Where do we go from here?

by Michael Brenson

"Where do we go from here?"
The Place of the Artist and the NEA

These remarks were prepared for the panel “On the Edge of the Future: Survival of the Artist in the New Political Climate,” which took place on October 15, 1994, as part of the conference “The Artist in Society: Rights, Roles and Responsibilities,” organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and held at the Art Institute of Chicago.

From its inception, the National Endowment for the Arts has been a symbol and gauge of American artistic vision and nerve. When the NEA was founded in 1965, American art gained a foothold at home and abroad it did not have before. When the NEA was relatively confident and unconstrained, American artistic culture was essentially confident and unconstrained. Since the political Right began monitoring the selections made by the NEA’s peer-panel process in 1989, using the work of gay and lesbian artists to stigmatize the NEA, American artists, and, by implication, the entire enterprise of American art, the NEA has been on the defensive, and artists have had trouble imagining the kind of ambition and sweep that have almost been synonymous with American art since World War II. My aim here is not to articulate and examine the many reasons American art as a whole has been in a restless, fragmented, uncertain state. Nor is it to deal directly with the question of whether the NEA should continue to exist if it must constantly justify itself to the kinds of bigots who have always been the enemies of the creative imagination. My intention in focusing on art and the NEA during the last thirty years is to shed light on the current situation of American art and contribute to the conversation about artistic responsibility and necessity in the immediate future.

    In order to convince you of the importance of the NEA, I need to give you a personal sense of the New York art scene before it existed. I was born during World War II and grew up in Manhattan after the war ended. An impressive list could be put together of pre-World War II American painters. Arthur Dove, Thomas Eakins, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe would be on it. Winslow Homer is, to me, as good as any artist America has produced. But American Modernism began to be widely appreciated only after the war. When I was a child, art was very much on the periphery of American life, and American art was almost entirely unknown outside the United States. When I told my elementary school classmates that my father was a painter, faces went blank. Being a Modernist painter, not to speak of a painter committed, like many other artists whose lives had been ruptured by the war, to spiritual abstraction, had little or no meaning for them. They did not judge me on my father’s profession; they were my friends. They simply could not relate to it. Being a painter was far less real to them than being a garbage collector or a street sweeper: Art was not even a profession; being an artist was like being a nonperson. I don’t know what my father thought about this. I do know he had no wish to assimilate himself entirely into America. He returned every summer to Paris, where he had lived between the wars, where as a child I saw him and other artists gather in cafes in the heart of the city and take for granted that Paris belonged to them as much as it belonged to anyone else.

    In the aftermath of the war, the attitude toward modern artists throughout American society was generally far more suspicious than it was among six-to-eight-year-old big-city kids. Outside their own circles, artists, particularly those rooted in Modernism, were widely considered deadbeats or undesirables. They were identified with everything that triumphant but edgy America was afraid of. What it was most afraid of, it seemed to me, was Communism and homosexuality. In those years, the radical, or experimental, or conspicuously nontraditional artist was identified with both. Somewhere near the nerve center of the American psyche, the artist, the Communist, and the homosexual were an unholy trio. I am not going to try to prove this link here; some of you will know what I am saying without my having to prove it. I am asking you to accept it as an experiential truth that I absorbed week in, week out in the streets and in other public places, traveling with my mother or father. We were foreigners, and I knew this not just because my parents spoke, dressed, and thought differently from other parents I knew. (The rhetoric of Eurocentrism is unfortunate in its denial of the divide between American and European cultures; these cultures have never been and are not now the same, not even after the international conquests of Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Levi’s, and Hertz.)

    The foreignness had as much to do with my father’s profession. There were certainly places where art was a cause. Certainly my father had his friends; he went to the Eighth Street Club every Friday night, and the Museum of Modern Art was not just a museum for him but a home. Elsewhere, however, he and his friends often drew looks and comments. They were suspicious; they were strange; they were other. The link of the artist with foreignness, Communism, and homosexuality helps explain why the Abstract Expressionists made such a point of their barroom manner and macho swagger. In order to gain a new kind of respect for the artist in America, they had to make sure the artist was disassociated from Communism, homosexuality, and foreignness. The Abstract Expressionists thought deeply, and among them only Jackson Pollock was really uncomfortable with words, but some of them almost hid their intelligence. The image they cultivated, of the hard-drinking, nonverbal, largely apolitical male, was one with which postwar America could feel at ease. For the sake of American art at that time, the Abstract Expressionists had to do what they did. By offering an unmistakably and conventionally American image of themselves, and by producing paintings of radically unconventional beauty and imagination that other postwar artists around the world had to think about, they helped create the basis for a postwar American art that American institutions could consider truly American. Abstract Expressionism, along with the color-field painting, Pop Art, and Minimalism that followed, projected a scale, a newness, an inventiveness, and a conviction that the mass media could latch on to. So could a government Cold War machine looking to spread the word about American creativity and values.

    With the Kennedy administration, respect for the artist seemed to become formalized. In October 1963, a month before his assassination, President Kennedy gave a famous speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College that promised to end forever the second-class status of the American artist. I don’t think the formation and development of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the crisis of these Endowments now, can be understood apart from it.

    Kennedy began by linking “art and the progress of the United States.” He emphasized the need for a sense of “responsibility to the public interest.” Then he defined the role and responsibility of the artist.

    “The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness,” Kennedy said. “But the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable.”

    He also said:

    When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of a man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.

    And Kennedy said this:

    If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, make him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

    I looked up this speech a year ago and am still amazed by it. I find its mixture of optimism and pessimism fascinating: A sense of the inevitability of self-interest and tragedy goes hand in hand with a sense of obligation to fight for justice and hope. I am struck as well by Kennedy’s belief in artists as outsiders whose outsiderness is justified by their responsibility to the society of which they are always a part. After five years of political exploitation of NEA selections by men like Senator Jesse Helms, Senator Alfonse D’Amato, Senator Robert Byrd, and the Reverend Donald Wildmon, I find almost painful Kennedy’s belief that the artist supported by government also had to be protected from government if the artistic imagination in America was going to be able to flourish. The conviction that art opposes power and that this opposition can be cleansing — in other words, that art brings health to the body politic — is almost stupefying to me now, given the linking of the American artist with degeneracy and disease by Pat Buchanan and others.

    Government support for the arts after the Kennedy administration made an enormous difference. There would not have been such an explosion of artists, dealers, collectors, critics, and curators if the government did not express confidence in art, if it did not feature art in its international programs, if it did not believe art was essential to the energy and purpose of the nation. The Endowments put a stamp of approval on American art and culture that encouraged new kinds of patronage and a level of institutional support they had not known before.

    With all its party politics, and all its ups and downs, the National Endowment for the Arts did more than strengthen the fabric of artistic culture in America; it was proof that this fabric existed. If you look at the lists of grants awarded by the Visual Arts Program in recent years, you will find clear evidence of the NEA’s curiosity and openness and determination to recognize a diversity of talent and, in the process, to strengthen the diversity of artistic talent in the nation. Just as important, by giving grants to difficult art, challenging art, art that can offend or shock, it acknowledged that provocative and confrontational art is essential to the vitality of American art as a whole. You cannot have a thriving arts program, or any vital artistic culture, for that matter, without supporting work that locates the fault lines of a society and articulates feelings and thoughts that the society as a whole has avoided or been unwilling to face. At least since French Impressionism, art has proven its necessity by charting social, political, and philosophical currents and channeling them into images or events that coax or pressure people into becoming more aware of the tensions and possibilities within themselves and within the age in which they live. Through its responsiveness to all kinds of artmaking and through its willingness to fund art that pressures society to acknowledge that there is something at stake in art and that artists as a group have something indispensable to say about the conflicts and longings of an age, the government sent a message that art mattered.

    Then came 1989. This was the year that saw tirades on the floor of the Senate against government funding of exhibitions that included sadomasochistic and homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and the infamous Andres Serrano photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine. It continued in 1990 with right-wing attacks on grants awarded to the performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. Funding for Marlon Riggs’s “Tongues Untied,” an eloquent and award-winning documentary about gay black men, drew fundamentalist fire in 1991. Earlier this year, a minuscule amount of NEA money given by the Walker Art Center to another performance artist, Ron Athey, set the distortion machine of the Right in motion again. The NEA now knows that the Right can exploit for its political purposes any grant it considers morally improper, and it knows that when the Right does single out a grant, the news media as a whole will jump through its hoops like trained dogs.

    But the attacks of the Right do not, by themselves, explain why the NEA is now so much on the defensive. I want to go back to Kennedy’s speech for a minute. Its view of the artist is definitely that of the heroic outsider working on the periphery of a problematic society and state to help expose the truth about both. In Kennedy’s speech, the artist belongs to society but also doesn’t, existing in a relationship between inside and outside that is extremely delicate and inherently problematic to any political administration that does not share Kennedy’s belief in the value of an outsider — a foreigner — helping to shape societal thinking about insider power. We live at a time when any view of the artist as a heroic outsider and any separation of artist and society are being severely challenged by the Left, and when to the Right, the moral authority of the artist is a joke. The NEA would not be in trouble if some of the principles that led to its formation and development were not seriously contested or dated.

    But there is another crucial reason why the NEA crisis occurred in 1989. Hand in hand with Kennedy’s idealism was a hard realism. His view of art cannot be understood apart from the Soviet Union. He could be so free in advocating such a radical vision because that vision was perceived as a Cold War weapon. By supporting such an enlightened view of the artist, Kennedy could contrast the approach to culture in the United States with the repressive state view of art in the Soviet Union. By showing the world that he was so sure of his political system that he was not afraid of having it criticized by creative people distrustful of power, Kennedy could contrast the confidence of democracy with a government that did not tolerate criticism.

    This link between cultural idealism and political realism, between commitment to the artist and Cold War politics, has been, I am convinced, implicitly understood by succeeding administrations. It is this link, not respect for art, that convinced those administrations to uphold the ideals formulated in that 1963 speech. In the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush presidencies had almost no interest in art, and the ideological foundation supporting the government’s commitment to American artistic culture got weaker and weaker. By the end of the decade, there was very little holding that commitment in place. When the Iron Curtain collapsed, the pragmatic need for a confident and unconstrained NEA collapsed with it. The authority of the NEA was suddenly and sharply diminished. Institutional support for the arts at the highest political and corporate levels continues to shrink. What was most striking to me about Morley Safer’s attack on contemporary art on 60 Minutes in September 1993, was not its bread-and-butter mass-media philistinism but rather the absence of any system to resist it.

    The fall of the Iron Curtain had another effect on the perception of art in many parts of America. When Communism ceased to be the enemy of American values abroad, homosexuality became the main enemy at home. Three of the best artists whose esthetic value Safer challenged are gay. By and large it is grants to gay artists that have drawn the sharks of the Right. The image of the gay or lesbian artist announcing, or flaunting, his or her views and fantasies unleashes the kind of hysteria that suspicion of Communists in institutional closets used to provoke after World War II. What I am saying is that the old paranoia-inducing link between the artist, the homosexual, and the Communist is still very much alive.

    What the events surrounding the NEA during the last five years tell us is this: The artist has never gained as much of a foothold in this country as his or her economic success and star status during the last thirty years led many people to believe. In many parts of America, the kind of hostility toward artists that so many people assumed had vanished is flourishing. Abstract Expressionists, Pop Artists, Minimalists, post-Minimalists, and many other postwar American artists have won big battles, but they also left big issues unchallenged. Many other battles will have to be waged again and again. And again. Like so many other developments that once provided answers, the NEA may now be as valuable for the problems it exposes as it is for the solutions it provides. The NEA has done a great deal for American art and artists, but what it can do now is probably limited, and it must no longer be a symbol of American artistic vision and nerve.

    How is the artist going to create a new support system? How do we take the next steps?

    The new public art is crucial. By new public art, I mean interactive, activist art in the service of social change. This art is not made for art institutions and not defined by objects. It does not assume the in-your-face stance that provokes such predictable reactions by the Right; it functions outside the art market that fuels the Morley Safers of the world by generating so much cynicism and hype. It encourages conversations about issues rather than calling attention to itself. It works toward or realizes actual changes in the environment. It builds collaborations between artists and communities outside social and political power. This kind of art reflects the experience of our world expressed in Guillermo Gomez-Peñas declaration that “we are living in a state of emergency.” It is very much about infrastructure; it works on a grass-roots level to listen and mobilize and construct a kind of foundation for art that powerful art institutions cannot now build. This kind of art, some of the best of which has been supported by the NEA, exists in streets, in schools, in parks, in churches, in rivers, and on hills. It is directed toward audiences that art institutions have barely reached, even on those occasions when they have been interested in them. No other art can now have a more decisive effect on the awakening of consciousness and hope.

    To this point, much of this public art has been serving communities at risk, which have been pretty much defined as minority communities in urban centers and with roots in non-Western cultures. I want to emphasize the need for more of these artists, many of whom come from the working class, to approach precisely those communities that support Helms, Byrd, and Buchanan, those communities that continue to link modern artists, homosexuals, and Communists as the enemy. Since the beginning of Modernism, these communities, more than any others, have been perceived as the enemies of art. Within the art world now, these segments of white middle- and lower-middle class America that make up Baudelaire’s “vulgar herd” are the demonized other. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that they really are the enemies of unconventional and innovative art. In order to diminish their fears about art and artists, it is going to be necessary to see the humanity of people who many be anti-abortion, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-Latino, and anti-black. It will also be necessary to end the rhetoric about white people, white men, and Europeans that has helped make many people stigmatized by that rhetoric wary of any notion of progress. The ease with which many so-called progressives indulge such stereotypes contributes to the ease with which the demagogues of the Right convince white people who feel beleaguered to jump on their bandwagons. Can we really change this country and establish a secure place for the artist in society without being shaped by and shaping the needs and humanity of the people on whom demagogues feed?

    I don’t want to end without saying a word to the art students here who are comfortable with institutions and interested in being painters or sculptors. If that is what you are passionate about, then no artistic bandwagon should make you turn your back on it. Object-making is essential, even now, certainly now. Painting and sculpture will always be irreplaceable. No one kind of art can ever be enough to satisfy all the needs to which art must respond. People in galleries and museums will always be looking for a kind of experience they cannot find anyplace else. You have far more room to maneuver now than you might think. It is important to consider what you can do in painting or sculpture that artists working in other media can’t do. It may not be possible anymore to believe that by changing language you can change the world, but that does not mean that the languages of painting and sculpture should not be thought about and reinvented so that they can continue to inspire and move. To you, I can offer this unsolicited advice: Don’t talk to your audiences, touch them; don’t demonize Modernism, understand its richness and complexity; distrust either-or thinking; be generous, be generous; leave yourself exposed.


                                                                                                                      1994

© Michael Brenson and Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

"Where Do We Go from Here? The Place of the Artist and the NEA," in Michael Brenson,
Acts of Engagement: Writings on Art, Criticism and Institutions, 1993-2002, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004, 75-82.