Museums Jump In to Show Video Removed by Smithsonian

[marmar]

from the New York Times:



Museums Jump In to Show Video Removed by Smithsonian
By KATE TAYLOR


While artists, foundations and activists continue to protest the Smithsonian Institution’s decision to pull an AIDS-themed video from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery after it was criticized by the head of the Catholic League and some Republican members of Congress, dozens of museums, including the Tate Modern, are lining up to show the disputed video, by the artist David Wojnarowicz.

And earlier this week the artist AA Bronson wrote to the director of the National Portrait Gallery, a Smithsonian museum, to ask that the gallery remove one of his works from the exhibition, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portaiture,” which explores homosexual themes, The Washington Post reported. The Bronson work in question, a wall-sized photograph titled “Felix, June 5, 1994,” shows the corpse of Mr. Bronson’s partner shortly after he died of AIDS. It is on loan to the exhibition from the National Gallery of Canada. A spokeswoman for the National Portrait Gallery said that the gallery wanted to keep the exhibition intact and therefore would not return the photograph early, according to the blog Modern Art Notes.

Meanwhile, Michael Katakis, a photographer and writer based in California, has written to the head of the Smithsonian, G. Wayne Clough, asking that it return his photographic portrait of Maya Lin, which he donated to the National Portrait Gallery two decades ago.

On the foundation front, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which gave a grant of $10,000 for “Hide/Seek,” has joined the Andy Warhol Foundation of the Visual Arts in declaring that it will provide no further financing to the Smithsonian unless the Wojnarowicz video is reinstated. Mapplethorpe’s work is, of course, famously associated with censorship: In 1989, shortly after Mapplethorpe died of AIDS, a retrospective of his photographs was canceled by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington because of concerns that the homoerotic and sadomasochistic imagery would incite conservative politicians against the National Endowment for the Arts, which had provided financing. When the exhibition was then shown at Cincinnati’s Contemporary Art Center, the center and its director were charged with obscenity. They were ultimately acquitted. ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/museums-jump-in-to-show-video-removed-by-smithsonian/

[formercia]

1. Decadent Art

It begins again.

By order of the Fuhrer

Seig Heil