Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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Field Work: First Amendment, the Musical

As if running for U.S. Senate and being a college professor weren't enough, OCH board member John Frohnmayer is also writing and developing a musical. Frohnmayer received a 2007 Literary Arts Fellowship for his new project, Spin, which details his tumultuous tenure as chair of the National Endowment for the Arts under President George H. W. Bush.

Frohnmayer was appointed to the NEA in 1989, in the midst of a brutal public controversy about the works of artists Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. In 1990 Congress imposed severe restrictions on NEA grants, including the so-called Helms language (named for Republican Senator Jesse Helms), which prohibited funding projects that could be considered "obscene" and which did not have "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

At first, Frohnmayer was reticent to share his views about how artists' First Amendment rights would be impinged on by the Helms Amendment, but ultimately he courted a lawsuit by inserting the language in NEA grant documents. Eventually, several artists brought suit against the NEA for turning down their grant proposals based on the Helms language. As the cases worked their way through the courts, the language was twice struck down as unconstitutional, but in 1998, the Supreme Court upheld a watered-down version of the Helms language that required projects to meet "general standards of decency" in order to qualify for NEA funding. This ruling eventually led Frohnmayer's successor, Jane Alexander, to eliminate the NEA regranting program for visual artists. In recalling his years with the NEA, Frohnmayer, who was forced to resign in 1992, says that he was "just not conservative enough for the conservatives and not liberal enough for the liberals."

Frohnmayer, who collaborated with Turkish-born jazz composer Sila Shaman to develop the music and lyrics for Spin, says the musical will focus on "the conflict between art, politics, and religion, and nobody gets off easy." It will feature, he says, "senators, religious zealots, and performance artists exploring totally non-controversial subjects such as sexual orientation, public funding, free expression, and church-state separation." Spin will premier at Oregon State University's Withycombe Theatre in early May, starring David Ogden Stiers of M*A*S*H fame.

Frohnmayer is the author of Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior, about his experiences as NEA chair, and Out of Tune: Listening to the First Amendment, a textbook on First Amendment freedoms. An affiliate professor at OSU, Frohnmayer lives in Corvallis. He is currently running as an independent for the U.S. Senate seat held by Gordon Smith.

--Sarah Van Winkle

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities