M.S., Economist: "Democracy in America", December 13, 2010

American politics

Fire in their belly

Economist, December 13, 2010, 18:03 by M.S.

Copyright by The Economist

THE FUNNIEST part of the CNSNews.com article that ultimately got David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly" pulled from the National Portrait Gallery last week is the sensitive-content notice at the top: "WARNING: This story contains graphic photographs of items on display in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery."

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What's in those graphic photographs? Mostly, the rather familiar (though still powerful and disturbing) image of a thin, nearly naked man nailed to a wooden cross, bleeding from open wounds. A lot of ants are crawling on the crucifix, but you can't make them out in the web images. There are a couple of images of other naked guys further down in the article, but of course those aren't the images that generated any controversy; nobody ever wound up pressuring the Smithsonian to pull Larry Rivers's portrait of John O'Hara wearing nothing but his motorcycle boots.

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The web article's author, a conservative activist named Penny Starr, was clearly trying to gin up some late-80s-style culture-war outrage at the idea that the Smithsonian was sponsoring an exhibit of gay artists. But the part of the story that proved to have legs, once the Catholic League's Bill Donohue decided to pick it up and got it endorsed by John Boehner, was the part about the crucifix with the ants crawling on it.

On Sunday, Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times that the Smithsonian's quick cave-in to demands that the piece be pulled from the show demonstrated that "even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America." Mr Rich is clearly right that the initial push was motivated by homophobia, as expressed in its closeted 2010 version: Ms Starr asked a curator whether "the exhibit might be offensive to people who disagree with the homosexual lifestyle." (One imagines that some exhibits might be offensive to people who disagree with the Christian lifestyle, the American lifestyle, or the female lifestyle, for that matter.)

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But it's not clear what tolerance or intolerance of homosexuality has to do with ants crawling on a crucifix. One can imagine what kinds of things David Wojnarowicz might have been thinking about with the ants. His lover had just died of AIDS, the emaciated figure of Christ was often recalled in those years in the wasted faces and bodies of HIV's victims, and in general the suffering of the plague years led to a lot of religiously themed art; one might recall a little play called "Angels in America", which I don't think anyone picketed as an insult to angels. The teeming motion of the ants suggests the ceaseless involuntary swarming of life at the cellular level, both thriving and decaying, constructive and parasitical. Insects crawling on a bound man's body is a common form of torture, it hints at the agony of people dying from degenerative diseases, and it also recalls the act of torture that is the Passion. As other critics wrote, Mr Wojnarowicz's piece is a memento mori, like half the religious art of the Renaissance; the Washington Post's Blake Gopnik observes that compared with Goya or 17th-century Spanish sculpture, it's a "relatively tepid reworking" of those themes.

But getting back to the ants: it's not really clear how they are supposed to be offensive. With the "Piss Christ" thing, there was at least an immature logic to the sense of offence. Children naturally take "peepee on your head" as an insult, and not everyone was going to think, "Okay, the swirling yellow sky effect recalls Rembrandt, the scatological joke of the medium defamiliarises the image and then leaves you thinking about the paradoxical idea of God as a flesh-and-blood being or, by extension, the strangeness of our own conscious and spiritual presence in these yucky material bodies". But ants? Who's offended by ants? The whole story has the feel of a troupe of political mummers donning their vestments and going through the motions, engaging in formalistic rituals of protest whose long-ago meanings they no longer feel or understand.

I'm actually hopeful that this may be among the last of these silly culture-war pantomimes we see for a while. The Smithsonian has taken a lot of flack for pulling "A Fire in My Belly", but I can at least imagine the relief with which a top administrator of the "Hide/Seek" show, waiting for the inevitable conservative assault, might have greeted Mr Boehner's letter: "They're going after the ants? That's it? They don't mind that we're doing a show that frankly addresses the gay identity of a substantial portion of the greatest names in American arts for the past 150 years? Fine, pull the ants!" I may be wrong, but it looks to me like the main takeaway here is that on the issue of the "homosexual lifestyle", cultural conservatives no longer have any fire in their belly.

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