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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 31, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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House votes to end NEA arts grants

WW interviews activist writers

By Leslie Feinberg

Majority votes in the House of Representatives on July 10 and 11 dismantled the National Endowment for the Arts and stripped it of funding. The NEA is down, but not dead. The House action still faces the hurdles of Senate and presidential approval.

The NEA has been the target of a vitriolic campaign by reactionary politicians and right-wing organizations for almost a decade. Workers World spoke to Chrystos and Minnie Bruce Pratt, two artists who faced the wrath of the right after receiving NEA grants.

In 1990, Menominee poet Chrystos, African Caribbean writer Audre Lorde and anti-racist poet Minnie Bruce Pratt were labeled "pornographers" in ferociously bigoted and well- publicized tirades by Republican Sen. Jesse Helms on the Senate floor.

Helms launched an investigation to revoke their funding. The reactionary American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss., organized a write-in campaign to Congress denouncing the three as "perverts."

Why were these writers so viciously attacked? "I'm sure it's because all three of us are queer," Chrystos said, "and all three of us are left of left-wing--we're all revolutionaries."

Chrystos, Lorde and Pratt issued a joint statement. Chrystos remembers: "We focused on how important it was for the NEA to continue and to be multicultural and diverse. We stated statistics that the U.S., which is the richest country in the world, allocates the smallest amount to the arts of any of the industrialized countries.

"We took an impassioned stance on the necessity of everyone working to involve themselves in the struggle against censorship."

Who will be silenced? Chrystos laughed wryly: "John Updike and Norman Mailer don't need NEA grants. Neither do the men now in Harvard and Yale who will be the writers of the next 20 years who are lauded by the right wing."

Before the early 1970s, Chrystos noted, white judges gave grants almost exclusively to white, straight male artists. The appointment of people of color as NEA judges was a gain of the progressive movements. "That's who nominated the three of us," Chrystos said.

"The NEA became a real arts organization to help struggling artists. I think the NEA came under attack because Brown people and queers started winning the grants."

The attacks on the NEA "are tied into cutting back on affirmative-action programs and ethnic studies and raising tuition in schools sky high so that only white, upper- middle-class people get education," Chrystos said.

"It's also about cutting back the work force," Chrystos added. Cutbacks in arts and education, she concluded, send the message that "our lives no longer have the same value."

PRATT: 'WHY IT'S IMPORTANT TO FIGHT ON THIS ISSUE'

Minnie Bruce Pratt recalled that right-wing attacks on NEA funding "started out as a political attack against work on gender and sexuality issues. But it spread to art in general being condemned as a luxury.

"However, that generated a ruling-class split," she noted, "because a segment of the elite class wants its operas and symphonies and ballets. And art brings in revenue. That's why Charleton Heston--Mr. Right Wing--was brought in to testify on behalf of federal arts funding. And that's why the Republicans are split on abolishing the NEA."

Pratt stressed, "The attacks on NEA artists were connected to the scapegoating of people of color and others caught in the cross hairs of attacks by the right wing."

Many of the NEA artists, she pointed out, "have been self- defined lesbians, gay men and feminists. The art they were making was part of a larger movement of cultural work in the U.S. that sought to close the gap between the everyday lives of people and the issues expressed in art in a way that pointed toward greater liberation."

Pratt explained that the attack on the arts "is part of a larger, well-orchestrated attack on information getting out to a wide range of people about issues of sexuality, AIDS education and sex education. It coincided with attacks on women's right to choose abortion and with increased federal radio broadcast restrictions.

"It's very easy for most people to see this struggle as remote from them," Pratt concluded, "because most of the art we've been taught in our public school education has been the art of the elite. So it's hard to see why we should care.

"But the artists who were targeted by these attacks were particularly conscious about bringing into visibility and hearing range the struggles of the lives of oppressed peoples. And that's why it's important to fight on this particular issue."

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