John O'Brien heads the Dalkey Archive Press, a small publishing house in Normal, Ill., that's typical of the sort of arts organization that didn't exist in America before the NEA was founded in 1965. Dalkey Archive books are literate, obscure and generally unfloatable in the marketplace. They rely on NEA grants, and O'Brien thinks the funding should be an all-or-nothing proposition. "Either you believe that there is a proper role in the government to support the cultural health of the country, as every civilized country does, and usually to a far greater degree than the United States has ever done," he says, "or you believe that the government should have no role in this, that it should be left to the marketplace, or it should be left to individual donors or foundations."

O'Brien opposes the decency clause but doesn't think Finley made a strong case that it constitutes censorship. "I don't know about a legal argument," he says. "But I would say that it's an almost indispensable function of government to recognize that art has a profound effect upon what happens in this country. There's an argument I've made for years, and I think I'm absolutely right about it, that this country was not aware of race problems until those race problems appeared in literary form. I really attribute the civil rights movement, for instance, to the fact that imaginatively we could grasp the issue of race in this country through such writers as Jean Toomer and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.

"Does art have that kind of impact, of making us aware of who we are as a people, and is that valuable for us to know? I suppose at that point it becomes the old Socratic value of 'know yourself.' Well, do we want to? The great fear in any society is of artists, because they're the ones who give us conceptions of what's going on and what will be going on."

As for Solanas' "Up Your Ass," it's a deliberately outrageous diatribe dealing with sex roles in America. Coates thinks it usefully violates the taboo against violent women. He started looking for the script when he saw Mary Harron's 1996 film "I Shot Andy Warhol," which recounted Solanas' obsession with Warhol and his Factory. Solanas has a cult following because of a satirical book she wrote in the '60s called the "SCUM Manifesto" (SCUM stands for the "Society for Cutting Up Men"). In 1965 she wrote "Up Your Ass" and asked Warhol to produce it; he not only turned her down but, with typical Warhol carelessness, managed to lose her script. Three years later, paranoid and delusional, Solanas stalked him and shot him in the chest. Although he survived the shooting, Warhol never fully recovered. When he died in 1987, complications from the wounds he had suffered 19 years earlier were partly to blame. By that time Solanas was all but forgotten. She died destitute in 1988 -- in San Francisco, not far from Coates' theater.

"I thought it was a worthy project to examine what she wrote before all that," says Coates. "Before her break with reality, before her assassination attempt and before the "SCUM Manifesto" even, there was a time when she was on her game and writing comedy more like Lenny Bruce would write than like a mad stalker. So is there any value in examining that piece? Well, we'll find out by doing it. Let's apply to our funders."

Someone at the Warhol estate found the script a few years ago at the bottom of a crate of lighting equipment, and it needs to be said that this brief, rude, battle-of-the-sexes farce, which led to an attempted murder and took 30-odd years to premiere, is ... well, slim. Performing it straight through takes about 40 minutes, but the karaoke-style songs Coates has added (like "Turd Is the Word") fatten the show and occasionally even improve it. Some routines are hilarious -- for example, a lesson in homemaking given by an old German teacher in cat's-eye glasses, with toilet paper stuck to her shoe -- but most of it is just a scurrilous blast of anger, not a brilliant exploration of maenadism in America.

Whether "Up Your Ass" works or not, Coates believes he should be free to fund the show with NEA dollars. "There will always be bombs," he says. "It's like you have to shoot 3 feet of film to get 1 foot of movie. That's part of the process. When the Pentagon drops a bomb on the Chinese Embassy, we don't say, 'Oh, we gotta defund the Pentagon.'"

The reason a decency clause in the NEA charter matters is that the endowment has enormous influence -- probably more than it wants -- in the world of nonprofit art. Its grants are small but official gestures of approval; private and local funding outfits tend to follow the NEA's lead. Winning or losing a grant can mean winning or losing a bouquet of other money, and for groups that rely from year to year on the endowment, one rejection can be disastrous. Coates has been careful not to use any of his federal money to stage "Up Your Ass," but he worries that the pall cast by the decency clause on theaters, museums, orchestras and orchid presses across the country will have an invisibly repressive effect. "In fact, we need more for 'Archbishop' than we're getting from the NEA," he says.

O'Brien at Dalkey Archive agrees. "You never turn down a book because it won't receive NEA funding," he says. "But it begins, in some very insidious ways, to make you second-guess certain things. And if that happens in publishing, they've won. As soon as you start thinking, 'Oh, God, what is the NEA going to think?' and 'Are we going to hurt the NEA?' they've won."

Recent Stories