How Great Thou Art

Rejected by the N.E.A., three artists speak out on censorship

By now, everyone has heard of Karen Finley, the feminist artist who pours chocolate, yams, and other representatives of the four food groups onto her body as "a symbol of women being treated like dirt," and whose National Endowment for the Arts funding was denied, on the grounds of ''certain political realities," by N.E.A. chairman John Frohnmayer. Less well known are the three other performance artists whose N.E.A. grants also fell under the ax.

New Yorker Holly Hughes deals unashamedly with her lesbianism in her bitingly satirical and confrontational monologues "The Well of Hominess" and "World Without End." Californian Tim Miller's politically charged performance piece "Some Golden States" traces his growth as a gay man, from his childhood in Nixon's hometown of Whittier, California, through the murder of gay San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk to today's AIDS-plagued landscape. Fellow Californian John Fleck vents frustration at homophobia, homelessness, and other social ills in his solo piece "Blessed Are All the Little Fishes," which includes brief onstage nudity and urination.

None of the three buys the obscenity explanation for their defunding. Nor do they believe that their grants were denied for reasons of low artistic merit. All three have received N.E.A. grants in the past, and all three are respected veterans of the performance-art field, having appeared to critical acclaim across North America and Europe.

"I see our defunding as a problem of national security," Miller says, "which I take in a broad context of the arts, sciences, industry, economy. We don't challenge ourselves, and I think it condemns us to a. very bleak future without economic or cultural vitality." And citing ABC's recent decision, following complaints from advertisers, not to rerun an episode of thirtysomething which showed a gay couple in bed, he adds, "Certain people are supposed to be invisible." Hughes concurs. "The obscenity charge against us is just a diversionary tactic. As a lesbian, you don't have to be obscene to get defunded,' ' she laughs. "You can sit out in a lawn chair with a sign saying I AM A LESBIAN and they'll come and cart you away." "We're definitely being used to support a bigger rehave the Communists to go after anymore. They need an enemy within. And they've decided it's us."

JOHN COLAPINTO