ARTISTS

  
If we do not describe the world that we wish to live in and how to get there, we will never get there. For this reason, the politics that we articulate to each other and publicly must include the totality of our freedom vision. Otherwise, this vision becomes unspeakable and impossible to imagine, remember or realize.

What do I want? I have the same vision for society that I have for personal relationships. I want a society that is responsible to people when we are weak or vulnerable and provides opportunity for our strengths. This means that every person needs a home, without which no healthy human development can take place. Every person needs good comprehensive health care from abortion to methadone to yoga and they shouldn’t have to be married to get it. Every person needs a quality education, and this includes an arts education. Every person needs a participatory workplace and some agency over their employment, including artists.

Most artists in this country are outside of the funding system. Most artists make work without funding, which means they make work sporadically, without necessary time or materials. For most artists, the attempt to participate in a funded institution (a theater, publishing house, gallery, museum, foundation or university) whether its money is private or governmental, is a humiliating, hopeless process of constant rejection by people who are not artists and who have pay checks. Most artists know that they are excluded from arts grants because arts grants are based on nepotism, and a variety of caste systems, not because of government restrictions -- as wrong as they may be. 

For an artist, the long, often futile journey of trying to enter the nepotism system in order to access money and institutional support is a deeply, deeply corrupting process. The more I understand how it works, the more pervasive I can see that it is. It involves adjustment of the work itself, false friendships, and silences. Why should artists be forced into dishonest personal relationships in order to get grants, and what is the impact of those kinds of relationships on art production and ideas? The kinds of silences imposed on people needing institutional support and money in our day are complex. But they very often involve formal conformity, in which the degree to which a piece of work formally refers to what is familiar and comfortable increases its opportunities for reward. In terms of content, the big no-no these days is artists’ truthful evocation of the behavior of the dominant group. In this exact moment, work that addresses how the dominant group’s power is constructed is excluded from significant development, discussion, and support. For example, in the theater, dying homosexuals can be represented on stage, but homophobia in its most truthful light is virtually banned. Black characters must be heterosexual and they can have historic angst or family dilemmas but they cannot describe white people. This is because dominant people’s dominance is rooted in the belief that their power is neutral, objective, and value-free. To examine how it is actually constructed would be to violate that illusion, and so other people can only be represented and express themselves if they remain in a special-interest (i.e., sidekick) position. And “tell our stories” without telling anyone else’s story.

If this exclusion from support is rooted in unacceptably truthful content, formal invention, not having gone to an Ivy League university, critics with territorial monopolies, sexist and racist arts administrators, not having inherited wealth, a daily print press with no people of color in power positions, the exclusion of lesbian content from mainstream support, nepotism or a decency clause, the end material result is the same in the artist’s life.

Now, this vision currently has no articulation in the NEA debate. And you may think that “strategically” there is no place for this. It “clouds the issue.” I disagree. Let me talk for a moment about how I think that change gets made. From my own experience of social change, the center is dependent on the radical wing in order to give it space to move. Different tendencies do not want the same things, but when all factions are healthy and visible, the end result is far better than when radical ideas are excluded from public discourse. The further to the left the left is, the more room the center has. When the left 

moves to the right, the center does too. For example, before AIDS, the demand for gay marriage was considered so radical as to be bizarre, preposterous. But once ACT UP walked into St. Patrick’s Cathedral, gay marriage, which is actually the moderate reform on gay liberation, became preferable to the dominant culture and therefore palatable. When gay people represented radical alternatives to the nuclear family, straight people had more room in how to negotiate their lives. As gay people succumb to the pressure of thirty years of Family Values, straight people become more conservative and more fixed in their gender roles. So it is to the benefit of all concerned with change that the most radical ideas be allowed to surface, in order to move the center to the left.

The NEA debate, as I have heard, seen and read, has positioned artists who initially qualified for NEA grants as people whose grants are a symbol of free speech in this country, and for whom the withholding of grants equals a modern day McCarthyism. The rhetoric does not describe the world of art and art-making outside the realm of the reward system. Nor does it address the way most artists are excluded. Instead they construct a world view with themselves as the radical extreme. This creates a falsely closed circle in which the most provocative alternative imaginable is simply their own position. Strategically, you can’t move in a discourse structured in such a closed manner. There has to be a more radical alternative available for your more moderate position to take hold. By only including ideas that could make it through the NEA panel system, by avoiding a discussion of how artists are treated broadly in the culture, and by de-contextualizing arts funding outside of the realm of broad human needs, the NEA debate becomes too narrow to be effective. The absence of alternatives, the exclusion of the experiences of most artists, a lack of broad social context and silence about the corruption of the arts reward system keeps the discourse from having a constructive social role.

After all, it is not legal cases that make social change, but the counter-culture and social movements that are created around them. The best thing you can get out of a legal case, from an activist’s point of view, is to use the raised platform to articulate a full freedom vision, a liberatory vision that includes people excluded by the power system. Thereby inviting those people to participate in realizing the vision because it also speaks to them. 

After all, what is it, exactly that we do want? And why aren’t we articulating it? If every time artists with the visibility of Karen Finley, Anna Deveare Smith, or Tony Kushner, for example, were interviewed over the next six months, they said, “We want WPA,” a space would be created in the public discourse for discussion about a new WPA. This kind of pro-active discourse would be far more beneficial to the arts than trying to debate and defend a corrupt rewards system.

After all, if the only way that marginal artists can have their work reviewed, seen, discussed and recognized is to have a controversy, then we are not in a democracy. This is the point that needs to be made. In order to be attacked by the right wing, now a prerequisite for marginal artists to have their work acknowledged, you have to be so far along in the power structure that the right wing can even see you. 

That white gay people or experimental artists cannot be evaluated on their own artistic terms without a controversy is censorship. That artists of color can’t even be seen to have the controversy is censorship. The withholding of grants followed by more publicity and exposure than money can buy is distorting and wrong, but it is not censorship. Having something to say that is not palatable to the arts establishment and/or the government and thereby being silenced and disposed of is censorship. Being excluded from support because of nepotism is censorship. Being excluded from the support system for reasons of caste is censorship. Being in the closet as a prerequisite to support is censorship. Being institutionally undereducated is censorship. Being excluded from the art-making process because you don’t have health care is censorship. Being obstructed in becoming an artist because abortion is not available in your geographic area is censorship. These are among the ways that artists and art-making get stopped. And if we do not tell the truth about how all of this works, even if it means doing self-criticism, then our rhetoric is useless. It will not inspire others, it will not create counter-culture. It will not present the vocabulary of a freedom vision into the discourse. It will not be true. It will simply be marketing.

-- Sarah Schulman, speaking at Harvard University’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue