Bridging the gap Umberto Crenca’s Frenetic Engineering: censored/uncensored BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

It’s almost funny. Of all the artists to censor, no choice is more ironic than that of Umberto Crenca. Bert is the artistic director of AS220 and a founder of the unjuried art space on Empire Street in Providence. Since 1985 the artist collective’s reason for being, and Crenca’s personal banner to wave, has been that no one should tell artists — visual or performance, self-defined or self-deluded — what their art should look, sound, feel, or smell like. Feedback and self-respect, the idea goes, will weed out the crap.

But that’s not the most remarkable thing about Frenetic Engineering: censored/uncensored, the dual show taking place at the Newport Art Museum through June 20 and across town at Blink Gallery through May 31. Feelings tend to run hot when it comes to matters like what is art and what is the responsibility of a museum.

So the most remarkable thing about this show, apart from it coming into being at all, is that it’s come into being so amiably. Each party involved seems to have taken a deep breath before accommodating the other side.

The typical viewer at the Newport museum and its board of directors, curator Nancy Whipple Grinnell knew, have conservative tastes in art. And Crenca didn’t want his works, burgeoning as they are with creative genitalia, cherry-picked for inoffensiveness. So the compromise was for the museum to show full-sized giclée digital reproductions of the paintings and drawings with blush-inducing appendages pixilated out; Blink Gallery, run by photographer Alexander Nesbitt, would show the unaltered originals.

As Crenca says at the opening of a video by Richard Goulis being shown at the shows, "It’s so much more important to build bridges than to widen gaps. That’s a philosophical thing for me. Every situation that seems awkward or alienating often has an opportunity to actually build bridges as opposed to create more separation."

That was on his mind last year when the offer to do a Newport Art Museum show came up. Crenca was a panelist in a censorship discussion in response to a show by Entang Wiharso at the Rhode Island Foundation Gallery that was cancelled by the artist after the foundation refused to display one of the works, deeming a squatting figure in one painting to be vulgar.

The NAM came into the news a few months ago in another controversy over appropriate artistic expression. A billboard advertising the museum’s annual ball showed mini-skirted women flirting as they passed construction workers. Women were invited to attend the ball "dressed hot enough to turn a hard hat." A part-time instructor at the museum, artist Cynthia Farnell, was fired after she wrote a letter to the editor deeming the billboard sexist and urging people to boycott the fund-raising event. Both the museum and the artist, who also is director of Hera Gallery in Wakefield, were accused of promoting censorship.

At the museum recently to finish hanging the show, Crenca said that his first reaction to Grinnell’s objection was "Why?"

"Just simple: ‘Why? I’m not sure I understand,’" he repeated. " Because I really don’t. I don’t know, maybe I’m naive or something, Bill, but I see this work as fairly humorous and fairly harmless."

Around him were "life-size" depictions of creatures that would send ET, and maybe Steven Spielberg, out of the room waving their arms.

"Then once Nancy started to unravel her reasons, I said, ‘Okay. I understand the politics of this,’ " he continued. "That doesn’t mean to me that I think work should ever be censored, in any museum. I think you could always do a disclaimer at the door."

He added: "What does it do? Does it hurt people? It’s just ideas that we’re afraid of."

Crenca spent 2-1/2 to 3 years creating about 40 of these creatures, and was frustrated that after being offered a show, these new friends he had gotten fond of might have to remain in his studio. "Particularly in two dimensional work, it’s difficult to get people to even look at it for more than five seconds," he lamented.

The artist is 53. While in the early years of AS220 he might have not gotten further than anger or throwing his hands in the air and walking away, he said that being able to put the conflict to good use was rewarding. "So suddenly my work became a vehicle for something bigger than itself, bigger than me. And that’s great."

It cost nearly $14,000, for the reproductions and mounting. Money for the alterations came not from the museum but from a patron and two grants, one from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and $9000 from — in another irony — the Rhode Island Foundation.

According to a Newport Art Museum press release, the censored works were "deemed inappropriate for a museum setting" by curator Grinnell. At one point in the video about the show, she is standing in the Cushing Gallery before a century-old painting of an aristocratic woman in white, the wife of the painter, for whom the regal, marble-rich gallery was named. She gestures over her shoulder to it after saying, "A lot of people who fund museums or who go to museums think art should be something pleasing to look at and soothing and beautiful — like her."

Grinnell’s original professional background is in libraries, with a master’s in library science. After reaching age 50, she decided to change careers and go for a master’s at Brown in museum studies, which she should finish this spring. She has been the curator at Newport Art Museum for five years.

Finding herself between a board and a hard place, Grinnell’s personal offensiveness meter does not stir as readily as those of some museum patrons. Even for this show, the scissors she felt obliged to wield sometimes failed to go snip-snip. She was standing in the museum gallery next to paintings of two colorful creatures, one with a whip-like penis and the other with a meager but enthusiastic erection.

How in the world did these guys slip by? Grinnell was asked.

"They weren’t so in-your-face," she replied.

Across the room, other unpixilated penii had assumed the shapes of pleased-looking serpents.

The museum’s education director, she said, told her she’s certainly not going to bring any children in here.

The museum has hung paintings showing traditional nudity, the curator noted. So the would-you-put-a-fig-leaf-on-Michelangelo’s-David argument doesn’t hold water for her. "We’re not censoring nudity here, is what I’m saying. I think we’re censoring the disturbing, grotesque element of it. I don’t think that a lot of the traditional people that have been our museum members want to see that."

Frenetic Engineering: censored/uncensored

By Umberto Crenca. At the Newport Art Museum through June 20 (censored) and Blink Gallery in Newport through May 31 (uncensored).