The end of the controversy surrounding A Fire in My Belly?

When David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly hit the headlines following the Smithsonian's decision to withdraw it from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the Smithsonian's National Portrait, many commentators talked about a return to the culture wars of the 1990s.

However, this time the controversy has played out differently from the era when Jesse Helms was railing against gay rights and contemporary art.The video made it onto YouTube, reaching millions of viewers who were previously unaware of its existence, MoMA acquired it for its permanent collection, the New Museum showed it continuously in its lobby, it was featured in an event at the Tate Modern to reconsider Wojnarowicz's work in the light if efforts to distort its intentions and legacy, and when the Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio reignited the controversy calling for A Fire in My Belly to be removed from Hide/Seek at the Brooklyn Museum the director of the Museum refused to withdraw the work.

This link takes you to an article in the Financial Times Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture and the controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz's work.

Image: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still

Curator defends artist's use of imagery of Christ's crucifixion as a metaphor for human suffering

The Brooklym museum is refusing to budge in the face of calls for David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire My Belly to be removed from the Hide/Seek exhibition, saying the artwork is "an expression of the artist's outrage at indifference to human suffering during the early years of the AIDS crisis.

The co-curator of the exhibition, Jonathan Katz, has also weighed in saying the work belongs to a centuries-old tradition of using the imagery of Jesus Christ's crucifixion as a metaphor for human suffering. "What gets lost in all this brouhaha is how thoroughly informed he is by a Catholic iconographic tradition and how he is reinvigorating it to describe new social realities" Katz said of the artist. "This is a work of art of great complexity and sensitivity."

Image: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still

Brooklyn bishop calls for A Fire in My Belly to be banned

The Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio, is fueling the furore over David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly, calling for it to be removed from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that it is a disrespectful and blasphemous attack on their religion. In a strangely telling video statement on the web Bishop DiMarzio says that he admires Wojnarowicz's identification with the suffering Christ but that he shouldn't be allowed to express it publicly in art. Read more...

Image: Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and David Wojnarowicz

Sacrilege and the sacred: round two

David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly is drawing flak from Catholic groups as the National Portrait Gallery's Hide/Seek exhibition heads to the Brooklyn Museum. So far Brooklyn's Catholic Diocese has requested the work be censored from the show, the Daily News is fueling tabloid-ready outrage in advance, and Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman says he has received thousands of pre-programmed emails in protest.

This link takes you to our earlier posts on the Smithsonian's controversial decision to withdraw A Fire in My Belly from the Washington showing of Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.

Image: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still

The Museum of Censored Art

The Museum of Censored Art was the brainchild of Michael Blasenstein and Michael Iacovone, the duo who were banned from all Smithsonian museums following their attempt to show David Wojnarowicz's video in the National Portrait Gallery after it had been removed from the institution's Hide/Seek exhibition on the history of gay identity in art. They screened A Fire in My Belly in the Gallery on an iPad suspended around Blasentein's neck with Iacovone shooting a video of the action.

Blasenstein and Iacovone later set up the Museum of Censored Art in a trailer outside the National Portrait Gallery where they attracted over 5,000 visitors to daily screenings of the censored video.

This link takes you to Wounded in the Crossfire of a Capital Culture War, the NYT's latest story on the collision of art and politics at the Smithsonian.

Image: The Museum of Censored Art set up outside the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to screen David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire In My Belly.

"The culture wars are back"

The National Portrait Gallery's Hide/Seek exhibition has closed but the controversy around Smithsonian director Wayne Clough's decision to remove a work by David Wojnarowicz from the show lingers on. The Smithsonian has said it will host a forum on the lessons learned from the dispute in April, but the details have yet to be released. Meanwhile the Corcoran Gallery of Art has hosted an all-day symposium on the issues raised by the affair titled Culture Wars: Then and Now. The keynote speaker was Robert Storr, who declared that "the culture wars are back" according to the Washington Post.

Recently the advocacy group People for the American Way also put out a lengthy report proposing lessons for museums gleaned from the Hide/Seek affair titled How Not to Respond to Political Issues: Lessons from the Smithsonian's Response to the Manufactured Right-Wing Controversy over Hide/Seek. The new report seeks to address the sense that the Smithsonian is trying to sweep the issues raised by censorship under the carpet.

