Censorship in Arts: Alive and Well : Jock Reynolds, director of the Addison Gallery, brings an exhibit to Newport Harbor Museum and recounts his involvement in the Mapplethorpe affair.

NEWPORT BEACH —  Don’t be fooled: Pernicious threats to freedom of expression are alive and well in America, warns Jock Reynolds, a key player in the federal arts funding uproar of a few years back.

And, he noted, the threats aren’t all coming from the religious right.

He pointed out that art always has had “the power to disturb and provoke,” and the debate over artistic censorship “is an age-old controversy not likely to diminish any time soon.”

Reynolds is director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., a prep school with an acclaimed collection of abstract art from which he culled “American Abstraction From the Addison Gallery of American Art,” a traveling exhibit launched recently at the Newport Harbor Art Museum and continuing there through May 2.

In a lecture at the museum Sunday, Reynolds--who played a direct role in the Robert Mapplethorpe controversies of 1989--gave an insider’s look into the furor involving the National Endowment for the Arts and spoke of continuing “dangerous” attempts at censorship.

One, he said, involves several black faculty members at Tufts University in Massachusetts, upset over works by African-American photographer Carrie Mae Weems included in a traveling group show called “No Laughing Matter,” scheduled to open at Tufts on April 1.

The conceptual works from Weems’ “Ain’t Joking” series explore “old racist jokes perpetuated by whites,” Reynolds said. The series includes an image of a black man cradling a rotund watermelon.

“The black faculty at Tufts wants to censor the work,” said Reynolds. But, he continued, art is about communication between individuals within a free, democratic society, and people must be “extremely vigilant” about efforts to inhibit that.

“If we’re willing to suppress what’s being created,” he said, “then we’re really doing something that’s very dangerous to the kind of society we espouse we want.”

Elizabeth Wylie, director of the year-old Tufts University Art Gallery, said by phone Monday that some members of the faculty and administration misunderstood the anti-racist intent of Weems’ work and were “extremely concerned that students might be hurt” by it.

But, she added, the matter essentially has been resolved and Weems’ work “most definitely” will be included in the exhibition. “I think it was a tempest in a teapot,” she said.

Still, the Tufts incident was not isolated: Black students at the University of Halifax in Nova Scotia, where the show was installed previously, staged a protest over it.

In any case, Reynolds is no stranger to this kind of debate. Two years ago, he successfully demanded that the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art restore a controversial photographic work by Sol LeWitt that had been removed from an exhibit Reynolds co-curated. The work, “Muybridge 1,” consists of images of a nude female that are viewed through small openings. Museum director Elizabeth Broun--”a very liberal person,” as Reynolds described her--found the work objectionable, akin to “a pornographic peep show and exploitative of women,” Reynolds said.

In 1989, while director of the progressive Washington Project for the Arts, Reynolds accepted the exhibition of photographs, some sexually explicit, by the late Robert Mapplethorpe that had been canceled by Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art. The Mapplethorpe exhibit, partly funded by an NEA grant, had helped stir a nationwide controversy over NEA support of what critics deemed obscene and sacrilegious art.

Long before that furor erupted, however, Reynolds had seen warning signs.

In 1985, three congressmen led by Richard Armey (R-Tex.), had attacked the NEA for funding poetry that included graphic language. Their aides “ran” to Congress, Reynolds said Sunday, “claiming that this was utter pornography, that tax dollars were supporting the worst dreck in the world.

“Decontextualizing and misrepresenting” the poets’ work, the congressmen--who denied charges of censorship--tried to cut the NEA’s budget, Reynolds said. Their effort was unsuccessful but nevertheless created “the first climate of real fear” within the NEA and within minority arts communities, whether gay or ethnic, he said.

The following year, Reynolds, in his capacity as WPA director, had what he calls a chilling conversation with then-NEA Chairman Frank Hodsoll.

Reynolds--who said he’d never recounted this story in public before--remembers being asked by Hodsoll to reconsider an NEA grant application--approved by an NEA peer panel and the presidentially appointed National Council on the Arts--for a “potentially provocative” public art project by established contemporary artists Erika Rothenberg and Jenny Holzer.

The project, dealing with citizens’ rights to express themselves publicly, involved two trucks. One was to be equipped with a huge megaphone, the other was to sport a huge television and an “open” microphone. The intention was to let spectators speak their minds as the trucks were driven around New York City and Washington, to the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court.

“We were asked,” Reynolds said, “if we didn’t want to withdraw” the project from funding consideration. “We were asked, ‘Do you really want this show to be done at this time, in this climate?’ . . . Ultimately, the grant was killed (by Hodsoll) for lack of artistic merit.”

After all that, the Mapplethorpe controversy came as no surprise, Reynolds said.

The Mapplethorpe exhibit had opened without incident at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which had received a $30,000 NEA grant to organize the retrospective. From there, it was displayed--again without incident, and to record crowds--at Chicago’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

The trouble, Reynolds said, began at the Corcoran Gallery. Such conservative politicians as Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) put “real political pressure” on the Corcoran’s trustees and its director, Christina Orr-Cahall, who canceled the show and later resigned over it.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle sent the message that “if you present this exhibit here, you might really be jeopardizing your funding,” Reynolds said.

He said the WPA took the exhibit “mainly because we felt it would be a disgrace” to deprive people of the chance to evaluate the show for themselves, and to decide if it indeed was “the great, treacherous pornographic exhibit it was made out to be.”

Reynolds said that about 49,000 visitors streamed through the WPA’s doors and that, in the end, only two complaints were heard. “I think people just did not think this was something to be censored or that Mapplethorpe was not a serious artist,” Reynolds said.

Eventually, the NEA debate fizzled, but not before it left the endowment “almost decimated,” Reynolds said.

The NEA’s peer-panel, with a built-in system of checks and balances that includes annual rotation of members, may not be perfect, said Reynolds, a working photographer and sculptor who has sat on panels since 1979, but it “has been one of the most fair and efficient ways of supporting artworks” and development of culture.

In such cases as the Mapplethorpe, LeWitt and Tufts incidents, one person or a small group of people “think that art can only have one impression, and can be seen or interpreted in only one way . . . that serves their own political agenda.

“Great art has a multiplicity of meanings, but it is increasingly seen in the most simplistic terms, and I think that’s really a dangerous intellectual conception.”

* “American Abstraction From the Addison Gallery of American Art” continues through May 2 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $2 to $4, free on Tuesdays. (714) 759-1122.