by Cynthia Carr
The letter from Montana’s father really shocked him. “I felt like my soul was slammed against a stone wall,” he wrote in his essay, the longest by far in Close to the Knives. “I started crying, something I haven’t done in months. There was something about the last half year, about all the deaths in the air. I’d been wondering if death has become so constant that I will never feel anything again. I fear losing the ability to feel the weight and depth of each life that folds up, sinks, and disappears from our sight. I thought of whether anyone will be able to feel anything about my death if it takes place. Is it all becoming the sensation one feels when they pass a dead bird in the street and all you can do is acknowledge it and move on.”
Robert Mapplethorpe’s beleaguered retrospective “The Perfect Moment” opened in Cincinnati on April 7. I was there to cover it and will never forget the moment when the police came bursting into the Contemporary Art Center, pushing away the artgoers and knocking down velvet ropes as if chasing some deadly criminal.
The police cleared the museum, which was on the second floor of a downtown mall and had been full to capacity. Between those thrown out and those who’d been waiting to enter, many hundreds of people soon stood on the mall’s ground floor. Museum director Dennis Barrie came out to address them, covering his face with his hands and telling them, “It’s a very dark day.”
The sheriff announced later at a press conference that the museum was now obligated to remove the offending pictures. The next morning, a Sunday, lawyers for the Contemporary Art Center went to a federal judge for a temporary restraining order. The judge ordered the police not to remove pictures, close the exhibit, or intimidate the people who wanted to see it.
Barrie and the museum had been charged with “pandering obscenity” and with “illegal use of a child in nudity-oriented material.” According to Miller v. California, a decision about obscenity should be based on “community standards.” At trial that fall, the prosecutor would suggest to the jury that maybe the record-breaking eighty-one thousand spectators had come from out of town.
But on April 7, the hundreds of people who stood outside the Contemporary Art Center began chanting to a surprised-looking police force: “We’re the community standard! We’re the community standard! We’re the community standard!”
Reverend Donald Wildmon, the Mississippi-based director of the American Family Association, had ordered himself a copy of the exhibition catalog for “Tongues of Flame.” Here was something he could use to further the Lord’s work of killing the National Endowment for the Arts. Though he reported later that the catalog made him kind of sick to his stomach, he persisted in ferreting out fourteen images—Christ shooting up plus thirteen pictures of alleged sexual activity. One of them was Rimbaud Masturbating, but all the others were fragments of much larger pieces. Six were negative insets from The Sex Series, one was a severely cropped still of the disco dancers from Fear of Disclosure, one was a purification ritual involving urine and a cow, and the rest were chopped from the complex and much larger paintings Water (from The Four Elements series) and Bad Moon Rising.
Wildmon pasted these bits onto two legal-size pages and added text with the headline “Your Tax Dollars Helped to Pay for These Works of Art.” The fact is that tax dollars paid for none of the work. David never in his life applied for an NEA grant. He earned a total of five hundred dollars from “Tongues of Flame”—his speaking fee. Even that didn’t necessarily come from the NEA, since its grant covered less than a third of the show’s cost.
On April 12, 1990, Wildmon mailed envelopes labeled “Caution—contains extremely offensive material” to every member of Congress with the two-page pamphlet of images and a long letter informing them that the enclosed information would soon be mailed to “3200 Christian leaders (heads of denominations, bishops, superintendents, etc.), 1000 Christian radio stations, 100 Christian television stations, and 178,000 pastors.” These “key leaders” would be asked to distribute the material further.
Wildmon suggested that the NEA had broken the law by funding “Tongues of Flame” in violation of the Helms amendment. He declared that the NEA acted as a government censor since only work chosen by elitist panels was funded, and he repeatedly quoted Frohnmayer out of context. But his main point was this: “The NEA has been isolated from mainstream American values for so long that it has become captive to a morally decadent minority which ridicules and mocks decent, moral taxpayers while demanding taxpayer subsidies. Congress must either clean the NEA up or abolish the agency altogether.”