The report offers five helpful bullet points for museums seeking to respond to future flare-ups:

• Don't panic: have a plan and follow it (a piece of common sense Clough has a history of ignoring);
  
• Defend core principles (of which freedom of expression should be a core one)
  
• Understand and expose your opponents (exposing extremist records, anti-freedom agendas and general disregard for truth demonstrated by right-wing culture warriors can undermine the impact of their attacks);
  
• Embrace debate (the best response to irresponsible speech is more speech... Short-circuiting debate by trying to avoid controversy prevents arts institutions from having a potentially transformative impact on public debate);
  
• Demonstrate accountability (ie Clough should have been fired for his admitted mismanagement).

You can read our earlier posts on the controversy here.

Image: The temporary Museum of Censored Art located outside the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to show David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly

MoMA acquires controversial Wojnarowicz video

The Museum of Modern Art has acquired the David Wojnarowicz video that was removed from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington after the Smithsonian's top executive G. Wayne Clough bowed to pressure from the New York-based Catholic League and congressional Republicans who objected to the work because it was "anti-Christian".

Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, made A Fire in My Belly in the late 1980s in response to the AIDS crisis. It was included in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (a Smithsonian museum) examining gay themes in American portraiture.

  

Last week artist AA Bronson joined the fray asking for his piece to be removed from the show in protest. His lawyer has sent a letter to Clough and the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Martin E. Sullivan, threatening legal action if the museum does not comply. 

Meanwhile A Fire in My Belly is being shown at MoMA in a collection show that runs to 9 May 2011 and it will feature in an event at the Tate Modern on 22 January to reconsider Wojnarowicz's work in the light of efforts to distort its intentions and legacy.

Image: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still

Sacrilege and the sacred

The New York-based Catholic League, a self-described civil rights organisation at the forefront of the fight to remove David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, has changed tactics this week. Originally objecting to the video that League president William Donohue described as "anti-Christian", the organisation now says that museums should have all federal funding pulled because "they cater to the affluent and well educated rather than to the working class". 

The controversy surrounding Wojnarowicz's video echoes the furore that erupted in New Zealand in 1998 when Te Papa Tongarewa the Museum of New Zealand presented Tania Kovats' Virgin in a Condom in the Pictura Britannica exhibition. New Zealand's Catholic community was outraged by the small statuette of the Virgin Mary sheathed in a condom. This followed the 1997 closure of the Andres Serrano exhibition at Melbourne's National Gallery of Victoria after a second attack on the artist's controversial work Piss Christ, death threats to staff and an alleged concern for a Rembrandt exhibition that was on at the time.   

The Catholic League's latest move (going after the museum project) also echoes the tactics of Catholics and evangelical Christians in New Zealand who questioned the national museum's double standards, pointing out that Te Papa (Maori for Our Place) had engaged in a lengthy process of consultation with Iwi aimed at developing a bicultural museum, but was unwilling to do the same for other communities of interest. They said the museum took great care to observe Maori spiritual values but ran roughshod over Christian values. 

Te Papa officials dug in, refusing to budge in the face of daily protests outside the museum and a 33 thousand-signature petition demanding the removal of Virgin in a Condom. But while the art world supported the museum's refusal to bow to pressure, many also felt that by its unwillingness to enter into an open debate Te Papa lost an early opportunity to foreground the museum's role as a forum - a place where ideas could be presented, tested and contested. 

The trans-Tasman responses in the late 90s (closing an exhibition in Melbourne v. an unproductive stand-off in Wellington) were less than ideal so it'll be interesting to see how the current controversy generated by Wojnarowicz's searing meditation on aspects of the AIDS pandemic plays out in the States.

This link takes you to a Backchat panel discussion screened by TVNZ in 1998 on Virgin in a Condom, the sacred and the profane, and art museums and controversy.

Images from the top: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still; Tania Kovats, Virgin in a Condom (1992); Andres Serrano, Piss Christ (1989)

Decision to censor video draws flak

The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has issued a strongly worded rebuke to the Smithsonian Institution and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, for censoring a video by David Wojnarowicz in the critically acclaimed exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, reports Christopher Knight for the Los Angeles Times.

The video, A Fire in My Belly, is a searing meditation on aspects of the AIDS pandemic and the decision to remove it came in the wake of calls by the House speaker-designate John Boehner and incoming majority leader Eric Cantor to dismantle the privately funded exhibition.

The AMMD statement described the Smithsonian's decision as having resulted from political pressure.

"More disturbing than the Smithsonian's decision to remove this work is the cause: unwarranted and uninformed censorship from politicians and other public figures, many of whom, by their own admission, have seen neither the exhibition as a whole or this specific work. The AAMD believes that freedom of expression is essential to the health and welfare of our communities and our nation. In this case, that takes the form of the rights and opportunities of our art museums to present works of art that express different points of view."

Image: video still from David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly