“Why should the working class pay for the leisure of the elite when in fact one of the things the working class likes to do for leisure is to go to professional wrestling? And if I suggested we should have federal funds for professional wrestling to lower the cost of the ticket, people would think I’m insane.
I don’t go to museums any more than any Americans do.”
Catholic League president Bill Donohue, on National Public Radio
questioning why the Smithsonian receives federal funding, December 2010
Back in December 2010 the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) opened its exhibit, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Described by NPG as “the first major museum exhibition focusing on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture.” Given the political environment the NPG lives in, this was a remarkable occurrence, and privately funded to boot.
One particular piece in the exhibition, an NPG-edited video by David Wojnarowicz [Vo na ROH vich] (d. 1992) titled A Fire In My Belly (1986-1987). The four minute version, edited from a 20 minute unfinished video, depicted Wojnarowicz’s highly surrealistic tribute to his partner who died of AIDS-related complications, and, as well, a meditation on his own infection with AIDS. The film shows very quick glimpses of challenging and, at times, disturbing images, including a meatpacking plant; various objects on fire; coins falling into a bleeding, bandaged hand; halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together; and a man’s lips being sewn shut.
Those images did not excite controversy. It was 11 seconds at the beginning of the film that depicts ants crawling on a crucifix One observer analyzed the 11 seconds, “A crucifix is besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on.”
The Smithsonian:
This imagery was part of a surrealistic video collage filmed in Mexico expressing the suffering, marginalization and physical decay of those who were afflicted with AIDS. In the video, Wojnarowicz used religious imagery placing his work firmly in the tradition of art that uses such imagery to universalize human suffering.
And the New York Times:
That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.
He felt, with reason, mortally embattled, and the video is filled with symbols of vulnerability under attack: beggars, slaughtered animals, displaced bodies and the crucified Jesus. In Wojnarowicz’s nature symbolism — and this is confirmed in other works — ants were symbols of a human life mechanically driven by its own needs, heedless of anything else. Here they blindly swarm over an emblem of suffering and self-sacrifice.
For Bill Donahue, the head of The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, however, the 11 seconds were “anti-Christian” and “hate speech.” Due to Donahue’s intervention and political pressure from the usual suspects (John Boehner, Eric Cantor) the Wojnarowicz film was summarily removed from the exhibition. The Smithsonian explained that “the attention to this particular video imagery and the way in which it was being interpreted by many overshadowed the importance and understanding of the entire exhibition.” Thereafter followed protesters, condemnation, and, of course, charges of cowardice (as well as cheers from the right).
