portraits of people he “ . . .would never have looked at under different circumstances." What is even more remarkable about this project is that Serrano imagines that he is bestowing some kind of middle-class dignity on the homeless by taking their pictures: "Who says the homeless can't have studio portraits like everyone else?"

Serrano is an Hispanic-American artist (in an art world where artists of color are systematically excluded), whose works openly challenge religious authority and transgress cultural boundaries, but he is, at the same moment, an artist who is remarkably oblivious to his own social power (as demonstrated by his patronizing attitudes towards his homeless subjects), and who is capable of producing works with an openly sexist content. We can account for the apparent disparity between Serrano as an exemplary “multicultural” artist, and his production of works that objectify women and the homeless only by recognizing that he is ambivalently positioned in relationship to social power (in terms of class and gender, as well as race) and cultural privilege. Serrano's works and his opinion are frequently solicited and circulated within the art world. He enjoys a fairly privileged relationship to the institutions of high culture, such as gallery and museum exhibitions and public and foundation grants. In short, he simply does not speak from a position that is directly exchangeable with that of the homeless, or of women. The solution to the inconsistencies in Serrano's work isn't to attack him on the basis of a fanatic belief in some thoroughly integrated and contradiction-free artwork or to argue that artists of color must produced unambiguously 'political' works. But neither is it to simply ignore or avoid those contradictions that do exist in his work and his outlook as a cultural producer.

The limitation of the art world's vulgar identity politics lies precisely in the fact that it overlooks precisely these contradictions. The social and cultural positions that we occupy are far more complicated than monolithic categories of race or sexuality are able to describe. Robert Mapplethorpe was gay, but he could also objectify black men in a way that was disturbing to many people of color. Struggles against racism have sometimes employed blatantly sexist and homophobic rhetoric, struggles against economic oppression have sometimes overlooked entirely the labor of women and people of color, and struggles against sexism have sometimes ignored the needs of working class women, and women of color. The point is that we are differentially positioned in relationship to oppression. Obviously this differential is highly biased, and continually reconstructed around certain central racial, sexual and economic categories. But this doesn't absolve us of the responsibility of interrogating our own connection to specific modes of social power—especially for participants in an arena such as the art world in which the most revolutionary rhetoric mixes unashamedly with the most blatant displays of cultural and economic privilege.

Identity theory, in its more complex and enabling form, teaches us that forms of oppression are highly imbricated and adaptable. It is entirely possible to be Hispanic and still harbor bourgeois attitudes about the homeless, or to be a lesbian and also a cultural conservative, like Anne-Imelda Radice, the director of the NEA. In this respect the right wing in the United States is far more sophisticated than many in the art world when it comes to recognizing, and exploiting, the complexity of multideterminant identities, as Bush's appointment of Clarence Thomas suggests. Kobena Mercer makes this point in his essay, "'1968': Periodizing Politics and Identity":

. . .the challenge of radical pluralism demands a relational and dialogic response which brings us to a perspectival view of what antagonistic movements have in common, namely that no one has a monopoly on oppositional identity. The new social movements structured around race, gender, and sexuality are neither inherently progressive or reactionary. . . Just like everyday people, women, black people, lesbian and gay people, and people who worry about social justice, nuclear power, or ecology can be interpellated into positions on the right just as much as they can articulated into positions on the left.82

It is this “relational and dialogic” perspective that we need to bear in mind when considering the position of the “committed arts professional” who would make common cause with the homeless. Alternative sector artists can't transcend their cultural privilege simply through an act of good faith. Their production is, by and large, not rooted in the representational needs of a non-art audience or community. Rather, their “community,” as I've tried to point out above, is too often limited to the alternative arts sector itself. Even though they often make claims to speak for, or to work with, a given community—particularly in forms such as the moral-didactic installation—these alliances and collaborations are almost always temporary. The artist moves on to another "issue," another "site" or another constituency, while the community remains behind—hopefully "touched" or "transformed" in some way by the artists presence. No matter how sensitive the artist might be, the situation that they place themselves in in relation to a non-art community is inevitably constrained by the same problems of paternalism and benign domination that structure the relationship between PMC social workers and their working-class clients. Tim Rollins, whose Kids of Survival (KOS) is considered by many to offer an exemplary case of community-based art, was accused last fall by former KOS members of misallocating funds from the sale of their work and intimidating group members with “favoritism and threats.”⁸³ Although Rollins has vehemently denied the charges, it seems clear that in projects such as this the experience of empowerment on the part of institutionally credentialed artists and their collaborators is bound to differ.

