NEA Chairman Admits Misstep in Controversy : Art: John E. Frohnmayer tells an angry group of artists that he fumbled in handling a key event two years ago. He also warns of new funding threats in Congress.

By ALLAN PARACHINI

Jan. 26, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, facing hostile artists at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday night, conceded he “screwed up” a key episode of the NEA controversy and warned that the arts agency may face new funding threats in Congress.

The remarks by John E. Frohnmayer apparently marked the first time the NEA chairman conceded to an audience that he made any misstep in handling the political crisis the federal arts agency faced for much of the last two years. He made the concession, pertaining to his handling of a grant for an AIDS-related art show at a New York City gallery in late 1989, at an open meeting with 200 mostly angry members of the Southern California arts community at the Ivar Theatre.

The exchange between Frohnmayer and a crowd of artists and arts supporters--including artists who have either rejected NEA money or seen their grants vetoed by Frohnmayer--seemed to some degree cathartic. But it also brought to the foreground funding problems the agency may face later this year as the Gulf War imposes new financial burdens on the government.

The meeting, which was organized by three arts organizations as an opportunity for artists to confront Frohnmayer, was one of three major public appearances by the NEA chairman during a swing through Southern California that ended Friday afternoon.

Acknowledging concerns among arts observers, Frohnmayer predicted that later this year the arts endowment may face an intense financial crisis and increased pressure from conservatives over what the agency should fund.

“We face what I think is a significant danger,” Frohnmayer said of possible efforts by NEA congressional critics to severely cut or even eliminate the arts endowment’s budget for 1992. While the NEA chairman declined to characterize the agency’s situation as any more precarious than other federally funded domestic programs, he conceded that the NEA may be considered vulnerable “because we have been a target over the last year.”

The concession that he had seriously misstepped early in his tenure as NEA chairman came after he was asked to justify his actions in a November, 1989, dispute over a grant to Artists Space, a New York City gallery that proposed to mount a politically provocative show encompassing a variety of AIDS-related themes. The show included powerful artistic work and a catalogue essay by David Wojnarowicz, an artist who suffers from AIDS and has become a key figure in the arts-AIDS activist movement.

In a series of actions that raised many questions among artists about Frohnmayer’s political common sense, the NEA chairman--then in office just 10 days--retracted a grant to the show. He later restored the money after a raging protest that ultimately grew to include rejection of a White House arts medal by the late conductor Leonard Bernstein. Frohnmayer’s defense of his actions was looked on by many in the arts as signaling a willingness to abandon principles of free expression for political expediency.

But Thursday night--in an apparent attempt to rebuild his relationship with the arts community--Frohnmayer seemed to abandon his defensive position.

“I screwed up. I didn’t handle it well, you know?” he said. “I screwed up and made a mistake.”

Among artists attending the often-contentious Ivar gathering Thursday was Rachel Rosenthal, a prominent performance artist who rejected an $11,500 NEA fellowship last summer to protest Frohnmayer’s actions in terminating grants to four other performance artists.

Tim Miller, one of the artists whose grants were vetoed by Frohnmayer, angrily accused the NEA chief of lying about his motivations in vetoing grants. Frohnmayer declined to discuss the situation, citing a pending lawsuit filed by the four performance artists against the NEA.

“We’re not stupid! You’re lying to us!” Miller shouted at Frohnmayer, who said he was unable to recognize his accuser because of the glare of television lights. “You’re lying to us (about the motivations behind a series of controversial grant rejections), just like (President Bush) lies to us (about the war with Iraq).”

Frohnmayer took the punishment for about 90 minutes, earning grudging admiration from some members of the audience. Just after the meeting concluded, several members of the audience chanted at him, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

At a Town Hall luncheon address on Wednesday at the Biltmore Hotel downtown, Frohnmayer told his audience he hoped that the anger of the arts community toward his administration of the NEA might soon begin to dissipate.

To those at both Town Hall and the Ivar, Frohnmayer stressed that the nearly two-year conflict over arts freedom, censorship and the NEA is symptomatic of fundamental, underlying questions that pervade contemporary American society.

“The intolerance that we see is symptomatic of a society that is going through a major reordering,” Frohnmayer told his Town Hall listeners.

To the artists, he issued an even blunter warning: The NEA crisis and conflict over freedom of speech and expression has not ended and there may be intense battles in the not-distant future. Resolving basic questions about tolerance of radical artistic and ideological messages could continue for at least the next five years, Frohnmayer suggested.

While the NEA chairman may have won some points, he clearly did not succeed in winning over his Ivar audience. After the exchange with Miller, Rosenthal renewed her attack. “Listening to you tonight, I hear a lot of hypocrisy. I hear a person whose major thrust is to hold on to his job,” she said.

His eyebrows arching, the NEA chief retorted, “I don’t need the job. At some point, I assume I will go back to private life.” To that, Rosenthal remarked, “Perhaps the sooner, the better.”