Jesse Helms Theory Of Art.pdf

The Jesse Helms Theory of Art*

RICHARD MEYER

After thirty years in the United States Senate, Republican Jesse Helms of

North Carolina retired in Januar y 2003. On the occasion of that retirement, I

would like to recall the central role Helms played in the American culture wars of

the late 1980s and early 1990s and sketch some of the ways in which his political

legacy continues to reverberate today.

As part of his largely successful effort to impose content restrictions on

federally funded art, Helms exploited public fears and fantasies about male homo-

sexuality. The name to which he most frequently assigned those fears and fantasies

was “Mapplethorpe.” “This Mapplethorpe fellow,” Helms told the New York Times ,

“was an acknowledged homosexual. He’s dead now, but the homosexual theme

goes throughout his work.” 1 As he would throughout the ensuing controversy,

Helms collapses Robert Mapplethorpe’s homosexuality and AIDS-related death

and then projects both onto the thematics of the photographer’s work.

Later in the same Times article, Helms tries to clarify his own criteria for

artistic judgment by making the following aesthetic distinction: “There’s a big

difference between The Merchant of Venice and a photograph of two males of

different races [in an erotic pose] on a marble-top table.” 2

One of the things that

* I am grateful to George Baker, James Kincaid, David Román, and Kaja Silverman, all of whom

offered excellent suggestions and moral support on this project. This essay is for Douglas Crimp.

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in conjunction

with the reconstruction of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment mounted by that museum in May 2000.

Sponsored in part by the Showtime Cable Television Network, the exhibition was timed to coincide with the

premiere of Dirty Pictures , a docudrama about the Mapplethorpe controversy produced by the network. Parts

of this text have previously appeared in two works by the author: Outlaw Representation: Censorship and

Homosexuality in Twent ieth-Century American Art (New York: Oxford Univer sit y Press, 2002) and

“Mapplethorpe’s Living Room: Photography and the Furnishing of Desire,” Art History 24, no. 2 (April 2001).

1. Cited in Maureen Dowd, “Unruf � ed Helms Basks in Eye of Arts Storm,” New York Times , July 28,

1989, p. B6.

2. Ibid. The Helms quotation as it appeared in the New York Times is as follows: “It’s perfectly

absurd. There’s a big difference between ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and a photograph of two men of

different races” in an erotic pose “on a marble-top table.” The words “in an erotic pose” are the only

ones that are paraphrased rather than quoted directly by the Times . This peculiar recourse to paraphrase

raises the question as to what words Helms actually employed to describe the so-called “erotic pose” of

the two men on the table.

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interests me about this statement, but which was not mentioned by the Times , is

that no such photograph by Mapplethorpe exists. Three photographs of inter-

racial male couples, including Embrace of 1982, appear in The Perfect Moment , the

Mapplethorpe exhibition catalog that Helms not only saw Ž r sthand, but also

selectively photocopied and distributed to his colleagues in Congress. 3 None of

the couples in The Perfect Moment , however, is posed on a marble-top t able.

Marble-top t ables appear nowhere, in fact , within Mapplethorpe’s published

oeuvre, though tables of different materials do surface in explicitly homoerotic

contexts, most famously in a 1976 portrait of a gay porn star, Mark Stevens (Mr.

10 1/2) . Like Embrace , Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2) was reproduced in the catalog

on which Helms based his descr iptions of Mapplethorpe’s work.

3. By way of lobbying for his proposed amendment restricting the content of federally funded art,

Helms photocopied four Mapplethorpe photographs and sent them to each of the twenty-six members

of the joint congressional committee which was to decide the issue. The four photographs copied by

Helms were Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2) (a photograph of a man in leather chaps displaying his penis on a

table); Man in Polyester Suit (a photograph of a black man, seen from the neck down, whose penis

drapes out of his unzipped suit pants); Rosie (a photograph of a partially naked little girl); and Jesse

McBride (a portrait of a naked little boy). According to the Washington Post , “The letters and pictures

were sent marked ‘personal and con Ž dential’ and ‘for members’ eyes only.” See Kara Swisher, “Helms’s

‘Indecent’ Sampler: Senator Sends Photos to Sway Conferees,” Washington Post , August 8, 1989, p. B1,

and “Helms Mails Photos He Calls Obscene,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch , August 9, 1989, p. 11A.

The irony of this incident, whereby Senator Helms sent through the mail pictures he had

himself deemed indecent, was underscored by the Post when it asked the Of Ž ce of the Postmaster

on Capitol Hill to clarify its policy on obscenity in the context of Helms’s mailing. “‘We will deliver

anything and we never censor mail or open it ,’ Joanna O’Rourke, executive assist ant to the

Postmaster, said when asked about policies on obscene materials. ‘When certain skin magazines

were sent here, a lot of members [of Congress] did not want them, but courts ruled that we deliver it

anyway,’ she said. ‘They said the members are here to represent the people—all the people, I guess.’”

Cited in Swisher, “Helms’s ‘Indecent’ Sampler.”

Left: Robert Mapplethorpe. Embrace . 1982.

Right: Mapplethorpe. Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2) . 1976.

The Jesse Helms Theory of Art

133

Now, it is not that I would expect Helms to be a particularly careful viewer of

Mapplethorpe’s photographs. But the way in which Helms gets the pictures wrong

reveals how the language of censorship summons its own fantasies of erotic trans-

gression and exchange. Within a psychoanalytic context, fantasy has been de Ž ned as

a “purely illusory production” or again as an “imaginary scene . . . representing the

ful Ž llment of a wish.” 4 Yet, as the philosopher Judith Butler argues, fantasy functions

by bracketing its status as illusory, by “postur[ing] as the real.” 5 Helms’s fantasy of

“two males of different races [in an erotic pose] on a marble-top table” clari Ž es

Butler’s point. This phrase is cited by Helms as though it were a description of the

real, which is to say, a real photograph by Mapplethorpe. The description is, however,

of an imagined picture that has been worked by Helms across the body of

Mapplethorpe’s photography and, in this sense, produced as much by the senator as

by the artist whom he attacks. The literary critic D. A. Miller has suggested that

t he phr as e “m arble-top” fun ct ions for He lms as a surrogate for t he word

“Mapplethorpe.” 6 “Marble-top” provides Helms with a means, however unconscious,

of inserting Mapplethorpe into a sexualized scene of interracial male coupling.

Alongside the misrecognized image of the “marble-top table,” I would like to

consider a slightly later moment in which Helms described his own art collection so

as to dramatize, by way of contrast, the supposed indecency of Mapplethorpe’s work.

In an interview published in the November 1989 issue of Museum and Arts magazine,

Helms discussed the art in his Arlington, Virginia, home, singling out for particular

praise a painting by an artist from Helms’s home state of North Carolina that depicts

“an old man, sitting at the table, with the Bible open in front of him, with his hands

folded in prayer. . . . And it is the most inspiring thing to me. . . . We have ten or twelve

pictures of art, all of which I like. But we don’t have any penises stretched out on the

table.” 7 By avowing his admiration for a painting of a pious old man at a table, Helms

means to counter other pictures, half-remembered and half-imagined, of other men

(e.g., Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2) ) and other tables (e.g. marble-top ones). Notice how

Helms’s assertion that “We have ten or twelve pictures of art . . . But we don’t have any

penises stretched out on the table” unwittingly confuses the distinction between

artistic representation and corporeal presence, between pictures and penises. At

such moments, Helms does not describe a particular photograph by Mapplethorpe

so much as he conjures a forbidden space of homosexual difference and depravity, a

space of tables and tabletops on which indecent pleasures unfold. And to this

per ver sely luxur iant space of homosexualit y, Helms opposes the r ighteous

respectability of his own home and art collection.

4. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton, 1973),

pp. 314–15.

5. Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess,” Differences 2,

no. 2 (Summer 1990), p. 108.

6. D. A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 41–42.

7. Charles Babington, “Jesse Riles Again,” Museum and Arts: Washington (November/December

1989), p. 59.

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Helms’s public discourse on Mapplethorpe might best be understood as an

attempt to cordon off the visual and symbolic force of homosexuality, to keep it as far

as possible from the senator and the morally upst anding cit izens he claims to

represent. In trying to suppress homosexuality, however, Helms continually returns

to it, whether by photocopying Mark Stevens (Mr. 10 1/2) for his fellow senators, by

repeatedly describing Mapplethorpe’s pictures to the press, or by bringing The Perfect

Moment catalog home to show his wife, Dorothy, who would memorably respond,

“Lord have mercy, Jesse, I’m not believing this.” 8 Helms’s Ž xation on Mapplethorpe

reveals the paradox whereby censorship tends to publicize, reproduce, and even

create the images it aims to suppress. Far from a solely restrictive force, censorship

generates its own representations of obscenity, whether in verbal, written, or visual

form. Like Helms’s descriptions of Mapplethorpe’s photography, such representa-

tions often correspond less to actual works of art than to the imagined scenes of

indecency those works provoke in the mind of the censor.

The psychic contradictions at the heart of censorship have been deftly

analyzed by Butler in terms of what she calls “the force of fantasy.” Drawing on the

example of Helms, Butler argues that censorship cannot but reenact the illicit

scenes it aims to snuff out:

Certain kinds of efforts to restrict practices of representation in the

hopes of reigning in the imaginary, controlling the phant asmatic, end

up reproducing and proliferating the phantasmatic in inadvertent ways,

indeed, in ways that contradict the intended purposes of the restriction

itself. The effort to limit representations of homoeroticism within the

federally funded art world—an effort to censor the phantasmatic—always

and only leads to its production; and the effort to produce and regulate it

in politically sanctioned forms ends up effecting certain forms of exclu-

sion that return, like insistent ghosts, to undermine those very efforts. 9

Helms’s attempt to restr ict homoerotic art operates, however unwitt ingly, to

provoke homoerotic fantasy, not least the senator’s own. Insofar as such fantasies

shape public policy, however, their effects could not be more real. We need only to

consider the changes imposed on the National Endowment for the Arts since the

Mapplethorpe controver sy— the elimination of nearly all grants to individual

artists, for example, or the insistence that every work of federally funded art meet

“general standards of decency”—to appreciate the material and legislative force of

Helms’s anxious fantasies. 10

8. Cited in Dowd, “Unruf � ed Helms Basks in Eye of Arts Storm,” p B6.

9. Butler, “The Force of Fantasy,” p. 108.

10. On the elimination of grants to individual artists, see Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip

Yenawine, Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America (New York: New York University Press,

1999) and Raymond J. Learsy, “To Encourage Great Art, Help Great Artists,” New York Times , December

3, 2002, p. A31. On the legislative imposition of the decency clause on the NEA, see Kathleen Sullivan,

“Are Content Restrictions Constitutional?,” in Wallis, Weems, and Yenawine, Art Matters , pp. 235–39,

and Meyer , Outlaw Representation , pp. 276–84.

Before delving any further into the

na ture of these fant as ies, I would like

brie � y to recall the historical circumstances

that gave rise to them. By the time Helms

Ž rst encountered Mapplethorpe’s photog-

raphy in the summer of 1989, a public

con � ict over federal funding to the arts was

already under way. That con � ict had begun

the previous Apr il when a conser vat ive

religious group called the American Family

Associat ion (AFA) sent out one million

copies of a letter denouncing an art work

ent it led Piss C hrist (19 87 ) by Andr es

Serrano. 11 The work, a large-scale color

photograph of a cruci Ž x submerged in a

luminous bath of urine, had been awarded

a $15,000 prize by the Southeastern Center

for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem,

North Carolina, an inst itut ion part ially

funded by the NEA. Shortly after receiving

t he AFA’s letter, Republican Alf onse

D’Amato ripped up an exhibition catalog

featur ing Piss Christ on the floor of the

Senate. In cheering on D’Amato’s gesture,

Helms announced, “The Senator from New

York is absolutely correct in his indigna-

tion. . . . I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano

and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk.” 12 If the worst

accusation Helms could muster against Serrano was that of being a jerk instead of

an artist, the senator and his colleagues would Ž nd a rather more graphic set of

charges to level against Mapplethorpe a few months later.

Building on the momentum of the Piss Christ controversy, religious groups

and Republican politicians proceeded to target The Perfect Moment , a full-scale

retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s work scheduled to open at the Corcoran Gallery

of Art in Washington, D.C., in July 1989. As attention moved from a single image

by Serrano to Mapplethorpe’s entire career, the rhetoric of attack shifted from

charges of religious desecration to those of homosexual degeneracy. 13

11. The American Family Association, formerly known as the National Federation for Decency, is a

multimillion-dollar organization based in Tupelo, Mississippi, which organizes public boycotts and

censorship campaigns through mass mailings, newsletters, and government lobbying. On the AFA, see

Bruce Selcraig, “Reverend Wildmon’s War on the Arts,” New York Times Magazine , September 2, 1990,

pp. 22–25, 43, 52–53.

12. Senator Helms, Congressional Record , May 18, 1989, p. S5595.

13. In early June of 1989, Representative Dick Armey (Republican of Texas), collected the signatures

of 107 House members for a letter protesting the NEA’s funding of The Perfect Moment , which, according

to the letter, contained “nude photographs of children, homoerotic shots of men and a sadomasochistic

self-portrait of the artist, and other morally repugnant materials of a sexual nature.” Dick Armey, cited

in “People: Art, Trash, and Funding,” International Herald Tribune , June 15, 1989, p. 20.

Andres Serrano. Piss Christ. 1987.

Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery.

The Perfect

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