A Reminder of the Fragility of Freedom and Human Dignity

Amid the current political attacks on the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy Center and higher education, I’m having flashbacks and a sense of déjà vu about how easily culture and history are targeted.

In 1989, conservative nationalist Senator Jesse Helms—a North Carolina Republican who opposed feminism, gay rights, civil rights, disability rights and affirmative action—railed against the arts and led a campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts. Helms and his supporters sought to ban federal funding for art deemed obscene, indecent and offensive to religion, race and heteronormative sexuality in response to work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, the NEA Four (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes), and others. The move sparked a national debate about freedom of speech and expression, censorship, and obscenity and community values.

In the early 1990s, I joined the ranks of artists targeted by the religious right when I exhibited a series of assemblages called Post-Catholic Relics at Ohio University–Lancaster. The works focused on my experience, as a woman grappling with agency and identity, in the Roman Catholic Church. They were confrontational and provocative—a self-portrait eating an apple on the cover of a Bible, a piece comparing Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa to masturbation and another enshrining contraceptives as holy relics, among others. They sought to consider and try to reconcile the Catholic Church’s treatment of women, specifically myself and the women in my family. “Why were the roles of women limited to virgin, saint or whore?” I wondered.

During the exhibition, members of the community protested, and an angry public forum ensued, attended by 400 people. My life was threatened, and newspapers published op-eds, letters to the editors, editorial cartoons and full-page ads about the works and gallery. The police investigated the exhibition to determine if I had broken the law and violated community standards. Ultimately, an official letter declared that I had not; I still have that letter. I hold it as a reminder of the fragility of freedom and how individual experience can be diminished, attacked and erased. Although some things have changed since then, the Helms era seems like a harbinger of destructive actions to come for artists, historians and museums exploring the truths of identity and discrimination.

Recently, I’ve also been reflecting on my years teaching and directing galleries and art museums at colleges and universities. One course I often taught was art appreciation. A component of the class included an investigation of propaganda and censorship in the arts as a means of dehumanizing groups of people to demean, dismiss and discriminate (stereotyping and derisive nicknames), justify war and crimes against humanity (detain, torture and murder), and keep dictators in power by destroying independent thought (book burning and declaring official state-sanctioned ideologies).

Students learned about the tyranny of Hitler and Nazi Germany—the calls to destroy “degenerate art” (modern, abstract, avant-garde forms by artists including Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, et al.), the production of propaganda films like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), stealing and looting of art from private collectors and museums, the creation of monuments to fascism, and the proliferation of Eurocentric scientific racism (e.g., the Aryan race).

In class, we also watched and discussed the 1946 newsreel Lest We Forget, which graphically depicts what U.S. soldiers discovered at concentration camps immediately after the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany. The color film was shot by cameramen-soldiers from the U.S. Air Force Motion Picture Unit, Captain Ellis Carter (Paramount Studios) and Lieutenant William Graf (Warner Brothers Studio). The footage was produced, edited and narrated by Captain Norman Krasna (Warner Brothers Studios), who also served in the unit and was an Academy Award–winning screenwriter with credits such as Princess O’Rourke and White Christmas.

I strongly encourage you to watch Lest We Forget, though be forewarned: It is profoundly disturbing. It unflinchingly documents the horrors of the Nazi regime—human beings so malnourished their skin hung on protruding bones, filth and disease so visible one swears it can be smelled across time and space. Humans were hung by hooks, bashed in the head and incinerated in ovens. Some of the dead were left rotting, their bodies heaped in piles. Krasna recounts, “It was a huge circus; they made games of killing. By digging a pit and burying a man to his head and then throwing rocks at the head until it disappeared. Or rolling a man in a spiked barrel down a hill.”

Lest We Forget implores us to remember what can happen when leaders tell us some human beings are unworthy and their experiences unimportant, who gaslight the people with propaganda and lies, who use power and the country’s wealth to repress citizens’ agency and fill their own coffers. It should haunt us, and we should fight against what we are experiencing in the U.S. today, because we are destined to repeat a history lest we forget.