High & Low: Graham Bader on soft-core

October 7 isn't just the day, in 1990, that the long-awaited exhibition "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" opened at the Museum of Modern Art; it is also the date, one year earlier, that the US Congress finally resolved to keep the really low out of the high, at least where federal funds were concerned. The legislation passed that afternoon in 1989, with the aim of blunting Senator Jesse Helms's attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts by a compromise agreement that prohibited funding of "obscene" art, was--of course--a mess. If the courtroom definition of obscenity excluded work of "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value," then how could anything deemed worthy of NEA funding be targeted by the new ruling? Nearly a year later, on the very same weekend of MOMA's blockbuster opening, this contradiction finally collapsed under its own weight. In Cincinnati, where even Playboy was banned, Contemporary Arts Center director Dennis Barrie was cleared of obscenity charges for showing Robert Mapplethorpe's sexually explicit photographs because, in the words of one juror, "even though we may not have liked the pictures ... we learned that art doesn't have to be pretty." The works in question may have looked like pornography, in other words, but weren't--they were art.

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Pornography certainly wasn't an issue for the organizers of "High & Low," Kirk Varnedoe, in his curatorial debut as the museum's new director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Adam Gopnik, then art critic for the New Yorker. For despite the fact that the porn business, in those early years of the Internet, had its most popular--and profitable--days just ahead of it (and that Jeff Koons, one of the show's contemporary stars, had recently married--and, um, collaborated with--the Italian porn actress Cicciolina), it didn't register so much as a mention in their blueprint for the exhibition. Instead, Varnedoe and Gopnik's search for the low led them to comics and graffiti, advertising and caricature--the four of which, along with the more amorphous "Words" and "Contemporary Reflections," composed their show's half dozen sections. So, Krazy Kat and the Michelin Man, but no Larry Flynt. On the high side, things were even more restricted: "High modern painting and sculpture constitute our primary topic," Varnedoe and Gopnik explained in their catalogue introduction, dismissing in one fell swoop everyone from John Heartfield to Nam June Paik to Cindy Sherman.

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The result of all this, as one critic after another fired off, was an exhibition grounded in both exclusion and arbitrariness, one that failed to ask even the most basic questions of its massive grounding opposition. "A disaster," wrote Roberta Smith in the New York Times (Oct. 5, 1990); "no grace, no air, no beauty, all evidence and didactic panels," said Bill Jones in Arts Magazine (in an article titled "Truth, Justice, and the Comics--or, MOMA to NY: Drop Dead" [Dec. 1990]); "as disappointingly superficial as its logo," opined Steven Heller in ID (Jan./Feb. 1991). (1) As Art Spiegelman sketched it in an artist's project for that December's Artforum, the organization and selection guiding "High & Low" resembled that of Borges's fabled Chinese Encyclopedia, wherein animals are classified as "Belonging to the Emperor," "Embalmed," "Sucking Pigs," "Innumerable," "That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies," etc. By the time the show finally limped into Los Angeles the following August, Richard Smith, in Artweek (Aug. 15, 1991), could only comment that "the exhibition has been hated in countless ways, and there's not much left for a critic to do, perhaps, except to think of a new way to hate it." (2)

Sure, nobody really expected to see porn at MOMA (even if this was, in 1990, perhaps the single most important hinge by which discussions of modern art entered the broader public sphere), but would it have been too much to include some form of television, photography, film, honest-to-God kitsch? (The show, as Jones scathingly wrote, might have been more appropriately titled "High and Medium-High.") Were Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Elizabeth Murray really all Varnedoe and Gopnik could come up with to represent the "high" in the decades since Pop? (The striking limitations of this selection were only exacerbated by Gopnik's arrogant dismissal, in the show's catalogue, of many of the relevant artists excluded.) And what about Andy Warhol showing up on The Love Boat, or El Lissitzky putting abstraction to the service of worker recruitment in postrevolutionary Russia, or Heartfield distributing his photomontages by the hundreds of thousands in the pages of the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung? Or, for that matter, Hitler and Stalin and their dreams of a bureaucratically mandated popular art? Wasn't the tale of "high and low" a lot more complicated than the exhibition was making it?