New Art Features Rudy, Nazis

An upcoming art exhibit portrays New York City Mayor and probable Republican Senate candidate Rudolph Giuliani in the company of Nazis.

Sanitation, by German-born artist Hans Haacke, is to be displayed as part of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition of new American art. The exhibit opens March 23.

The installation piece is planned around a wall lined with a row of eight to 12 garbage cans, each with a speaker playing the sound of jackboots marching. A reproduction of the First Amendment is to be included, along with six quotations—three from the mayor—written in the Gothic "Fraktur" typescript used by Hitler.

The other quotations are from three outspoken opponents of the National Endowment for the Arts: Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., religious broadcaster Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, the conservative candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination.

The work was commissioned by the Whitney, which did not know ahead of time exactly what Haacke would produce.

Whitney Director Maxwell Anderson said that the museum had decided it would back the artist and that Giuliani was being notified of the work as a courtesy.

The quotations from the mayor refer to his opposition to Sensation, an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last year.

Giuliani and other Roman Catholics objected in particular to one painting in the Sensation exhibit, the Holy Virgin Mary by Nigerian-born British artist Chris Ofili, which was marked with a lump of elephant dung and cut-outs from pornographic magazines.

The mayor, who described Ofili's works as "sick beyond words," withdrew funding from the museum and moved to evict it.

A federal judge later ordered the city to restore the museum's public funding.

At a news conference today, Giuliani said the planned Whitney exhibit had little in common with Sensation because the Brooklyn Museum uses city funds while the Whitney is almost entirely privately funded.

"There's a big, big difference," Giuliani, who is expected to oppose First Lady Hillary Clinton in the race for U.S. Senate, said. "They have a right to do that but they've got to use their own money."

However, Giuliani added that as a private citizen, he believed that "when people misuse descriptions like that in essence they do a grave injustice to the Holocaust and one of the worst chapters in world history."