"Holy Virgin Mary" by Chris Ofili,
was adorned in dung.

Art attack

Brooklyn's museum chief
says he won't address
'Sensation' storm

---

By Scott Vogel
svogel@starbulletin.com

On Dec. 18, 1999, 72-year-old Dennis Heiner paid $9.75 for a ticket to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, intent on seeing one particular painting in the museum's controversial exhibit, "Sensation." The painting in question was Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary," a wholly unremarkable piece of art that nevertheless had left a city of 7 million people divided, thanks to a generous helping of elephant dung and several pornographic images that the artist had appended to the picture. To all appearances, Heiner was just like the hundred or so New Yorkers waiting in line for the exhibit that day, dressed in a style that museum officials would later call "dapper."

After taking an elevator to the fifth-floor galleries, Heiner wandered a bit, then complained to a security guard about feeling dizzy. As soon as the guard was distracted by his purported malaise, Heiner slipped behind a Plexiglas shield constructed to protect Ofili's black Madonna picture. Quickly producing a plastic bottle of white paint from his herringbone coat, Heiner set about the task of destroying the picture, smearing the Madonna's head and shoulders with paint before being subdued.

"Holy Virgin Mary" was cleaned within the hour, and the painting suffered no permanent damage. ("It's like a stain -- the sooner you get at it, the better your chances of removing it," said a museum spokeswoman.) Heiner, meanwhile, who was charged with misdemeanor criminal mischief, had a simple answer to the question of why he had planned to destroy the painting.

"It's blasphemous," he said.

You might be expecting a lively exchange on blasphemy and its discontents when Arnold L. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, gives a free lecture Sunday at the Honolulu Academy. After all, according to the academy, the original title of the talk was "Censorship and Art: 'Sensation' and its Aftermath." (In fact, the museum's Web site still lists this title, saying that Lehman "will present a lecture on the controversy surrounding the Brooklyn Museum's recent exhibition, 'Sensations,' [sic] and the ramifications of censorship on the modern art scene.") Nevertheless, Lehman has no intentions of rehashing the controversy, as I discovered after submitting him a set of questions on "Sensation" and its aftermath.

"You should be aware that the focus of my talk will not be on 'Sensation,' as originally indicated, I assume, in the press release from the HAA," he wrote, via e-mail. "I will be directing primary attention to the current issues of relevance, diversity and audience development at the Brooklyn Museum of Art specifically, and within American museums more generally. The issues and art related to 'Sensation' (and other exhibitions) will be mentioned as illustrations of broader concerns."

Those are interesting topics, of course, and it's true that thanks to audacious programming, the Brooklyn Museum has been able to attract the kind of audience -- younger, more ethnically diverse -- that other museums can only dream about. But even rarer still was the cultural firestorm that the BMA started when it unleashed "Sensation." (Even on the exhibit's final day, the New York Times was moved to write, "It ended much as it began, with long lines out the doors and Catholic protesters praying on the sidewalk.") Whatever your views on the beauty or profanity of the exhibit, one thing's for certain. "Sensation" forced an entire city to ask what art is, what an artist's intentions mean and what the difference is between provocation and defamation. And how often does that happen?

Art controversies are nothing new, but what really made "Sensation" a sensation was the inordinate amount of time it spent on the front pages. New Yorkers are a famously mercurial sort, difficult to get the attention of and even more difficult to hold the attention of. Yet from the moment Mayor Rudolph Giuliani saw plans for the exhibit and sought to cut off public funds for the project, to the exhibition's closing a few months later, "Sensation" was the story that refused to die.

First, the museum filed a lawsuit alleging that the mayor had violated the First Amendment in threatening to withhold money from the institution because he felt the art to be offensive. Giuliani's administration countered that the Brooklyn Museum had violated the terms of its 1893 lease with the city declaring that the museum should at all times be open to children. (Because of "Sensation's" content, which also included a bust of a man created from several pints of frozen blood and a formaldehyde-immersed pig that had been sheared in half, the museum required children to be accompanied by an adult.)

Realizing that the First Amendment was going against them, the mayor's office next accused the museum with conspiring to inflate the value of the art, noting that Christie's, the famous auction house, was both a sponsor of the exhibition and the principal art dealer for Charles Saatchi, who owned the "Sensation" artworks. This led to a further controversy when court documents revealed that Lehman's team had solicited money to mount the exhibition from those who stood to gain most from it, several art dealers and Saatchi himself. The latter pledged more than $100,000 to underwrite the $2 million exhibit. This raised questions about the museum's integrity, especially as an exhibit of Saatchi's collection was bound to increase the value of the art.

In the end, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon ruled that the mayor must continue funding the museum, stating that "there is no federal constitutional issue more grave than the effort by government officials to censor works of expression and to threaten the vitality of a major cultural institution as punishment for failing to abide by governmental demands for orthodoxy." And so the exhibition continued, as did the protests, as did the lines at the box office, as did the questions about the museum's ethics.

Such was the storm that was "Sensation," around which swirled issues of aesthetics, mayoral responsibility, public funding, private chicanery, the First Amendment and religious iconography. It was nothing less than a cultural hurricane, and Arnold Lehman was squarely in the eye of the storm, an experience that must have been exhilarating, terrifying and inconvenient all at once. Sunday's audience can only hope that he will go off on a tangent, perhaps digress his way into one of the major art stories of our time. The Honolulu art scene could use a bit of this kind of sensation.

Let's talk A lecture by Arnold L. Lehman When: 2 p.m. Sunday Where: Honolulu Academy of Arts Cost: Free Call: 532-8701

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