Grant Kester, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (Afterimage 1994)

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Orchestral maneuvers in the dark.

reprint from vol. 21, no6, January 1994

Kester, Grant H.

Afterimage; May/June 1998, Vol. 25 Issue 6, p18-18, 1pIllustration

Article

National Endowment for the Arts

Art -- Government aid -- Conferences

In an article reprinted from the January 1994 issue of Afterimage,the writer discusses After the Culture Wars: Is there a Future forPublic Funding of the Arts?, a conference held at the Eastman

School of Music in Rochester, New York, in November 1993. Theevent featured three roundtable discussions, including onecentering on the standards used in decisions about arts funding,and a public symposium on whether the National Endowment forthe Arts is the best approach to federal arts funding. The absenceof performance artists, video- and lmmakers, and photographerswas particularly disappointing as these are precisely themarginal and excessive realms of art practice that will have tobe sacriced as the National Endowment of the Arts pursues itsmain goal of supporting excellence in the arts.

03007472

505743806

Art Full Text (H.W. Wilson)

ORCHESTRAL MANEUVERS IN THE DARK

On a cold Saturday afternoon in early November 1993 the prestigious Eastman. School of Music inRochester, NY played host to a day-long conclave of leading gures from politics and the arts whowere brought together to discuss the future of public arts funding. The morning segment of the

conference "After the Culture wars: Isb there a Future for Public Funding of the Arts?" wasorganized around three "roundtable" discussions that focused on questions of artists' FirstAmendment rights the standards employed in arts funding decisions and the amount of money thatthe United States government should spend on the arts. The afternoon was devoted to a publicsymposium, "F~d~ eral Funding for the Arts: Is the NEA the best approach," moderated by RobertO'Neil, President Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Symposium participants included formercongressman John Brademas; attorney and former Nixon White House Counsel Leonard Garment;

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congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY), choreographer Garth Fagan of the Garth Fagan DanceCompany; Michael Morgan, Assistant Conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; ChristopherRouse, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer at the Eastman School; Andrea Gill, a ceramicist whoteaches at Alfred State University; and Douglas Dempster, Chair of the Humanities Department atthe Eastman School.

The symposium was clearly centered around Brademas and Garment, who were co-Chairs of theNational Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Independent Commission, a damage-control deviceestablished by President Reagan during the early days of the arts funding controversies. Althoughthe Commission was widely touted for its "bipartisan" composition, Brademas and Garment seemedto agree on just about everything (or maybe this just means that Democrats and Republicans havethe same ideas about arts policy). What emerged at the interstices of their remarks was somethinglike an ofcial consensus position on arts funding that was quite revealing. What also emerged,especially in Garment's remarks, was the fact that many of our assumptions about the "liberal" basisof arts funding policy need to be reevaluated. As Garment pointed out, the single most generous

President in the history of the NEA (vis-a-vis budget appropriations) was Richard Nixon.

Brademas began by reviewing the "ndings" of the Independent Commission, now over four yearsold (1989). His recommendations, based on the Commission's report, can be divided into twocategories; pragmatic (and blatantly ideological) and fuzzy (and less blatantly ideological). In thepragmatic category were calls to strengthen the power of the NEA chair and National Council inorder to prevent the dangerously "politicized" peer-panel system from abrogating entirely the NEA'ssacred public trust. It was not made clear, however, just how the act of giving more power toindividuals who are presidentially appointed, and who function to enact the particular cultural agendaof each administration, would reduce the "politicization" of the grant-giving process or alleviate"conict of interest." The Commission also recommended the highly symbolic gesture of expandingthe peer panels (now the "grant advisory panels") to include "lay members" (i.e. members of the"general public"). The signicance of the evangelical metaphor employed here passed unnoted. Inaddition, Brademas called for more funding for art education, greater cultural diversity in artsfunding, and increased access in general to museums and other arts institutions.

On the fuzzy size Brademas called for the NEA to be more "accountable,"and to recommit itself to its"primary mission": the support and encouragement of "excellence" and "quality" in the arts (asopposed to "mediocrity"). He also hailed the importance of the arts for the health of an "open

society." The fuzzy and less blatantly ideological recommendations could be recognized by thepresence of conceptual key words such as "excellence," "quality" and "accountability." This is typicalof conservative arguments about culture that sacrice any meaningful engagement with thedenition of these highly problematic and value-laden terms for ad hominum appeals to anon-existent consensus as to what they might actually mean, and for whom they might hold thatmeaning. Of course the central problem in the debate over arts funding is precisely that there is no


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consensus about terms such as "quality" or "excellence" in the rst place, or rather, thatdisagreements about the meaning of these terms are based on underlying social and culturalcontradictions that the terms themselves are meant to paper over. Nor is it clear just which segmentof the "public" the NEA is meant to be accountable to. Excellence was bandied a6out quite a bit, in adenuded, Matthew Arnold kind of way. When pressed to dene this ne plus ultra Garmentvolunteered sophomoric platitudes: "I don't know what quality is, but I recognize it when I see it," andinarticulate mumblings about line, shape and form, nally trailing off in a meandering tautology to theeffect that "excellence" is something that "artists can recognize." The lack of any coherent attempt todene these central terms constituted perhaps the central disappointment in a symposium that was,with a few exceptions, characterized by anecdotal statements and offthe-cuff observations passingfor thoughtful cultural analysis.

Brademas was followed by Garment, ostensibly presenting the "other side of the argument."Garment began by arguing for the importance of venerable "institutions" (giving as examples hisown law rm and the Eastman School of Music), as opposed to the kinds of less than venerable

organizations that have supported "controversial" art in the past. Fortunately these activities havebeen limited to the "margins" of the Endowment's activities. The margin is, of course, anotherpopular conservative term, designating all those kinds of activities that "most Americans" would notapprove of. Garment went on to portray himself as a calm and reasonable centrist, with right-wingcritics (presumably Helms, et. al.) collaborating with artists and the media to create a publicityspectacle for their own selsh purposes out of a "handful" of works by Serrano and Mapplethorpe.Garment painted a picture in which the arts controversies ended in a "stand off" in which truantartists came to "realize that they couldn't do whatever they wanted to with NEA money," while thecourt system (in rejecting the "content restrictions" on NEA funding introduced by the Helms

Amendment) rewarded them with their freedom of expression. In other words, artists have agreed tonot say things that will offend (some politically powerful) people, while the courts have agreed toprotect their rst amendment right not to say them. Work on the "margins," the "excesses" beyondwhat is understood to be the broadly agreed upon majority opinion in the U.S. have been eliminated.The higher mission of the good ship Endowment, coursing through the waters of mass culture topreserve quality and excellence, has been preserved, and the ship will cruise steadily onward having

jettisoned this annoying cargo.

The court decision that struck down the content restrictions contained in the Helms amendment wasseen as a victory for liberal arts supporters. But Garment's scenario, in which the NEA has learned

to "curb the excesses," is really just a convenient way to get the NEA to save the government theembarrassment of "controversial" art in the rst place. If the NEA has learned its lesson andre-dedicated itself to quality and excellence there won't be any more controversial art. This is thestrategic value of the quality argument; by dening "mediocre" art as work that produces a"controversial" reaction (presumably by attacking "mainstream" or dominant values), you implicitlydene quality art as work that does not create a "controversy" (presumably by reinforcing these


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same values). Conservatives such as Garment can triumphantly herald their commitment to freespeech and an "open society," even as they effectively censor any possible dissenting opinion--notbecause they disagree with it, but because it fails to display the requisite "quality." What thequality/mediocrity split really seems to be about is the belief that the NEA should not fund work thatcertain vocal constituencies in the U.S. nd "offensive," and that this work, by virtue of the fact that itdoes offend certain groups (Helms, evangelical Christians, etc.) is therefore "mediocre." Thisformulation overlooks the fact that many people in the U.S. had no problem at all with Serrano orMapplethorpe's work, and felt that it reected their own values and interests quite well. These samepeople might even be offended by the amount of public money that is spent on opera, ballet orclassical music. Why is it that the outrage of only one segment of the American public is consideredlegitimate?

The arts, in the classic conservative denition, are supposed to be transcendent and universal, buthere they clearly reect the fragmented nature of American society. This transcendence was alsocompromised by a revealing glimpse that Garment provided into the real politik behind arts policy

decision-making. Garment noted that the NEA's budget increased exponentially under the Nixonadministration. The motivation behind this gesture, however, didn't stem from Nixon's rmcommitment to culture, or to the persuasive power of carefully crafted arguments about theimportance of the arts, but rather from a memo that Garment wrote to Nixon advising him thatincreased funding for the arts would win him much needed votes among the liberal establishment.

Garment concluded by arguing that all the discussions about censorship and controversial art areold news, whereupon he launched into an exegesis on the decrepit state of American culture ingeneral that can only be described as bizarre. Garment painted a picture in which people "living infear of dangerous and crowded cities" stay safely home (presumably in the suburbs) watching cableTV and listening to CDs. Rather than venturing out into the drug and crime infested streets ofAmerica at night to see Shakespeare in the park, or a ballet or a symphony, they stay at homewatching Beavis and Butthead and Thigh Master ads. While cable TV promises to provide aheretofore unrealized mass audience, it also, in the classic Greenberglan sense "grinds downpopular taste." The worst excesses of Mapplethorpe or Serrano, according to Garment, "look almostchaste" beside the "shock effect" of cable TV. As a result the true crisis facing the arts today isn'tabout freedom of expression, its about how to maintain their very relevance and identity in the faceof the masscult onslaught. To avoid being made redundant by the Home Shopping Club and theLarouche Connection, artists must return to that which they know best: you guessed it, "quality" and

"excellence." Finally, anticipating those who might raise questions about quality as a relic of an eliteculture, Garment defended his own liberal credentials ("I support afrmative action"), even as heheld out for an aesthetic standard that transcends the social ("I'm a Jew, but I like Bach").

After the two gray eminences had their say, the other panelists were allowed to enter the fray.Slaughter, who, as the head of the Congressional Arts Caucus was arguably the most qualied


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person on the panel to speak to issues of current arts funding, used the brief time slot allotted to herto stress the importance of art education programs. Morgan, Rouse, Fagan and Gill weren't allowedto make formal remarks at all, and instead had to respond to questions posed by O'Neil. WhenO'Neil confronted ceramicist Gill with the argument that artists, rather than relying on public funding,should be able to support themselves in the marketplace, she responded that the much-desired"excellence" only comes with painstaking "research" and experimentation: "you can't come up withquality overnight, someone has to pay for it." Thus the role of the NEA is to support "basic research,"which then lters back down to the "public" in the form of "quality" art work. If one were to diagramGill's analysis it would look something like this:

This is the basis of the second of three common positions on "controversial" art (the rst beingGarment's). Artists are "like" scientists; they engage in "research" and experimentation. In thepursuit of great art there are bound to be some occasional failed experiments (i.e. some "offensive"art). But these failures are necessary so that others may eventually succeed and produce"excellence." The third position, which was not represented here, is that it is precisely the role of the

artist to ask difcult questions, to prick the viewer's conscience and to call our attention touncomfortable truths.

It is not surprising, given the venue of this symposium, that the "artists" on the panel included acomposer and a conductor, in addition to a modern dance choreographer and a ceramicist.However, given the fact that the "controversial" works that were the implicit and explicit focus of somuch of the discussion, especially the discussion around "quality" and excellence," werephotographs, videos and performance works, it might have been interesting to hear from aperformance artist, a videomaker or a photographer. It's worth noting that a classicallytrained,Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and a symphony orchestra conductor might have very differentdenitions of "excellence" than Karen Finley, David Wojnarowicz or Holly Hughes. In fact, given thatconservatives likely view things like classical music and modern dance as eminently safe examplesof "quality" high art, there is reason to assume that conductors and composers would bepredisposed to identify quite easily with the conservative position on "excellence" in the arts. In fact,if NEA funding were to be reprioritized along the lines that Garment advocates, classical music,ballet, theater and opera would clearly be beneciaries. Thus it was particularly interesting to listento Rouse respond to the question of what he would do if he were threatened with a (presumablyHelms-style) content restriction on his work. Rouse bravely insisted that he would, of course, refusethe grant. But just what might constitute a "content restriction" on someone who composes trombone

concertos truly taxes the imagination.

The absence of performance artists, lm- and videomakers and photographers was especiallydisappointing because these are precisely the "marginal" and "excessive" areas of arts practice thatare at stake in conservative attacks, and in the positions taken up by gures such as Garment andBrademas. These are the "marginal" practices, lacking in the requisite "quality," that will have to be


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sacriced as the NEA pursues its primary mission of supporting excellence in the arts.

DIAGRAM: Gill's analysis

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): A page from an Afterimage magazine.

~~~~~~~~ by Grant H. Kester From Vol. 21, no. 6 (January 1994)

Grant H. Kester is currently Assistant Professor of Modern Art History at Washington StateUniversity, Pullman.

Source: Afterimage, May/June 1998, Vol. 25 Issue 6, p18, 1pItem: 505743806


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Documents

Grant Kester, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (Afterimage 1994)