The Smithsonian’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly” video from its Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is already made and done. The piece is gone, but it has popped up in a number of other locations, including a display at the New Museum and Transformer Gallery in DC. The question is, should the piece be restored to Hide/Seek?
The “deletion” of the piece immediately touched off a scandal in the art world as the museum was impugned with committing censorship, deliberately limiting artists’, and curators’ freedom of expression. Add to that that the offense taken to the piece is based on a clear misunderstanding of the work’s meaning and context and you’ve got a clear case of utter stupidity. Yet no matter the complaints or criticisms, the Wojnarowicz will not be un-removed. It has been excised from the exhibition, and it will stay excised whether it is replaced or not.
Making the decision to remove the piece is irrevocable. The absence of the Wojnarowicz has become a strong symbol and rallying point for the art world against censorship, stronger perhaps than the restitution of the piece would be. After all, the social and political context behind the decision still exist. LATimes critic Christopher Knight and Modern Art Notes’ Tyler Green have both suggested that the deletion is part of a deeper unrest on the right and a desire and willingness to reignite the culture wars. Knight summarizes in one fell swoop the conflict surrounding the piece:
Objectively speaking, an artist bent on making an anti-Christian diatribe would not spend just 15 seconds of a 13-minute video making it. Those images instead serve another function: To rebuke the same self-righteous moralism of those who are attacking the Smithsonian now.
“A Fire in My Belly” installed at the New Museum (image from New Museum)
The removal of the Wojnarowicz made the video go viral, in a real-world sense. It is now omnipresent in the online art world, instantly accessible through YouTube and on view in more than a handful of art institutions, with viewings and protests still in planning. Because of the video’s absence in one venue, it is now everywhere. The whole case is an object lesson for those who would censor art (and anything, for that matter, see Wikileaks): in the globalized, online world, censorship is nigh impossible, and attempts are ill-advised. In the end, if the Smithsonian, our governmental museum, won’t show a piece of art, the rest of us will. The display of the video in so many other venues is another symbol of the network of support the work has found in reaction to its failed censorship.
So what should the Smithsonian staff do? I suggest they leave the space empty and put up a sign where the Wojnarowicz used to be: “This art work has been censored by the United States government under Republican political pressure.” How’s that for transparency?
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But it wasn’t censored by the United States Government. It was censored by the Museum.
I would argue that the museum is a wholly governmental body, and the decision was made by a wholly governmental staffer: the smithsonian secretary Wayne Clough http://www.si.edu/about/people.htm
So it was in effect censored by the government. The decision had little or nothing to do with actual National Portrait Gallery staff.
I’ve been incredibly heartened by the viral response generated by this controversy. Wojnarowicz’s work is reaching an exponentially larger audience and enjoying renewed life through dialogue, thanks to this latest act of rightwing nutjob stupidity. The progressive left, which looked so sleepy and victimized just a few weeks ago, is finally showing new signs of life. So many eloquent statements are being put out by prominent institutions, newspapers, and public figures in support of Wojnarowicz and Hide/Seek. As I write, the heroic Bernie Sanders is filibustering the Republican tax cuts in Congress. Something is happening here. I say… thank you, Obama and the Smithsonian, for your sad acts of cowardice. Apparently they are just what the people needed.