Frohnmayer wrote Wildmon a letter on April 20 that began, “Members of Congress have shared with me your letter dated April 12, 1990. I am sure you will want to contact each of them again and correct the many false impressions you left. I know your zeal for this subject is great, but I hope you also remember the Commandment against bearing false witness for which all of us who are Christians and Jews must some day answer.” And he added that images like this were not going to be funded on his watch.
David didn’t know about the mailing until Blinderman called on April 19 to describe what it looked like and read him the text. David was angry and upset. The next day, he got a call from the Washington Post and told the reporter he thought the people attacking him were “repressed five-year-olds.” The mailing did not represent his work. “They’re making pieces of their own,” he said.
When the Post reporter called Wildmon, the reverend admitted that the images were cropped, but he asked, “Does that make them less obscene?”
He never responded to Frohnmayer’s plea to correct “false impressions.” Instead, on May 1, Wildmon sent another letter to every member of Congress, which began, “The National Endowment for the Arts helped fund the child pornography contained in the enclosed sealed envelope.” There he placed copies of Mapplethorpe’s two pictures of children and copies of photos taken by Ricardo T. Barros of his nude wife and children. The latter had run in Nueva Luz, an NEA-funded photography magazine. Wildmon promised that this information would soon be mailed to his list of “key leaders” and they would be asked to disseminate it further.
On April 21, David left for a long-planned trip to Mérida in the Yucatán with Tom. There he found the material for the end of his book, his postscript to “The Suicide of a Guy Who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine over a Mouse Hole.”
Tom had seen a poster for a bullfight. David wasn’t sure he felt like going, then decided he would. His first impulse, he wrote in his journal, was to offer money to spare the animal, but he didn’t have that kind of money. His twenty-three-page “postscript” interspersed his account of this bullfight with various sharp memories: The violence he’d experienced at the hands of his father. Keith Davis on his deathbed getting a last-minute phone call from his estranged boyfriend. The earliest photo he had of his mother—the one she’d inscribed at the bottom with the word “Self.” The ritualized slaughter he and Tom witnessed in the bullring that day came to a terrible end as the bull, twisting and turning before the assaults of the banderillero, broke its own front left leg. “The matador shakes his head in sympathy and disgust,” he wrote. “He arches his feet and points his sword at the bull in an affected graceful, arched motion. He takes aim with his X-ray eyes on that invisible point between the rolling curves of the bull’s shoulders, the true point where the entrance of the steel blade will still the heart. Smell the flowers while you can.”
“The pain I feel is to see my own death in the bull’s death,” he wrote. He was also still thinking about Montana’s suicide and why it had hit him so hard—“despite my having successfully managed to freeze out the weight of various other deaths in the last five years,” as he put it. “I felt I stood the chance of going crazy and becoming a windmill of slaughter if I allowed myself the luxury of experiencing each of those deaths with the full weight accorded them. [Montana’s] manner of death opened a door to all that I’ve been speaking of.”
He noticed children in Mérida selling wild roses. His photographic p
iece Hell Is a Place on Earth would tell the rest of the story, how at dusk the children would sit in a local park eating the petals of the flowers they hadn’t managed to sell. That was the text incorporated into a close-up of a bumblebee.
He and Tom stopped at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá, where David filmed a long column of leaf-cutter ants, each carrying a green slice of leaf back to the nest. They spent the night there and Tom went off to see the light show put on at the ruin, but David did not feel well and stayed behind at the hotel. “He knew something was wrong [physically],” said Tom. “All the little things that usually cheered him up weren’t working. David used to love to go shopping for little trinkets and things, but—he said he just didn’t care anymore. Nothing like that mattered. So he was really depressed. I think he was more afraid than he ever admitted.”
