Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Arts in America, by Michael Brenson. The New Press, 157 pages, $25.00.
In the United States, we like our artists nobly bereft, taking literallyPercy Bysshe Shelley's description of poets as "the unacknowledged legislators ofthe world." When artists stoop to seek acknowledgment, the priestly skullcapsfall off. Yikes! These are just people who--like us--want to be famous, or atleast pay for mammograms and send the kids to college. We'd like to see artistsgo on working--but won't subsidy, especially from prosaic, real-life legislators,ruin them?
The title of Michael Brenson's Visionaries and Outcasts spells out the holy and lonely requirements we have set for artists. His book, which tends to echo these Romantic expectations, describes how such ideals fared under 35 years of federal arts administration. Brenson is looking back at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)--specifically, its embattled, and now defunct, fellowships for individual artists, a program that from 1967 until 1995 handed money outright to thousands of working authors, critics, composers, performers, and visual artists.
Retracing the contortions of this program's history and the controversies thatswirled around it, the author opens a window onto American art in the latetwentieth century, a period of splintering expansion and commercialization. TheNEA helped unleash these developments, but, as the demise of the fellowshipprogram proves, the agency has not yet found either a stable role or--morefundamentally --an entirely convincing argument for its own legitimacy. How canwe allow howling and splattering prophets to traffic with the state? The Greeksdid it, the Florentines did it, but Americans, much as we enjoy the benefits ofpublic funding for the arts, continue to find such expenditures--and the artistswho accept them--suspect.
Brenson rightly calls the individual-artist fellowship program--with itsno-strings stipends of up to $20,000--"one of the crown jewels" of the NEA. Asgems go, however, this one was weirdly perishable. In 1968, just the second yearthat the fellowships were awarded, the money was almost cut off. "Aid toindividuals is liable to turn out to be nothing more than a subsidy for hippies,beatniks, junkies, and Vietniks," charged Representative Paul Fino of New York.With the kind of rhetoric we've heard many times since, Fino roared that taxdollars had been squandered "to subsidize anti-Vietnam movies made by EuropeanCommunists [and] antiwhite plays written by black nationalists like LeRoi Jones."
The U.S. House voted that year to stop all direct grants to artists. Though theSenate reversed course, the fellowship program would twist and shudder with eachnew political wind for nearly three more decades. After the Republican sweeps of1994, with memories of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs and AndresSerrano's Piss Christ (depicting a crucifix submerged in the artist's urine) still tingling, Congress did dismantle the grants program. Today only writers (presumably so ineffectual that they can't cause offense) need apply.
The rules of contemporary art have for at least a century demanded innovation andwelcomed outrage: Duchamp unveiling a bicycle wheel, Pollock oozing webs ofpaint, Picasso lounging in his underpants and surrounded by assorted children. Weexpect "serious" artists to be bright, fast-moving targets. During the 1950s, theCIA even deployed American painting as a weapon in the Cold War by arrangingexhibitions overseas, in Brenson's words, "to flaunt the freedom in the West."Proclaiming, "Art is not a form of propaganda," John Kennedy deftly used it assuch, asserting the idealism, nerve, and glamour of his presidency by drawingartists near. A hollow-eyed Robert Frost read poetry at JFK's inauguration, andlater that year Jackie welcomed cellist Pablo Casals to the White House as acherished friend, his concert broadcast on network television.
"The NEA," Brenson writes, was "conceived at a historical moment when it wasconsidered essential by government to show the world America's capacity forinventiveness, adventurousness, and self-examination." The Americanartist--brash and experimental--might serve as a kind of cultural astronaut,inscrutable perhaps but so much better than those docile and leaden realists ofthe Soviet Union.
In 1965, when Lyndon Johnson signed the NEA into law, the nation's art worldwas small and concentrated in Manhattan, and the agency's first visual artsdirector, Henry Geldzahler, was a suitably dazzling reflection of New York's presumptuousness. With chutzpah unthinkable in today's specialized andbureaucratic art world, Geldzahler, once appointed, held on to his main job atthe Metropolitan Museum of Art and periodically flew to Washington, D.C., todictate orders at the new arts agency.
