Angry at Daddy.

• Author: S. D., Trav
• Position: Brief Article

An uncensored Holly Hughes rails against censorship

Seeing Holly Hughes' recent performance piece, Preaching to the Perverted, at New York's premier downtown performance space, P.S. 122, last April was like traveling back to 1989. That was when the first shots were fired in the so-called culture wars, a clash among myriad factions in Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the media, and the arts community itself. That year, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and then-Sen. Alphonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) discovered just what Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano were doing on the taxpayers' dime. In the grand political tradition, they proceeded to turn a case of one penny-ante federal agency's indirect support for controversial art into a national perception of the NEA as some sort of sodomite's Pentagon. By 1990, Helms had introduced and passed a proviso in the year's spending bill that barred the NEA from underwriting art with "obscene" content. The first victims of the new law were dubbed "the NEA Four": Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes.

Hughes, a New York performance artist, was penalized for having allegedly stuck her hand up her vagina--a gesture that, however mutually rewarding for audience and performer, occurred during a federally funded performance, which the NEA felt violated its obscenity rules. After the agency withdrew its grants, the NEA Four fought the decision in federal court twice, winning both times and eventually receiving their money (a few thousand dollars each) in 1993.

The Clinton administration actually appealed the rulings, and the case went before the Supreme Court in 1998. Hughes and Co. lost. The Court decided that it was indeed constitutional for the NEA to consider "general standards of decency" in awarding grants. It did not rule on whether it is constitutional for the NEA to exist in the first place.

Still licking her wounds from a decade's worth of battles to retrieve her $6,000, Holly Hughes re-emerged, hopping mad, with her latest jeremiad. Preaching to the Perverted, which ran for about a month to mostly positive reviews, is an interesting artifact for at least two reasons. First, it raises in crystal-clear relief a number of issues related to public funding of art. Though the culture wars may no longer be front-page news, the underlying issues raised by them--especially dueling definitions of censorship--remain highly relevant in a society that continues to fund culture with local...