They went on to Playa del Carmen, where they were going to meet Anita Vitale. One night, David dreamt that he was back in Times Square. He wondered what his purpose was there. He couldn’t remember where he lived. In the dream, he found two baby birds in a cardboard box and tried to figure out how to take care of them. Where could he get an eyedropper? Then, walking west across Forty-second Street, he began to scream. “It is a sad great deep scream and it goes on forever. It lifts and swells up into the air and the sky, it barrels out into the west and my head is vibrating and the pressure of it makes me blind to everything but the blood running in rivers under my skin, and my fingers are tensed and delicate as a ten-year-old’s and all my life is within them and it is here in the midst of that scream in the midst of this sensation of life in an uninfected body in all this blurry swirl of dusky street light that I wake up.”
They brought piñatas to the airport to greet Anita, but all three of them hated Playa del Carmen. They drove off to the rough ruins at Cobá, surrounded at one point by thousands of small yellow butterflies. David insisted that Tom drive at a snail’s pace but casualties were inevitable, and he would groan each time one hit the windshield. They went to the beach at Xel-há and did some snorkeling. This had never made sense before, since David could barely see a thing without his glasses. But Tom had bought David a gift—goggles that had his prescription. At another beach, David lay in a hammock, and Tom realized it was the only time he’d ever seen David relax on a vacation. “He was swinging very slowly, with his finger in the sand, and I whispered to Anita, ‘Look, look, look. He’s just laying there.’ And we were shocked. Neither of us had seen that before. Usually he was on the go. Always running.”
David told them he was too depressed to enjoy himself. He wanted to leave. In Cancún, Tom went with him to see if they could arrange a ticket back to New York, but they couldn’t get it done. While they were with the travel agent, she told them there was a suite available at the Sheraton in Cancún. It could easily accommodate three people, and the price wasn’t bad. They had not expected to like Cancún but actually quite enjoyed it for a few days. David even went parasailing off the beach. But when they went out to shop, he still wasn’t interested. He left before Tom and Anita did, but that was part of the original plan. He had to get back. Still, said Tom, “He was definitely off. The spark was leaving.”
That was David’s last trip to Mexico.
He got back to New York on May 1. On May 2, he went to the Village Voice office, where a reporter showed him a fax of a photocopy of the original AFA mailing, which easily gave him enough of an idea of what had been done to his work. He was outraged. As he would say many times over the next two months, his work had been turned into “banal pornography,” stripped of its artistic and political content. And these bowdlerized images had reached way more people than his real art ever had. He began to have trouble sleeping.
He called John Carlin, the former art critic for Paper magazine who’d become an entertainment lawyer. “I gave him some basic copyright info, but told him it wasn’t my area of expertise,” Carlin said. Carlin had just founded the Red Hot Organization, which that fall would release its first CD, Red Hot and Blue, to raise money for AIDS charities. He suggested another lawyer and stayed in touch with David as the case developed, trying, he said, “to help him understand the counterintuitive aspects of the law as best I could.” David actually applied for copyrights on all the pieces Wildmon had used on May 11, something that would never have seemed necessary to him before this.
When he discussed the issue with Wendy Olsoff, one of his dealers at P.P.O.W, she contacted her brother Jonathan Olsoff, an attorney with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a major corporate law firm with an extensive pro bono practice. Olsoff quickly decided to take David’s case, and brought in Kathryn Barrett, a colleague at Skadden Arps who specialized—as he did—in intellectual property. They were joined by David Cole, then an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who specialized in First Amendment issues.
The culture war was about to intensify on several fronts. On May 13, the National Council on the Arts convened. This group of presidential appointees with more or less distinguished careers in the arts met quarterly to advise the chair on agency policy and, usually, to rubber-stamp grants recommended by peer panels. This time, Frohnmayer told them, there were some problematic grants in the solo-performance category. “Holly Hughes is a lesbian and her work is very heavily of that genre,” he told them. Tim Miller’s work was “aggressively homosexual.” John Fleck was said to have urinated into a toilet onstage during a performance. And Karen Finley had just been labeled “a nude chocolate-smeared young woman” by conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. The council tabled a decision on the four artists, but took action to terminate two grants to the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the organizer of Mapplethorpe’s show “The Perfect Moment.” Killing a grant was an unusual move by the council, quite possibly unprecedented, and it was widely understood in the art world to be punishment.