Nodding to the rest of the nation (and widening his sphere of personalinfluence, too), Geldzahler appointed panels of visual-arts experts across thenation, from whom he solicited nominations for the individual artist grants.Handpicked panelists took turns handpicking their favorite painters and sculptors. "Fairness in art," Geldzahler once said, "is not nearly so interestingas quality." Maybe so, but when democratic governments spend money on art,fairness becomes an issue faster than you can say "philistine."
Brenson spends considerable time describing how Geldzahler and his successorsran the NEA's visual-arts programs; and though a rundown of arts administratorsmay sound less than scintillating, in fact these changes in leadership andprocedure illuminate the pressures and fads that shaped U.S. culture for all ofus during these years. In the early 1970s, for example, the NEA begandeliberately distributing its visual-arts fellowships among artists of manymedia, responding both to rising interest in art photography and crafts and tothe general expansion of art production. From 1965 to 1974, the number ofmaster-of-fine-arts programs in studio art nearly doubled. The AbstractExpressionists hadn't given a damn about university credentials, but by themid-1970s aspiring trained artists were stampeding from graduate schools by thethousands, most of them grasping for fellowships as income and publicaffirmation.
The art world was changing, and the NEA's visual-arts administrators struggled tokeep pace. Brenson recounts how the agency abandoned its process of fellowshipnominations, partly in the name of fairness but more practically because ahandful of tastemakers could no longer track all the newcomers crowding onto thescene. Art had become a career, albeit a tenuous one, and the NEA fellowships,which could so effectively advance such careers, would be managed morerationally: Artists were required to submit their own applications and slides,peer panels followed strict procedures, and fellowship winners would be chosen byconsensus. No longer "unacknowledged legislators," U.S. artists had becomeprofessional outcasts. This paradox of expectations continues to bind artists andto alienate their audiences.
A New York art critic and professor of curatorial studies at Bard College, Brenson was originally commissioned to study the fellowship program by the NEA'svisual-arts director just before the ax fell, and some of his book reads like anintra-office report (inexcusably, without an index). Too often Brenson lapsesinto preachiness and bathetic praise: "The peer panel system embodied theidealism and nobility of the NEA." Obliged to defend the agency's work, hisaccount is understandably but unfortunately lopsided and would have profitedenormously from interviews with detractors, particularly artists who failed towin grants and congressional leaders like Jesse Helms, who managed to grandstandand gay-bait the fellowships out of existence. Presumably, they have lots to say.
And for all his chronicling of changes in program guidelines, Brenson fails toexamine the effects of these changes on art. How, for instance, did the art andartists selected by nomination differ from winners chosen by consensus? Dodifferent systems of reward foster different sorts of art?
Only toward the end of Visionaries and Outcasts does Brenson draw on his skills as a critic. He argues that the NEA gradually traded its Sputnik-era faith in artistic innovation for a more static model of "excellence." Brenson warns: "An agency whose language of authority is a museum language will not easily be able to make an effective argument for artists reaching for what society does not yet want to see or hear." Brenson concludes that the fellowship program, which boosted so many U.S. artists for a time, failed to organize its participants in lasting ways, to link them with local communities, or to help them voice an alternative to the market's definition of "quality." He also faults contemporary artists themselves, finding more and more of them "in love with science, equipped with state-of-the-art technology, and interested in joining rather than resisting the entertainment industry." Painter Julian Schnabel's switch to moviemaking comes to mind.
How curious it is, though, that just as artists may have been co-opted by themarket, the old virtues once ascribed to modern painters and sculptors--risktaking, innovation, rebelliousness--became the language of U.S. business: allthose high-tech entrepreneurs exercising "vision" and enacting their "passion,"playing Nerf basketball at the office--the asexual, workplace equivalent ofPicasso in his skivvies. As any artist will tell you, this tattered Romanticbanner becomes heavy lifting after a while. We'll see how long those on thebusiness side can carry it.
