Arts Endowment Blocks Grant to College in Maine for Controversial Exhibit By RICHARD MORGAN
The National Endowment for the Arts announced Tuesday that it would block a $42,000 grant to the Maine College of Art for an exhibition by William Pope.L, a Bates College lecturer. The exhibit was to include a wall drawing made of peanut butter and a seven-foot-tall mound of flour topped with a barking mechanical dog.
At the same time, the NEA cleared a grant -- which had been delayed along with the Maine College of Art grant -- for a production of a play about Afghanistan. Both grants had been given preliminary approval by NEA officials before being blocked by the agency's acting chairman, Robert S. Martin.
The play, Homebody/Kabul is written by Tony Kushner, whose play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Homebody/Kabul was written before September 11 and focuses on the life of a former British homemaker in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Although the final NEA grant was $60,000, the original recommendation from the National Council of the Arts was $100,000. The grant will go to a production of the play by the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California.
"While it was disconcerting that there was ever any controversy surrounding this grant, we applaud the endowment for supporting art which raises important political issues," said Tony Taccone, artistic director at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
Mr. Pope.L is best known for Member, a.k.a. Schlong Journey, a 1996 work of performance art in which Mr. Pope.L, a black man, walked around Harlem wearing a 14-foot cardboard white penis that occasionally deposited eggs on the sidewalk. As part of the biennial exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2002, Mr. Pope.L plans to wear a Superman suit and crawl from his mother's house in the Bronx to the Statue of Liberty.
"It seems the NEA's picture of me is stuck in 1996," said Mr. Pope.L of the organization's rejection of the application for his exhibition, called "William Pope.L: eRacism." "But since then, I've done object art, fiction writing, sound work, installation art. I'm represented by the Project Gallery, one of the most hip galleries in New York."
The NEA chairman usually accepts the recommendations of the members of the National Council of the Arts, which had approved both grants. But Mark D. Weinberg, a spokesman for the NEA, said it was "not uncommon" for the chairman to withhold approval, saying the chairman had a "right and a responsibility" to do so.
In an interview Wednesday, Mr. Weinberg said he was unable to discuss Mr. Pope.L's application because of an NEA rule barring conversation about rejected applications. For the 2002 fiscal year, under which both applications were processed, the NEA's budget is $115-million.
Because the two applications dealt with politically sensitive work, many artists and scholars feared that the chairman's review would result in censorship. The NEA is not bound by any rules preventing a chairman from holding applications indefinitely. "There's no usual length to the chairman's recommendations," said Mr. Weinberg. "It's whatever time frame he deems appropriate."
"It's very Zen of the NEA not to comment on rejected applications, but this silence has meaning," said Mr. Pope.L. "It's just increasing anxiety and fear. It's like, I want to drive your car, but I also want to know where we're going."
Mr. Pope.L also rejected the idea that the applications were held because they were controversial. "It's not about controversy," he said. "It's about, What is the image that the nation, in terms of its culture, wants of itself? I mean, really, the NEA is just depicting its own face.
"But it's stupid of me to sweat them," he said. "My work was not made for easy acceptance; it was meant to challenge acceptance, and I dealt with that a long time ago. But maybe inadvertently what the NEA has done is open up that conversation on culture."
The college is going ahead with the Pope.L show after receiving a grant of $50,000 last week from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.