David couldn’t afford to get completely distracted by the culture war. He had to finish his book. He also had an installation to make for “The Decade Show,” opening May 12, 1990. This survey of the 1980s was an unusual collaboration among three institutions: the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The focus was “identity.”
The New Museum gave David a small room with the fourth wall open. David had hired Judy Glantzman to help him. They drove to the Palisades together in her car to collect twigs, leaves, and branches. He knew what elements he wanted to include, and he’d sketched a very complex, very labor-intensive plan in his journal. Then he cut that back after feeling his way in the space allotted him. “The wild thing about David—watching him work,” Glantzman said, “was that he would smoke four thousand cigarettes, the deadline was getting closer, I’m a nervous wreck, and he’s sitting still smoking, but he’s working. His wrist wasn’t working but his brain. And then the piece came out fully formed.”
He called the piece America: Heads of Family/Heads of State. At the center he suspended a large papier-mâché head, blindfolded with the word “QUEER” written in red paint across the forehead. Below it were two video monitors on a stand, running some of the ITSOFOMO footage. He placed images around that stand—a photo of anti-gay picketers with signs like “AIDS is a Punishment from the Eternal Father” next to a photo of Nazis destroying the Institute of Sexual Science. For the sides of that video stand, he’d enlarged some of the hate mail that started coming into University Galleries in Normal after his work was discussed on The 700 Club, in the weekly Human Events, and in the AFA mailing. Laid out in front of that on a kind of nest made from branches and flowers was the child skeleton wearing a white dress. He placed a large print of One Day This Kid … on the back wall, with photos of politicians like Reagan and Helms and pictures of his own parents on the side walls. Between the video setup and This Kid, he’d created a kind of village on a leaf-and-twig-strewn floor, with a couple of small houses covered with dollar bills, his globe where the only country is America (repeated in a
ll hemispheres), a doll reclining in a Plexiglas cube, a child’s chair with branches growing from it—and nestled at the center, Horton Hears a Who.
On May 18, 1990, David’s team of lawyers filed for a preliminary injunction in U.S. district court to stop Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association from further publishing or distributing the two pages of severely cropped images.
Then on May 21, David’s lawyers filed a complaint charging Wildmon and the AFA with “unauthorized copying, deliberate distortion and mutilation of, and misrepresentation of seven works of art” and “false and malicious defamation of the character, reputation and professional standing of Mr. Wojnarowicz.” They were asking for a million dollars in damages on each of five legal claims.
That same day, David wrote to Philip Zimmerman, the friend who was with him when he witnessed the death of Keith Davis. Zimmerman had just tested positive for HIV, and he told David in a letter that he would consider suicide before going out the way Keith had David wrote back.
Despite some of my fears I feel I am approaching the spectacle of my own death with interest in everything around me. I see my own contradictions and feel less afraid of them, I see my weaknesses and my strengths and they are becoming important to me. It’s hard to define what I am trying to give you here; I guess its reassurance in whatever you do. I think it’s beautiful what you carry and what you make and all the impulses that you outline because they reek of life. I would like to be parting air with my body’s movement for years and years even in exhaustion, but in the event of my possible death … I feel kind of satisfied in mapping down my interior world with each thing I make. I’m realizing that there is something elementally important in bringing what is deep inside to light. It can ease things for others. It can ease the pressure of being alien in the visible structure that we had no hands in creating.… Philip, I have no threshold for physical pain and have always wondered in the last couple years what to do if I reach a point of pain I can’t endure. I think living has been painful to an extent in this society that was and is blind to who and what I am, but its been a bearable pain because it simultaneously revealed me to myself over these years. I hold on to my body’s life and feel reluctant to think much about giving it up.
