Jesse Helms humor

At 55 seconds in, there are images of an AIDS activist protest that put a giant condom over Helms' house. At 2:44, there's discussion of SF Pride organizers using Helms' words to promote the Gay Pride parade.

Tim Miller

Tim Miller is a Los Angeles-based performance artist, and a key founder of P.S. 122 in New York and Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles. He's one of the 4 performance artists who was denied funding and sued the National Endowment for the Arts (the NEA Four).

"I sometimes feel this border between my body and some friends who are really sick right now. It's like this nice coastline on your arm here. It's a border I want to cross, though. A coastline I want to pull people to. Maybe you have brought a special life preserver and you can teach me how to use it and we can throw it to all our friends who are sick and we can pull them back to shore. I want to hold these bodies really close so that not one more slips away." (Miller, My Queer Body)

"Mourning and celebration are the two poles of this life. I know they are often hovering quite near the surface of the community that gathers to see my work. These charged feelings are quite present in the theatres that I step out into, asking spectators to shout out a favorite place on their bodies. I know I am a queer performer presenting my homo-content work in a time of crisis. My work is also filtered through a complex set of political events around the right wing's attempt to censor lesbian and gay artists. Perhaps this makes these human gatherings for the work more pregnant with feeling and need. The call to community more pointed. I want to feel the full blast of the humanness of the situation. I want, as a performer, to be pulled and challenged" (Miller and David Román, "Preaching to the Converted," Theatre Journal. 47:2, 1995)

"The financial vulnerability of the queer arts is most often the result of an anti-art sentiment endemic in contemporary U.S. culture and, more directly, of the cultural wars fueled by the ongoing crisis of the National Endowment of the Arts; it is not the result of the artistic failure of queer artist" ("Preaching to the Converted")

"Performance artists are tackling the blood and bone of the society...A lot of it is not pretty, but our culture is not about Swan Lake" (Miller, qtd. in People Magazine)

John Fleck

John Fleck, one of the 4 performance artists censored by the NEA, performing at a protest in Los Angeles against NEA's denial of funding.

"People in the audience were calling me a pervert, hissing at me, trying to paint me as some obscene decadent who's trying to destroy the country. I love this country. But I'm very frightened about the future of intellectual and artistic expression here." (John Fleck, quoted in People Magazine)

Fleck says that the NEA funding controversy "made me realize there must be something important to what we're doing if it gets such a reaction from the conservatives," (Fleck qtd. in LA Weekly)

A 1-hour video of Fleck's performance of A Snowbell's Chance in Hell, his response to the NEA censorship:

John Frohnmayer

Chairman of the NEA from 1989-1992, Frohnmayer largely bowed to political pressure from the religious right to deny finding to controversial artists, but did fend off Congressional attempts for more restrictive funding oversight by Congress.

Frohnmayer personally overrode the recommendations of a panel of experts in order to deny funding to individual artists (the NEA 4). He also instituted a policy requiring artists to sign an anti-obscenity pledge.

Headlines and Quotes

"Bending to the Political Winds, the NEA Cuts Off Grants to Four Artists Amid Charges of Censorship" (People Magazine, August 6, 1990)

"All artists are interconnected," says Papp. "The most outspoken people help other artists take chances. Once you start to cut at the fringe, you start to cut at the entire body, and then you'll get second-class stuff—art that is afraid." (Joseph Papp, head of the Public Theater, quoted in People Magazine)

"NEA Chairman's abiding by a policy of fear" (Eugene Register-Guard)

The Villains of the Culture War

These are the most public voices in the controversies and censorship battles of the 1980s and 1990s:



President Ronald Reagan

President George H. W. Bush

North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms

NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer

Orange County Representative Dana Rohrabacher

Dick Armey, Republican House Majority Leader

Pat Buchanan, senior advisor to Ronald Reagan and 1992 and 1996 Presidential candidate

The NEA 4

Image from the Long Beach Union

John Fleck, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Karen Finley

Holly Hughes

One of the NEA four, Holly Hughes is a lesbian performance artist who was denied a grant for her work. Her play, "Preaching to the Perverted" tells the story of the experience.

Quotes from Hughes' interview with the First Amendment Center:

"The government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent three homos and one feminist from getting $24,000 in hard-earned tax money."

"It was really about targeted homophobia, and — although, as I say that, I feel like, “I hope Jesse Helms would not like my work. Then I’d really have to commit suicide.” It is controversial, and it is provocative, and I think that should have a place in a country that pretends to be a democracy.

