Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing

[Nan Goldin]

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing

New York City, USA: Artists Space, 1989

32 pp., 23 x 15.5 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

When recalling battles to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, many will likely picture Robert Mapplethorpe with a whip in his asshole, or Karen Finley naked and smeared with chocolate. Or maybe Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. 

But this slim catalogue to an exhibition curated by Nan Goldin also set off a firestorm of controversy, and ended up being dramatically torn apart in protest, in the US Senate. 

Senator Jesse Helms is often seen as the main villain in the battle to protect the NEA and artistic freedom (see images outside of Artists' Space, below) and he was truly a reprehensible character, by any measure. He opposed food stamps, needle exchange programs, civil rights, disability rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, and access to abortions.1

But Helms had many allies in the US government when it came to attacking the National Endowment for the Arts. 

As far back as 1981, Ronald Reagan intended to push Congress to defund the NEA entirely, in part because it was thought to be "easy to defeat".2 Oddly, conservative Reagan allies such as actor and NRA spokesperson Charlton Heston and Joseph Coors, of Coors Brewery, convinced the president that continuing support was important and necessary. 

Most of the attempts that followed were based on outrage against perceived slights to Christianity, and attacks on queer artists. Pat Robertson urged Congress to put an end to federal support of “obscenity, pornography and attacks on religion”, taking out newspaper ads and using his 700 Club Television show to promote the dismantling of the NEA. 

Pat Buchanan - during his 1992 campaign for the Republican nomination- promised to shut down the NEA and "fumigate" the building. 

In the case of the Nan Goldin curated 1989 show Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, it was the not the exhibition itself, but the exhibition catalogue, that drew political condemnation. More specifically, the exhibition catalogue essay. Goldin commissioned David Wojnarowicz to write a text for the accompanying booklet, and the resulting “Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell” pulled no punches. 

Wojnarowicz responded to the AIDS-themed exhibition with a rage-filled text almost designed to erupt in controversy. The two passages that most offended the right are about Helms and Cardinal John O'Connor, whose views were somewhat more liberal than those of Jesse Helms. 

Cardinal O'Connor opposed capital punishment, military intervention and increased military budgets. He advocated on behalf of the poor and the homeless and was staunchly pro-union. He endorsed a national hate crime law that included crimes motivated by sexual orientation, and led a 1990 funeral Mass for James Zappalorti, a gay man who was murdered on Staten Island. 

However, O'Connor also opposed the teaching of safe sex in schools, and the distribution of condoms to prevent AIDs. He subscribed to the Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are never permissible, while homosexual desires are "disordered" but not in themselves sinful. He was also opposed to abortion. 

Wojnarowicz wrote: 

"On the table is today’s newspaper with a picture of cardinal O’Connor saying he’d like to take part in operation rescue’s blocking of abortion clinics but his lawyers are advising against it. This fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on Fifth Avenue should lose his church tax-exempt status and pay retroactive taxes from the last couple centuries. Shut down our clinics and we will shut down your ‘church.’ I believe in the death penalty for people in positions of power who commit crimes against humanity, i.e., fascism. This creep in black skirts has kept safer-sex information off the local television stations and mass transit advertising spaces for the last eight years of the AIDS epidemic thereby helping thousands and thousands to their unnecessary deaths."

and about Helms: 

"I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination. At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw rep. Willliam Dannemeyer off the empire state building. These fantasies give me distance from my outrage for a few seconds. They give me momentary comfort. "

Coming only months after the Piss Christ controversy, right-wing politicians, the Catholic church, and the American Family Association waged scorched-earth campaigns against public funding for artists. 

Senator Al D’Amato dramatically tore the slim volume apart in the Senate, calling it a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.”3

Feeling the pressure, NEA chairman John Frohnmayer withdrew a $10,000 grant to Artists' Space, on November 8th, 1989, citing the politically charged nature of the exhibition: “what had been presented to the Endowment by the Artists Space application was an artistic exhibition. We find, however, in reviewing the material now to be exhibited, that a large portion of the content is political rather than artistic in nature.”

This raised alarms that a new NEA provision aimed at denying federal funds to artworks judged obscene would be broadened to include political censorship.

On November 17th, the National Endowment for the Arts partially restored the grant, stipulating that the funds were for the exhibition, not the catalogue. The catalogue printing costs were covered by the Robert Mapplethorpe Estate.4

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing is valued at over $800, but the Smithsonian have archived the book in full, here. 

1. Jesse Helms bitterly opposed federal financing for AIDs research and treatment, believing it was God's punishment for homosexuals. "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy," he declared. 

In 1993, he is reported to have said to Senator Orrin Hatch in an elevator "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries," and then proceeded to sing the racist song about "the good life" during slavery to Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman in the Senate. He was one of only three senators to vote against the confirmation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court.

2. Easy to defeat in theory (not as necessary as roads, schools, emergency services, the social safety net, etc), arts funding often survives because of the arts' community's natural access to the media and - ultimately - because cutting arts funding doesn't significantly alter the bottom line of a country's budget. 

3. Incidentally, D’Amato is the last Republican to have represented New York in the U.S. Senate. Five years ago - at the age of eighty - he was recorded berating his wife while she was recovering in hospital. 

4. Mapplethorpe had just died, in March of that year.