Surviving censure

Holly Hughes preaches for decency’s sake

By Tanya Whiton

Between the lines Stack-stalking Shannon Rose Riley If you want to catch her, she’s in the stacks,” the library attendant at Maine College of Art said. I was looking for faculty member and performance artist Shannon Rose Riley. I found her, wearing a pair of orange polyester pants and a matching top, casually wandering between ceiling-high shelves of books. Save a few students using computers, nobody else was around — so much for being the anonymous reviewer. I sat down at a big table, took my new CVS mini-notebook out of my bag, and watched her return with a heap of texts. Usually a big fan of the library, in this particular instance, the silence made me a little tense. MUST READS: Riley relies on serendipity. The intimacy of being the only audience member for what at first seemed to be a series of semi-random and prosaic acts felt forced. But something happened, as Riley began to read from the selected books, the act transformed a set of isolated fragments into a complete whole. It was impossible not to construct a story in my mind. That story was distinctly influenced by my thoughts prior to Riley’s performance: I’d been mulling Holly Hughes’ show from the evening before. I’d been thinking about how frightened people are of the unfamiliar. And I’d been thinking about how performance art often forces its audience to see things in a new context — how it makes the familiar strange and vice versa. Some partial excerpts from Riley’s reading: “Nothing out of the ordinary happened on my trip to see Don Juan . . .” “As an adult, she could still be this Big Daddy . . .” “[It is] the cyclical recurrence of what has been before — in a word, eternal return . . .” And finally: “Most people ignorantly suppose that artists are the decorators of our human existence, the esthetes to whom the cultivated may turn when the real business of the day is done.” ýI believe there’s a certain serendipity to choosing books in the first place,” Riley said afterward, making copies of her selections to add to the other half of her performance/installation, which is part of the MECA faculty exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art. After each journey through the stacks, she goes downstairs to the gallery and sews her quotes onto a scroll attached to the wall. The performances that have gone before are documented on its winding paper, which gathers on the floor. The beauty of Riley’s very simple piece was that it made all the arbitrary, ordinary happenings of daily life seem temporarily imbued with some kind of meaning, some fragment of a story. Which is the reason I’ve loved books — and libraries — to begin with.

PERSECUTION: has taken its toll on Hughes.

Performance artist Holly Hughes knows first hand how the term “family values” can be wielded in the service of stripping away a person’s First Amendment rights. In 1990, she and three other solo performers — Karen Finley, John Fleck, and Tim Miller — were denied grants by the National Endowment for the Arts. Why?

Well, in Hughes’s case, the reason was the “obscene and lesbian content” of her work. According to NEA chairman John Frohnmayer, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and a host of other conservatives, Hughes’s stage dramas didn’t deserve any federal money because they undermined “family values.” Never mind that most of the folks gunning for Hughes’s government funding had never seen her plays — The Well of Horniness, The Lady Dick, to name a few. If they had, they’d have seen what was so indecent: women being honest about their sexuality; women who (frankly, my dear) didn’t give a damn about men.

Hughes’ current show, Preaching to the Perverted, is the story of her battle with the government, the Christian right, and the media. In 1992, Hughes, Finley, Fleck, and Miller — dubbed the “NEA Four” — sued the government and won. The government appealed, and lost.

Then, in 1998, the US Supreme Court overturned the previous verdicts in which judges had cited the “vague and unconstitutional” elements of the “standards of decency” clause that had been used to defund the NEA Four. The Court ruled in favor of . . . the government. Hughes was deluged with hate mail, bludgeoned by the mainstream media, and characterized by Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association as a “child pornographer.” All for spoofing on the idea that lesbians are either tortured by their abnormality or are simply straight chicks in disguise. Hughes’s unapologetic portrayal of lesbian sexuality was apparently so alarming to the right that they couldn’t stop at taking away her financial support — they deemed it necessary to vilify her name as well.

Preaching to the Perverted opens with Hughes carrying labeled cardboard boxes onto a bare stage. The boxes are dated. The dates are those on which fellow artists — Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz — had installations removed, shows canceled, or performances stopped. A personable, petite blonde woman in street clothes, Hughes introduces herself, and takes a seat on a box.

She proceeds to tell a story about an exhibit in which an American flag was spread on the ground. In order for viewers to comment on their reaction to Old Glory’s desecration, they had to step on her.

Hughes continues with an anecdote about a ritual from her childhood. Each summer, she and her siblings would arrive at their family’s summer camp, remove a carefully folded flag from their father’s desk, and hoist it up the flagpole. The event was important because “. . . there was someone there to see us act like a family.” Her articulation of the tension between appearance and reality — and the radical disparity between those who favor maintaining appearances over confronting reality — creates a frame for what follows: Hughes pulls fistfuls of tiny flags from one of her boxes, and begins to list visual artists, musicians, and performers on Senator Helms’s roster of artists who posed threats to “family values.” For each of these artists, a miniature Stars and Stripes flutters to the ground.

A straight middle-aged couple seated in front of me stood, put on their coats, and walked out of the show. “I’m glad she’s enjoying all the freedoms,” said the wife in a loud voice, for the benefit of those of us who chose to stay.

But what Hughes did in her 90-minute solo venture didn’t seem even remotely radical compared to the kinds of performances she’s done in the past. There was none of what Village Voice writer C. Carr referred to as “The Dyke Noir Theater of Holly Hughes.” There was no Detective Garnet McClit dropping sultry, butchy lines, no chorus of half clad women hollering “Well of horniness!” No. Holly Hughes simply told her side of a long and complicated story.

She did so by employing many of the tamer elements of performance art: elliptical storytelling; simple, associative props; improvisational blocking; and, well, a vibrator. She interspersed mini-accounts of her life as it was transformed by the protracted legal battle, turning each account into a short skit. My favorite was about the Easter Bunny: unable to find work as an actor, Hughes took a gig working parties as a bunny. “Half of the audience was scared,” she quips. “The other half said, ‘Look! It’s got a zipper!’ ”

Her crisp, funny writing, combined with an engaging stage presence, makes it easy to be sidetracked by the pieces’ humor. At one point, Hughes dons a rainbow-colored mullet wig, and vamps all over the stage, waving the vibrator and a Teletubbie in the air. “I’m gay,” she says. “So my hypothalamus is enlarged, and it secretes special rights.” She represents the Supreme Court justices with rubber duckies, carefully placing each one — Scalia, Rehnquist, etc. — in their spot on the “bench.” She makes cracks about the Starr Report: “No NEA funding for that!” But towards the end of her show, the toll taken on Hughes as an artist and as an individual became clear, as did the implications of her case: if the Supreme Court can decide to mandate what is decent and what is not, anyone who chooses to express themselves is in danger. Standing (metaphorically) in the cavernous great hall of the Court, Hughes says it occurred to her that “I’m not here as a citizen participating in a democratic society. I’m here because I’ve been bad.”

My sole criticism of Hughes’s show was that she missed a chance to end it on its most poignant and chilling note. After her romp in the Supreme Court, there’s a brief voice-over in which she’s barraged with reporters’ questions. The larger-than-life Hughes shrinks perceptibly, and it’s revealed that despite the fact that she still tells it as she sees it, Holly Hughes has been cowed by the very institutions that were created by “we the people” to uphold our rights.

Like many of the players in Hughes’s “cast” of politicians, judges, and arts commentators, the couple who exited in the first 10 minutes of the show formed their opinion before hearing her story through. Had they stayed, they would have heard a tale of individual freedoms being systematically taken away. They would have witnessed a writer and performer committed enough to her own vision to brave a firestorm of censure and slander. And most disturbingly, they would have seen history repeating itself. In a time when fear of the unknown is being used to blur the distinctions between church and state, a time when freedom of expression is perceived as a threat not only to family values but to national security, some of the first people targeted are artists. And the first artists targeted are those outside the mainstream.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.