The relationship between “community” artists and the “communities” they seek to work with is inevitably implicated in the larger symbolic economy of American politics. The poor and oppressed in our country are often being spoken for. Their rage and their oppression are frequently appropriated by politicians and policy-makers for their own ends. Thus, the same mobilization of the Great Society's aura that allowed Richard Nixon to court the liberal establishment through increases in NEA funding also allowed the alternative arts sector to reinvent itself as a legitimate beneficiary of public funding by appropriating the empowerment rhetoric of the late ‘60s. The rootlessness of the alternative artist is emblematic of the position occupied by the majority of intellectuals and artists in the United States today. This rootlessness is neither good nor bad per se; it simply is the defining condition under which most oppositional cultural production takes place (certainly most forms of state-funded "community" or "public" art). The problems of speaking for others, of cultural privilege, and intellectual tourism, are the central problems facing the publicly funded alternative arts sector today. There is no simple solution except to acknowledge them and begin a dialogue on how to work through them. What is striking, however, is the almost total refusal in the alternative sector to acknowledge that these problems exist, and the unquestioned belief that simply calling oneself an artist is a sufficient precondition for engaging in highly theatrical forms of moral rhetoric on behalf of the disenfranchised.

The unstated assumption behind the arts funding paradigm that has existed in the United States for the past quarter century has been that contemporary art production is a self-evident public good, deserving of taxpayer support. The "cultural worker," and "artists space" models stressed the importance of autonomy for the contemporary artist, and led to the creation of a network of state-funded "laboratories," engaged in various forms of cultural experimentation. This model is no longer sufficient—not because, as conservatives argue, artists are producing blasphemous or anti-American works, but because this very autonomy has prevented artists and arts administrators from developing and administering models of cultural production in which the needs of the public are taken seriously. Although there have been victories along the way in the arts funding battle—primarily in the courts—it is important to realize just what the conservatives have been able to accomplish. John Frohnmayer's replacement, Anne-Imelda Radice, based on her public comments and official actions to date, is more than willing to implement a conservative cultural agenda under the guise of concerns over artistic "quality." The NEA’s National Council, after twelve years of Republican appointments, is almost entirely conservative, and now has the power to override both the peer panels and the NEA's director, and the peer panel system itself has been seriously compromised. Although many members of the Endowment's staff are trying to maintain as much of the previously existing infrastructure as possible, it is clear that the NEA as it was only a few years ago has ceased to exist. At the same time, economic cutbacks at the state and federal level have eroded what little funding for the arts existed in the first place. If current trends continue many state arts councils won't even exist in a few years time.

It seems apparent that the paradigms used to justify public arts funding in the United States are going to change. Whether this change will come in response to conservative demands for a museumified high culture, or will respond to calls for a more truly popular and democratic culture remains to be seen. A great deal depends on the ability of the art world to reformulate the relationship between the publicly funded artist and the publics they hope to represent. In articulating this relationship, it will be necessary to discard the old, comfortable truths of the artist’s space and artistic autonomy. This process must begin with a frank and critical appraisal of the art world's own practices and presuppositions regarding various strata of the American public. There are an enormous number of constituencies, movements, and communities within the American public whom artists can work with, and learn from—not as the shock therapists of some imaginary middle class, but as collaborators and participants in the daily struggles of life under an increasingly oppressive and divisive economic regime. This is the argument that has to be made when conservatives have the audacity to wrap themselves in some presumed public outrage. But it can't be made convincingly so long as artists’ relationship to these publics remains one of moral censure, shamanistic arrogance, or pedagogical superiority.

Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego

NOTES

1. The following statement is taken from a declaration developed by the Jacob's Pillow Presenter's Conference in Becket, MA. "Some politicians argue that it is not censorship to deny public money to controversial projects because in these instances artists can pursue other sources. This argument is fallacious for the following reasons; 1) it denies the artist the right to public funds even when the work is of recognized quality and; 2) it defines excellence according to values which are not artistic." Quoted in the National Association of Artists Organizations Bulletin, Spring 1990, 7.

2. See Carole S. Vance, "The War on Culture," Art in America (September 1989), 39-45. Also see Richard Bolton, "The Cultural Contradictions of Conservativism," New Art Examiner 17:10 (June 1990), 24-29. Both are included in Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, Richard Bolton, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1992).

3. These phrases were taken from a random selection of editorials and press releases contained in Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts.

4. Bolton, Culture Wars, 23.

5. For accounts of the formation of the Endowment, see Milton Cummings, "Government and the Arts: An Overview," in Public Money and the Muse: Essays on Government Funding for the Arts, Stephen Benedict, editor, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 46-52; Dick Netzer, The Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 59-74; and Gary O. Larson, The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts 1943-1965, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 152-218.

6. Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 222.

7. Ibid., 160.

8. Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse: Visual Arts and the Public Interest, (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 59.

9. Ibid., 47.

10. Larson, The Reluctant Patron, 194.

11. Ibid., 161.

12. Banfield, The Democratic Muse, 60.

13. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, (New York: Vintage, 1971), 251.

14. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 262.

15. See David Stoloff, "The Short Unhappy History of Community Action Programs," in The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman and David Mermelstein, (New York: Vintage, 1967), 231-239.

16. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, 266.

17. Stoloff, The Great Society Reader, 177.

18. On the impact of New Federalism on federal urban policy, see Susan S. and Norman I. Fainstein, "Economic Change, National Policy, and the System of Cities," in Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Development, ed. Susan S. and Norman I. Fainstein, et al. (New York: Longman Press, rev. ed., 1986).

19. See Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

20. Cummings, "Government and the Arts: An Overview," 55.

21. Elaine King, Pluralism in the Visual Arts in the United States 1965-1978: The National Endowment for the Arts, an Influential Force, (unpublished Ph.D dissertation, Northwestern University, Field of Interdepartmental Studies in Speech, June 1986), 139.

22. Ibid.

23. Raymond Williams, "State Culture and Beyond," in Culture and the State: ICA Documents 2, Lisa Appignanesi, ed., (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1984), 3-5.

24. In fiscal year 1991, artist-run exhibition spaces, media centers, and publications, received less than 15 percent of the NEA's total programming support. Most of the first-generation alternative spaces were founded in the early to mid-1970s, (e.g., Franklin Furnace in 1976, The Kitchen in 1971, the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1975, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY., which was founded in 1969, and received its first NEA funding in 1972).

25. See King, “Pluralism in the Visual Arts,” 94. Even though NEA funding may make up a relatively small proportion of an organization's total budget (often as little as 15 to 20 percent), the organization is still reliant on the leverage that NEA recognition provides for other funding sources.

26. Washington Project for the Arts Document, Helen M. Brunner and Donald H. Russell, Jr. eds., (Washington, D.C.: Washington Project for the Arts, 1986), 1.

27. King, “Pluralism in the Visual Arts,” 153.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., 153-155.

30. As Derek Guthrie notes in an article in the New Art Examiner on the Washington Project for the Arts, "The 'farm-system' of artists spaces would never have come into existence without the passionate support of Brian O'Doherty." Derek Guthrie "WPA: Dinosaur or Phoenix?" New Art Examiner vol. 14, no.7. (March 1987): 21.

31. See André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (Boston: South End Press, 1982); Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy, and Socialism in America (Boston: South End Press, 1984); and Barbara and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, Pat Walker, ed. (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 5-45.

32. Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Vintage, 1991).

33. Barbara and John Ehrenreich, “Between Labor and Capital,” 12.

34. Ibid., 16.

35. Ibid., 17.

36. Ibid., 26.

37. “The defining characteristics of professions . . . are, in brief: a) the existence of a specialized body of knowledge, accessible only by lengthy training; b) the existence of ethical standards which include a commitment to public service; and c) a measure of autonomy from outside interference in the practice of the profession (e.g., only members of the profession can judge the value of a fellow professional’s work).” Ibid.

38. Testimony by Charlotte R. Murphy before the Committee on Education and Labor; Subcommittee on Postsecondary Education, March 21, 1990. Printed in National Association of Arts Organizations Bulletin, (Spring 1990), 6.

39. Karen Finley, statement from June 29, 1990, printed in the NAAO Bulletin, July 1990, 1.

40. "Statement of Susan Wyatt, Executive Director of Artists Space," reprinted in the NAAO Bulletin, July 1991, 11.

41. Stephen Kahn, "Communities of Faith, Communities of Interest," in "The Visual Artists' Organization: Past, Present, Future," in Afterimage, vol.14, no.3, (October, 1986), 13.

42. King, “Pluralism in the Visual Arts,” 63.

43. Ibid.

44. The Independent Commission was co-chaired by John Brademas, President of New York University and attorney Leonard Garment, the man who gave Richard Nixon such revealing advice about the political value of supporting increased arts funding. These comments are taken from a summary of the Commission report released in September 1990.

45. Renny Pritikin, "The Port Huron Statement and the Origin of Artists' Organizations" in New Writing in Arts Criticism: 1986 Journal, Anne Marie MacDonald, Kathy Brew, Peter Saidel, and Maureen Keefe, eds., (San Francisco: San Francisco Artspace, 1988), 37.

46. In his discussion of the “negative identification” that existed between avant-garde artists and workers during the late nineteenth century, in his essay “The Politics of the Avant-Garde,” Raymond Williams notes that early “alternative and opposition groups formed by artists based themselves on the premise that artists, like workers, were being ‘practically exploited’ by the market system.” Raymond Williams, “The Politics of the Avant-Garde,” in Vision and Blueprints, Edward Timms and Peter Collier, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 6-7. A more recent example of this identification is provided by the publication this spring of a list of “our country’s cultural working class” by Jeff Gates and ArtFBI (Artists for a Better Image). Developed as a response to Vice-President Dan Quayle’s attacks on the “cultural elite,” the ArtFBI list includes hundreds of artists “who have evoked [the power to effect change] and, more importantly, have developed creative ways to pass that potential on to others.”

47. NEA Artists' Projects: New Forms Panel, statement, May 25, 1990 in Culture Wars, 213.

48. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

49. See Arts Space, the Report of the Mayor's Blue Ribbon Committee for Promotion of the Arts and Economic Development (1988), which was funded and coordinated by the District of Columbia Office of Business and Economic Development. Also see: "Editorial," New Art Examiner, May 1988, 5.

50. Renny Pritikin, Statement to the National Council, (January 31, 1992) printed in NAAO Bulletin, (February 1992), 2.

51. See Howardena Pindell, "Breaking the Silence," New Art Examiner, (October 1990).

52. For coverage of this event see: "Angry Group Knocks Down Jackson Portrait," Washington Post (November 30, 1989) sec. B, 1. and Courtland Milloy, "Thinking with a Club," Washington Post (December 3, 1989) sec. B, 3.

53. For another perspective on the question of "coding" in visual art works see Grant H. Kester, "Pragmatics of Public Art: An Interview with Stephen Willats," Afterimage vol.19., no.10. (May 1992), 8-12.

54. Although the audiences for these spaces included a large number of local artists, the artists shown were as likely to be from New York or Los Angeles, as from the local community. The programmers of these spaces were content to take up what writer and former Art Papers editor Laura Lieberman has termed the "missionary position" - trying to introduce the 'locals' to progressive alternative arts models. Many of these spaces were, in fact, criticized precisely for their failure to respond to the needs of local artists. Writing on the in fighting between former Washington Project for the Arts Director Jock Reynolds and several prominent Washington artists and WPA board members, Derek Guthrie comments, "At the heart of the issue was who could control the exhibition program. In terms of simple rhetoric, it was local artists versus outside artists." Derek Guthrie, “WPA: Dinosaur or Phoenix?,” 22.

