KF: I think that there were a lot of fantasies projected onto artists during the culture wars in the 1980s or ’90s. People would come up with really extraordinary ideas about what the artwork was, or what artists’ lives were like. But I think that that’s always true with artists; there’s this idea that artists are these uncontrollable beings, that they live in this world that is really out of control. That was very painful: having the story about your life, your sexuality, and your body being exposed in a certain way that wasn’t true. We’re seeing some of the same strategies going on now, with things like Marjorie Taylor Greene attacking the drag queen Lil Miss Hot Mess.
TRR: Ron, I read that there was even one pundit who complained about how buckets of AIDS-tainted blood were spewed at the audience in your performance Four Screens in a Harsh Life [1994]. That never happened; as you point out, the performer Divinity Fudge, whose blood was used, wasn’t even HIV-positive. So it seems there has always been this sensationalizing and perhaps even deliberate misreading or mischaracterization of the work to further a conservative agenda.
RON ATHEY: Absolutely.
TRR: At the same time, I take Helen’s point that it’s gone into a kind of hyperdrive, such that now the Right is occupied with ideas like Democrats running pedophilic rings out of pizza parlor basements. There is this constant projection from bad-faith actors, who find the truth irrelevant to their desires to rhetorically position the work that artists are doing—and even reality itself. As artists and writers who specialize in shaping narratives and giving form to different realities, what can we do in this moment?
HM: I think one of the aspects of the culture wars that Andres and Ron and Karen were so involved in was that the mainstream museums and newspapers, and cultural criticism of the moment, did so little to stand up for and protect the artists. I’m sure you three had your people, but there wasn’t a full-throated defense of the work, explicating and situating it in a context, so that it could make sense to an audience outside of downtown New York when it got put on a national stage.
One of the things I noted in the attack of the Trump administration on universities is the degree to which Columbia just gave up right away: Why didn’t the universities band together? Why didn’t universities and museums come together and use their expertise in defense of the work under attack from 1989 to 1994? I think we are in the middle of repeating that fundamental error. I’m not calling for Instagram statements of allyship and solidarity; I’m calling for robust conversations at the highest levels about supporting the work of the people that we know will be attacked and hurt in this period. And we should be out ahead of it already.