"A lot of the people who were arguing for funding for the NEA really wanted to talk about it in the most bland, First Amendment terms and, you know, not specifically talk about the work that was under attack. And the work that was under attack, from Serrano to Marlon Riggs to my work and lots of other people, is provocative work. It is — it, it’s intentionally designed to raise questions, and, a lot of times, it was questions about sexuality and sexual identity. Maybe it was about the American flag. Maybe it was about use of Christian symbols. And the left didn’t make a good case for why, why work that raises uncomfortable questions should be funded."

"The NEA was set up to fund work that wasn’t going to be necessarily funded by the marketplace and this recognition that there is a lot of culture that isn’t going to reach a mass audience and that that’s an important part of, you know, our heritage. And, also, it makes — you know, a lot of popular cultural events are not accessible to, you know, working-class poor people, even middle-class. I mean, think about, like — I would have loved to see the Barbra Streisand concert, but it was a little beyond my means. And public funding meant that a lot of people who weren’t privileged had access. It kept ticket prices down and sometimes free. So, it made art accessible to a lot of people who are cut out of the marketplace."

---

"This part of the script isn’t finished. My role in the Culture War is still very much a work in progress, a story that I’m telling as I’m living it. But the point is, it needs to be performed in front an audience. If I’m ever going to be able to write this wrong, I’ll need your help" (Hughes, Introduction to Clit Notes) "'If any of us were producing pornography,' Hughes points out, 'we wouldn't bother to apply to the NEA—we'd be raking in the big bucks.' (Hughes, Quoted in People Magazine)

"We were all dealing with sexuality and gender and the body at a time when the country was just in a state of panic, particularly about HIV and AIDS...AIDS sent this huge panic through American culture, which the right exploited and pressured the government to respond. Instead of helping people with HIV, they attacked art and attacked work" (Hughes qtd. in LA Weekly)

Ambiguïté

J'ai pensé à différentes choses qui touchent à l'ambiguïté avec différents personnages ou à la danse etc.

Voici tout d'abord le personnage de "The rocky horror picture show"

Une photo de l'artiste performeur Steven Cohen.

L'artiste, Ali Madhavi, travaille beaucoup avec ce qui est lié à la mode et au monde du cabaret. 

Voici une photo de son travail ( il y a beaucoup d'autres choses à voir) 

Matthew Barney a exploré cette question des genres dans ses films Cremaster entre autre en créant des êtres hybrides asexués. 

Sinon je me suis aussi intéressé au voguing  

J'ai découvert il y a peu un spectacle qui s'appelle Mimosa abordant l'ambiguïté sexuelle et indirectement le voguing aussi. Il était passé à Brest il y a 2 ans. Il y a des vidéos et quelques photos sur internet si ça vous intéresse.


Il y a un film à voir sur cette danse qui s'appelle Paris is Burning. Il y a des extraits sur youtube.

Sinon par rapport à Lady Gaga, qui multiplie les références ou citations contemporaines passant de Marcel Duchamp à Damien Hirst, il y a une video qui montre plusieurs références (Bowie, Hirst, Orlan, Warholl...)
D'ailleurs Scott, il y a le chapeau que je cherchais l'autre jour, il est de ce genre là. Il y a pas mal de choses à voir au niveau de l'ambiguïté aussi par les vêtements, les chorégraphies etc. Forcément chez Madonna aussi il y a beaucoup à voir, elle a tant fait et puis Lady Gaga n'est que ça "fille" ^^.

Sinon je terminerai avec cela. C'est la photo d'un projet que j'avais fais l'année dernière. Pour la fermeture d'un cinéma à Quimper, on nous a demandé de créer un évènement. On a crée une fausse cérémonie. J'ai choisi d'interpréter (un personnage inventé par moi-même), jouant avec l'ambiguïté et le trouble. Image d'une star ou diva déchue apparaissant comme un oracle et mauvais présage.

Sur ces dernières paroles. Bonne soirée à vous. Et merci d'avoir lu ce post.

Louise Bourgeois

Mickaël, j'ai vu rapidement dans un bouquin sur Louise Bourgeois une performance qu'elle a faite en 1992, ça s'appelle She lost it.

La vidéo n'est pas de très bonne qualité mais ça donne un aperçu : 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_CG35YGnV8