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Sacrilege Or Censorship? Christians Enraged by Art with Gay, Religious Images

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Minor White (American, 1908–1976). Tom Murphy, 1948. Gelatin silver print, 4 5/8 x 3 5/8 in. (11.7 x 9.2 cm). The Minor White Archive, Princeton University Art Museum. Bequest of Minor White, MWA 48-136. © Trustees of Princeton University Photo courtesy Tacoma Art Museum

On November 18, HIDE/SEEK: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture will open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum (BM). After it closes on February 12, the exhibition will travel to the Tacoma Art Museum (TAM) where it can be viewed from March 17 through June 10, 2012.

It wasn’t until the controversy surrounding it went viral more than a month after it opened, that I first heard about HIDE/SEEK , then showing at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). I considered traveling to Washington, D.C. to see it, but the holidays were coming; a blizzard was predicted for D.C. and I was familiar with the work of many of the artists. When I owned a gallery, I had even shown some of the same pictures being exhibited at the NPG. And I had experienced the same issues as Jonathan Katz and co-curator David Ward when they were assembling the show.

Like them, I had been refused loans of art, often by closeted gay curators who were afraid of drawing attention to themselves. In fact my gallery, In a Plain Brown Wrapper, which I opened in Chicago less than a decade after Stonewall, had been visited by police in 1980 and threatened with closure when I held the first Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition outside of New York and San Francisco.

This was not the first time that an exhibition that included LGBT or religious imagery had been censored and undoubtedly not the last. So thinking I had been there, done that, I decided to stay home with my partner in more temperate Seattle.

But I changed my mind over a post-Christmas brunch with our neighbors down the street. Pamm had given Pam a copy of the splendid catalogue, a stunning coffee-table size book which included images I had never seen before. Wow! After flipping through its pages, really just a quick perusal, I was ready
to pack my bag. And I’m really glad I decided to make the trip.

It was only after I had booked my flight that I learned my stay coincided with an organized protest by Art Positive at the annual meeting of The Smithsonian’s Board of Directors.

 

Stuart Wilber and Lt. Dan Choi. Photo by Shannon Cuttle

In case you missed the uproar, I’ll explain. A four minute excerpt from the film A Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz was on display when this landmark show first opened on October 30, 2010. It was removed December 1.

As Holland Cotter reported, NYT, 12-10-2010 this was not the first time Wojnarowicz’s work had created a stir. “In 1989, Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, mailed a pamphlet reproducing details from collages by the New York artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) to every member of Congress, to various news media outlets and to religious leaders across the country. Mr. Wildmon, a Methodist minister, had prepared the pamphlet himself; he considered the images pornographic or blasphemous. He had copied them from the catalog for an exhibition partly supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the real object of his protest. Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch), furious at having his work selectively edited, sued Mr. Wildmon for misrepresenting his art and won the case.”

 

A Fire In My Belly (still), 1986-87. Super 8mm film, black and white and color. Silent. Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/New York University

Twenty-one years later history repeated itself. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, one of the icons of the Religious Right, took offence at an excerpt from A Fire in My Belly which included an image of ants crawling over a crucifix and Republican leaders John Boehner and Eric Cantor suggested the entire exhibit be canceled and threatened the federal funding of the Gallery unless the Smithsonian pulled the Wojnarowicz piece. Feeling pressured, G. Wayne Clough, the director of the gallery unilaterally removed the video excerpt of the film, a commentary on AIDS and spirituality.

The Smithsonian was petitioned to restore the video to the exhibit  and the film was projected on the side of the building, but it wasn’t until Mike Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone brought the film back into the NPG that the story of its removal and copies of the video went viral; the ensuing kerfuffle prompted institutions worldwide to protest the censorship and show the video.

Blasenstein strapped an iPad around his neck and stood in the gallery with the video playing on the screen. He offered flyers about the Smithsonian’s censorship to visitors. In less than 10 minutes security guards removed him from the exhibit and he and Iacovone, who filmed the encounter, were barred for life from returning to any of the Smithsonian museums. Prohibited from displaying the film inside, Blasenstein and Iacovone parked a trailer around the corner, called it the Museum of Censored Art and showed the film for the duration of the exhibition.

Last April when I learned the Brooklyn and Tacoma Art Museums were exploring the feasibility of re-mounting Hide/Seek, I asked Lisa McKeown, the Communications Coordinator, at the Tacoma Art Museum if any objections had been made to mounting the exhibition. She responded, “Just to clarify… There hasn’t been an organized movement that we’ve had to deal with (yet) as far as people objecting to bringing the exhibition to Tacoma. We have received some letters, emails, and phone calls from individuals who do not want us to bring the exhibition, for various reasons. On the flip side… we have had many more letters and emails in support of our bringing the exhibition here.”

