Visitors to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington will no longer be able to find the David Wojnarowicz video “A Fire in My Belly” there, but they will not have to travel far to see it. Transformer, a Washington-based arts organization, has been playing it in the front window of its gallery on P Street NW, near Logan Circle, and says it will continue to do so on a 24-hour loop until the National Portrait Gallery reinstates it.
The National Portrait Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, took the video out of an exhibition called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” after the Catholic League and members of the House of Representatives said the work was offensive to Christians. Among the imagery that Mr. Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, uses in the video to depict the suffering of an AIDS patient is a scene of ants crawling on a crucifix.
In a telephone interview on Thursday Victoria Reis, the Transformer executive and artistic director, said the criticism of the video and its removal was “turning back the clock to culture wars that I had thought, in this day and age, in 2010, we were well beyond, but obviously we’re not.”
Ms. Reis said the video currently being shown at Transformer is an abbreviated, four-minute version of “A Fire in My Belly” that can be found on YouTube; she said the gallery had received permission from Mr. Wojnarowicz’s estate to show the full 30-minute version of the film and planned to present it shortly.
Ms. Reis said the gallery was also organizing a protest to start at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday in which participants will march from Transformer to the National Portrait Gallery and then to Congress.
The Transformer gallery’s plans were reported in The Washington Post.
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