"Politics"

An artist who challenged Jesse Helms and George Bush's "decency clause" 10 years ago remembers what it was like to be called the "chocolate smeared young woman."

By Karen Finley

Nov 13, 2000 | The television was black-and-white, but we knew the blood flowing out of the young man's head was scarlet. The policeman kept pounding the skull with skill and determination. The camera panned in for a close-up and my stomach shuddered in revulsion.

It was August, 1968. I was having a slumber party. At first my friends and I thought we were seeing a movie. But soon, we learned that it was the Chicago Democratic Convention. We stood mesmerized, forgetting Amy's bra in the freezer. Nineteen-sixty-eight was the year of assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam War. We had already become used to society's rage. But this was worse somehow, maybe because it was so close to home.

Seeing the demonstrators beaten was my entrance into the counterculture's rage and the unrest of the entire nation. My personal anger, hostility, and anxiety had found a context in which it felt at home.

The Chicago Democratic Convention produced the Chicago 7. I went to Evanston City Hall when I was still in junior high, to see the defendants and their attorney, William Kunstler, speak. Kunstler later formed the Center for Constitutional Rights, which would handle the NEA 4 trial, in which I was a plaintiff. The lead attorney for the NEA case was David Cole, Kunstler's protégé. David Cole was from Evanston. When I found this out, it seemed like an odd coincidence.

I applied for a solo artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for 1990. While the application was pending, I performed "We Keep Our Victims Ready" at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. I received a positive evaluation from the NEA panel member who came to see my show.

The process for receiving an NEA grant is a lengthy one. You submit a curriculum vitae, an artist's statement, and examples of work. If you have applied for a theater grant (as I had), a local theater professional comes to see you perform. You then meet with a local peer panel for an interview. The peer panel sends a recommendation, either for approval or denial of the grant, to the 26-member National Council on the Arts in Washington, D.C.

The Council convenes to review the applications recommended for approval by the national peer panels. Then the Council's recommendations are sent to the NEA's chairman for approval. These last two steps are really a formality. In the history of the NEA, peer panel recommendations have rarely been overturned.

My peer panel review went well that year. I was recommended for approval.

But sometime in early May, 1990, someone went into my application files and leaked information about "We Keep Our Victims Ready" to the widely syndicated conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. I was about to become the latest casualty of the so-called culture wars.

That year, the National Council was to convene to review peer panel recommendations on the weekend of May 12-13. On May 11, Evans and Novak's column, entitled "New 'Art' Storm Brewing," appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Post, and other major dailies across America.

In the column, Evans and Novak wrote that the chairman of the NEA, John Frohnmeyer, had been advised by unnamed "friends" to veto a number of solo-artist grant applications up for review. Among the applications was that of a "chocolate smeared young women" -- me. A Frohnmeyer veto would "ease President Bush's deepening troubles with conservatives on his suspect cultural agenda," wrote Evans and Novak. Approval of the grants, on the other hand, would make it difficult for Bush to "defuse the hottest cultural-and-taxpayer issue out in the land beyond the Beltway."

This thinly veiled threat did the trick. The Council neither rejected nor approved the 18 contested theater applications that weekend. It decided to postpone its decision until after "more information" about the artists and their work could be obtained.

Next Page: George Bush wrote, "The taxpayer will not subsidize filth"

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