David Wojnarowicz, AFA Wildmon materials

Terry Gross: David Wojnarowicz is an artist at the center of the controversy over government funding of the arts.

Narrator: Terry Gross interviewed Wojnarowicz in this interview on June 26, 1990. They discussed his fight against religious conservatives who targeted his work.

Terry Gross: He was represented in last year's group show, Witnesses Against Our Vanishing, Art About AIDS. The exhibition was at Artists Space in New York. The National Endowment for the Arts withdrew its funding from the show, then reinstated it, but with the stipulation that no endowment money be used to fund the catalogue. The reason was the catalogue essay, written by Wojnarowicz, which attacked prominent political and religious figures. Earlier this year, Wojnarowicz had a retrospective exhibition at the Illinois State University galleries in Normal, funded in part by the NEA.

Reverend Donald Wildmon in spearheading the attack against the reauthorization of the NEA. One of his recent mass mailings was headlined: Your tax dollars helped pay for these, quote, works of art. Below are sexually explicit images taken from Wojnarowicz's multimedia works. This week, Wojnarowicz took Wildmon to court for violating his copyright and distorting his work by taking it out of context. The judge issued a temporary injunction against the pamphlet. A full decision is expected in a month. Wojnarowicz described how Wildmon used his art.

David Wojnarowicz: What he did was, he excised from the images, small fragments that dealt with sexual activity or depicted sexual activity that were in a political and artistic context, stripped the context from around the image and then presented that image as the full work, put my name on it. And he did this to fourteen images, three of which were not sexual in nature, and sent them around the country.

What he did was essentially reduce my work by stripping out all the artistic and political context that I place images in, and he basically left the very strong impression that my work consists of solely nothing more than a banal pornography.

Narrator: If you’d like to hear more of the conversation between Gross and Wojnarowicz, please tap to continue.