And in May, when I began a letter-writing campaign to lend the two museums additional support for mounting the exhibition, Charles Desmarais, then Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum responded that unlike the NPG or TAM, “we have received nothing but support and encouragement.”

Not anymore! An article in yesterday’s New York Daily News was headlined, “Another unholy controversy at Brooklyn museum: Video of ants skittering over crucified Jesus is enraging Christians.”

Erin Durkin, Mark Morales and Katie Nelson wrote, “An avant-garde video of ants skittering over the crucified Jesus is enraging Christians who say an upcoming Brooklyn Museum art exhibit is sacrilegious. ‘Ants were crawling on the image of the crucified Christ,’ said Msgr. Kieran Harrington, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, which sent a letter asking for the video to get yanked from the exhibit. ‘Certainly we don’t think this would be tolerated if this was the image of the Prophet Muhammed [sic] or any other religious symbol.’ ‘What is the point?’’ said Pastor A. R. Bernard, who leads Brooklyn’s Christian Cultural Center. ‘I think this is the piece in the Hide/seek collection they really need to hide.’

It’s far from the first time the art museum has stirred the pot: The museum drew ire from then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1999 for an exhibit featuring a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung and images of female genitalia.

Giuliani tried to cut the museums funding because of the painting, part of a provocative exhibit called Sensation.  Giuliani and Catholic advocates also slammed the museum for featuring [Renee Cox’s “] Yo Mamas Last Supper” which depicts Christ as a nude woman in 2001. “A Fire in My Belly” is creating a similar stir. But Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold Lehman defended the entire exhibit. ‘For a city that prides itself on diversity and creativity, there couldn’t be a better exhibition,’ Lehman told the Daily News.”

There are more than a hundred good reasons to travel to Brooklyn this winter or to Tacoma
this spring; viewing the 10 second segment of
 a 4 minute excerpt from the 30 minute A Fire in My
Belly is only one of them.

The website of the Brooklyn Museum, puts the exhibition in perspective. “Hide/Seek is the first major museum exhibition to focus on themes of gender and sexuality in modern American portraiture bringing together “more than one hundred works in a wide range of media, including paintings, photographs, works on paper, film, and installation art. The exhibition charts the underdocumented role that sexual identity has played in the making of modern art, and highlights the contributions of gay and lesbian artists to American art. Beginning in the late nineteenth century with Thomas Eakins’ Realist paintings, HIDE/SEEK traces the often coded narrative of sexual desire in art produced throughout the early modern period and up to the present. The exhibition features pieces by canonical figures in American art—including George Bellows, Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, and
Berenice Abbott—along with works that openly assert gay and lesbian subjects in modern and contemporary art, by artists such as Jess Collins and Tee Corinne.”

 

 

Berenice Abbott, 'Janet Flanner,' 1927 Photo courtesy Tacoma Art Museum

“In addition to revealing connections between sexual identity and formal developments in modern art, HIDE/SEEK presents artists’ responses to the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the AIDS epidemic, and postmodern themes of identity, highlighted with major pieces by artists such as AA Bronson, Félix González-Torres, and Annie Leibovitz.”

Yes, there are more than a hundred good reasons to go to Brooklyn between November 18 and February 12. And if you manage to get there before January 29 you can also catch the exhibition, Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties  which includes this splendid painting of gay icon, Paul Cadmus.

 

Luigi Lucioni (American, 1900–1988). Paul Cadmus, 1928. Oil on canvas, 16 x 12 1/8 in. (40.6 x 30.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 2007.28 Photo courtesy Brooklyn Museum

Another not-to-be-missed exhibition, Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories is presently at the NPG, through January 22, 2012. It was originally shown at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum where ironically a lesbian couple was asked to leave the exhibition because they were holding hands.

 

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

From the day they met, September 8, 1907, Stein and Toklas lived as an openly Lesbian couple. Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories features more than 25 artifacts and 100 works by artists from across Europe and the U.S., detailing Stein’s life and work as an artist, collector and distinctive style-maker.  The NPG website informs us that the exhibition “shares an in-depth portrait of Stein that knits together her many identities: literary celebrity; life-long partner of Alice B. Toklas; arts networker whose famous friendships included some of the most prominent artists of her time (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Hemingway); Jewish-American expatriate; and muse to artists of several generations. Stein is considered by many to be an inventor of Modernism whose reach across the arts was extraordinary. She wrote novels, poems, essays, literary and art theory, opera libretti, ballets, memoirs and children’s books and was also an arts networker, bringing creative people together in legendary salons and gatherings in her homes. Her originality as a thinker, along with her interdisciplinary approach to projects in dance, music and theater, continue to inspire artists today.”

Despite today’s political climate with its resurgence of intolerance and incivility; the directors and curators in Brooklyn and Tacoma have defied attempts at censorship and instead defended freedom of expression. At a time when funding for the arts is problematical at best they have risked the disapprobation of patrons, donors and politicians. These institutions deserve our support – the easiest and best way to demonstrate it is to simply go see these shows.

You won’t regret the time you take or the effort you make to journey to these museums. Each of these exhibitions offers the opportunity to understand the human experience from an historical LGBT perspective. The pictures are as moving and as relevant today as when they were first made.

And if you want to try your hand at a little subversive activism while you are enjoying the art, how about holding hands with a person of the same sex as you stroll through the museum?

Stuart Wilber. Photo by Mathew Ryan Williams

 

Stuart Wilber believes that living life openly as a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Allied person is the most powerful kind of activism. Shortly after meeting his partner in Chicago in 1977, he opened a gallery named In a Plain Brown Wrapper, where he exhibited cutting edge work by leading artists; art that dealt with sexuality and gender identification. In the late 1980’s when they moved to San Clemente, CA in Orange County, life as an openly gay couple became a political act. They moved to Seattle 16 years ago and married in Canada a few weeks after British Columbia legalized same-sex marriage. Although legally married in some countries, they are only considered domestic partners in Washington State.  Equality continues to elude him.

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News

‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’

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April 25, 2024

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Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is responding to Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing on Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was a U.S. president, and she delivered a strong warning in response.

Trump’s attorney argued before the nation’s highest court that the ex-president could have ordered the assassination of a political rival and not face criminal prosecution unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and then convicted by the Senate.

But even then, Trump attorney John Sauer argued, if assassinating his political rival were done as an “official act,” he would be automatically immune from all prosecution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, presenting the hypothetical, expressed, “there are some things that are so fundamentally evil that they have to be protected against.”

RELATED: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military, or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” she asked.

“It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act,” Trump attorney Sauer quickly replied.

Sauer later claimed that if a president ordered the U.S. military to wage a coup, he could also be immune from prosecution, again, if it were an “official act.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs, was quick to poke a large hole in that hypothetical.

“If the president suspends the Senate, you can’t prosecute him because it’s not an official act until the Senate impeaches …. Uh oh,” he declared.

RELATED: Justices Slam Trump Lawyer: ‘Why Is It the President Would Not Be Required to Follow the Law?’

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted the Trump team.

“The assassination of political rivals as an official act,” the New York Democrat wrote.

“Understand what the Trump team is arguing for here. Take it seriously and at face value,” she said, issuing a warning: “This is not a game.”

Marc Elias, who has been an attorney to top Democrats and the Democratic National Committee, remarked, “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”

CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, a former U.S. Ambassador and White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform under President Barack Obama, boiled it down: “Trump is seeking dictatorial powers.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

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April 25, 2024

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Legal experts appeared somewhat pleased during the first half of the Supreme Court’s historic hearing on Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was the President of the United States, as the justice appeared unwilling to accept that claim, but were stunned later when the right-wing justices questioned the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s attorney. Many experts are suggesting the ex-president may have won at least a part of the day, and some are expressing concern about the future of American democracy.

“Former President Trump seems likely to win at least a partial victory from the Supreme Court in his effort to avoid prosecution for his role in Jan. 6,” Axios reports. “A definitive ruling against Trump — a clear rejection of his theory of immunity that would allow his Jan. 6 trial to promptly resume — seemed to be the least likely outcome.”

The most likely outcome “might be for the high court to punt, perhaps kicking the case back to lower courts for more nuanced hearings. That would still be a victory for Trump, who has sought first and foremost to delay a trial in the Jan. 6 case until after Inauguration Day in 2025.”

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the courts and the law, noted: “This did NOT go very well [for Special Counsel] Jack Smith’s team. Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh think Trump’s Jan. 6 prosecution is unconstitutional. Maybe Gorsuch too. Roberts is skeptical of the charges. Barrett is more amenable to Smith but still wants some immunity.”

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Civil rights attorney and Tufts University professor Matthew Segal, responding to Stern’s remarks, commented: “If this is true, and if Trump becomes president again, there is likely no limit to the harm he’d be willing to cause — to the country, and to specific individuals — under the aegis of this immunity.”

Noted foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator David Rothkopf observed: “Feels like the court is leaning toward creating new immunity protections for a president. It’s amazing. We’re watching the Constitution be rewritten in front of our eyes in real time.”

“Frog in boiling water alert,” warned Ian Bassin, a former Associate White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. “Who could have imagined 8 years ago that in the Trump era the Supreme Court would be considering whether a president should be above the law for assassinating opponents or ordering a military coup and that *at least* four justices might agree.”

NYU professor of law Melissa Murray responded to Bassin: “We are normalizing authoritarianism.”

Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, argued before the Supreme Court justices that if Trump had a political rival assassinated, he could only be prosecuted if he had first been impeach by the U.S. House of Representatives then convicted by the U.S. Senate.

During oral arguments Thursday, MSNBC host Chris Hayes commented on social media, “Something that drives me a little insane, I’ll admit, is that Trump’s OWN LAWYERS at his impeachment told the Senators to vote not to convict him BECAUSE he could be prosecuted if it came to that. Now they’re arguing that the only way he could be prosecuted is if they convicted.”

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Attorney and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa warned, “It’s worth highlighting that Trump’s lawyers are setting up another argument for a second Trump presidency: Criminal laws don’t apply to the President unless they specifically say so…this lays the groundwork for saying (in the future) he can’t be impeached for conduct he can’t be prosecuted for.”

But NYU and Harvard professor of law Ryan Goodman shared a different perspective.

“Due to Trump attorney’s concessions in Supreme Court oral argument, there’s now a very clear path for DOJ’s case to go forward. It’d be a travesty for Justices to delay matters further. Justice Amy Coney Barrett got Trump attorney to concede core allegations are private acts.”

NYU professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert scholar on authoritarians, fascism, and democracy concluded, “Folks, whatever the Court does, having this case heard and the idea of having immunity for a military coup taken seriously by being debated is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme ideas and and involves giving them a respected platform.”

The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal offered up a prediction: “Court doesn’t come back till May 9th which will be a decision day. But I think they won’t decide *this* case until July 3rd for max delay. And that decision will be 5-4 to remand the case back to DC, for additional delay.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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Justices Slam Trump Lawyer: ‘Why Is It the President Would Not Be Required to Follow the Law?’

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17 hours ago

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April 25, 2024

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Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court hearing Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity early on appeared at best skeptical, were able to get his attorney to admit personal criminal acts can be prosecuted, appeared to skewer his argument a president must be impeached and convicted before he can be criminally prosecuted, and peppered him with questions exposing what some experts see is the apparent weakness of his case.

Legal experts appeared to believe, based on the Justices’ questions and statements, Trump will lose his claim of absolute presidential immunity, and may remand the case back to the lower court that already ruled against him, but these observations came during Justices’ questioning of Trump attorney John Sauer, and before they questioned the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s Michael Dreeben.

“I can say with reasonable confidence that if you’re arguing a case in the Supreme Court of the United States and Justices Alito and Sotomayor are tag-teaming you, you are going to lose,” noted attorney George Conway, who has argued a case before the nation’s highest court and obtained a unanimous decision.

But some are also warning that the justices will delay so Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump will not take place before the November election.

READ MORE: ‘To Do God Knows What’: Local Elections Official Reads Lara Trump the Riot Act

“This argument still has a ways to go,” observed UCLA professor of law Rick Hasen, one of the top election law scholars in the county. “But it is easy to see the Court (1) siding against Trump on the merits but (2) in a way that requires further proceedings that easily push this case past the election (to a point where Trump could end this prosecution if elected).”

The Economist’s Supreme Court reporter Steven Mazie appeared to agree: “So, big picture: the (already slim) chances of Jack Smith actually getting his 2020 election-subversion case in front of a jury before the 2024 election are dwindling before our eyes.”

One of the most stunning lines of questioning came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who said, “If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority, could go into Office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes. I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is, from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

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She also warned, “If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office? It’s right now the fact that we’re having this debate because, OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] has said that presidents might be prosecuted. Presidents, from the beginning of time have understood that that’s a possibility. That might be what has kept this office from turning into the kind of crime center that I’m envisioning, but once we say, ‘no criminal liability, Mr. President, you can do whatever you want,’ I’m worried that we would have a worse problem than the problem of the president feeling constrained to follow the law while he’s in office.”

“Why is it as a matter of theory,” Justice Jackson said, “and I’m hoping you can sort of zoom way out here, that the president would not be required to follow the law when he is performing his official acts?”

“So,” she added later, “I guess I don’t understand why Congress in every criminal statute would have to say and the President is included. I thought that was the sort of background understanding that if they’re enacting a generally applicable criminal statute, it applies to the President just like everyone else.”

Another critical moment came when Justice Elena Kagan asked, “If a president sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, is that immune?”

Professor of law Jennifer Taub observed, “This is truly a remarkable moment. A former U.S. president is at his criminal trial in New York, while at the same time the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing his lawyer’s argument that he should be immune from prosecution in an entirely different federal criminal case.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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