55. Dennis Barrie, "Freedom of Expression is the Issue," in Bolton, Culture Wars, 347. Although Mapplethorpe is not strictly speaking a product of the alternative space movement the reception of his work previous to the controversy was limited to a relatively small fine-arts audience. Other examples would include David Wojnarowicz, whose work was used by Rev. Donald Wildmon to illustrate a mass-mailing pamphlet attacking the Endowment. Wojnarowicz successfully sued Wildmon for using his work without permission.

56. Statement by Susan Wyatt before the House Subcommittee on Government Activities and Transportation on June 19, 1991 printed in NAAO Bulletin (July 1991), 8.

57. Examples include Martha Rosler's "If You Lived Here. . ." and Group Material's "Democracy," projects, which were presented at the Dia Art Foundation's exhibition space in Manhattan and later published in book form by Bay Press. These projects included self-described "Town Meetings," intended—as the name suggests—to create a utopian mini public-sphere in which artists, activists, and members of the public could engage in free and open debate. See: If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory, and Social Activism, A Project by Martha Rosler, Brian Wallis, editor, (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991). Also see Richard Bolton's recent project on male violence at New Langton Arts in San Francisco.

58. Ken Johnson, "Theater of Dissent," Art in America (March 1991), 131.

59. Kim Sawchuk, "Unleashing the Demons of History: An Interview with Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena," Parachute 67, 25.

60. Charles Wilmoth, review of Los Angeles Poverty Department's "Jupiter 35," High Performance, (Summer 1989), 57.

61. Charles Wilmoth, review of Karen Finley's "We Keep Our Victims Ready," High Performance, (Summer 1989), 57.

62. See: Andy Grundberg, "When Outs Are In, What's Up?" New York Times, (Sunday, July 26, 1987) section H, 30, 32.

63. Craig Owens, "The Medusa Effect or, The Spectacular Ruse," in We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture: Works by Barbara Kruger, (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1983), 6.

64. Jane Weinstock, "What she means, to you," ibid, 12-16.

65. Ken Johnson, 131.

66. Stephen Holden, "The Stark Oratory Of a Wild Karen Finley," New York Times, July 23, 1992, C17.

67. Laura Shapiro, "A One-Woman Tour of Hell," Newsweek (August 6, 1990), 60-61.

68. Tom Birch, "Government and the Arts: A Manipulated Debate," Art View: The Quarterly Journal of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, vol.11., no.4, 4.

69. Culture Wars, 254.

70. Shapiro, 60.

71. Barry Kapke, review of "A Suggestion of Madness," High Performance #45 (Spring 1989), 55.

72. Guillermo Gomez-Pena, "A Poem for the Program" from "1992: A Performance chronicle of the re-discovery of America, by the Warrior for Gringostroica," in White Walls #30, (When World's Collide), 1992, 14.

73. Margaret Spillane, "The Culture of Narcissism," Culture Wars, 571.

74. Ibid, 573.

75. Culture Wars, 34.

76. "Statement by Ted Potter, Director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art," May 19, 1989.

77. Lucy R. Lippard, "Andres Serrano: The Spirit and the Letter," Art in America (April 1990), 239.

78. When asked how he felt about the "strong political interpretation of [his] work," in an interview with Christian Walker, Serrano replied, "I can't really fight that or complain about it because the work is meant to be open to interpretation, as I always say it is. I have to take it both ways, the good with the bad." Christian Walker, "An Interview with Andres Serrano," Art Papers, (September-October 1990), 38.

79. Walker, 39.

80. Walker, 41.

81. This and the remaining Serrano quotes are all from the Walker interview, 41.

82. Kobena Mercer, "'1968': Periodizing Politics and Identity," in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 426.