SUIT * * COUNTERSUIT

Two dildos and a phallic image will be hauled as evidence before a Middlesex district court Monday.

The items are taken from a recent Cambridge art exhibit that has provoked a bitter debate about free speech and artistic license in both the Cambridge city council and the local arts community over the last month.

In the latest episode of this expanding controversy, City Councillor William H. Walsh today will file a criminal complaint against a Cambridge artist, charging him with public dissemination of obscene and pornographic materials through his art show.

The misdemeanor charge is a cross-complaint in response to an earlier charge filed on October 18 by the artist, Hans Evers, who accused Walsh of malicious destruction of personal property.

Both complaints will be heard November 7 by the clerk magistrate in the Third District Court of Eastern Middlesex who will decide whether to press criminal charges, according to James J. Rafferty, Walsh's attorney.

According to chapter 272, section 29 of the Massachusetts General Laws, the maximum penalty for knowingly spreading obscene matter is five years imprisonment or a fine of up to $10,000.

The legal brouhaha began on October 5 when Walsh removed three items from "Identidem," Evers' solo art show at Gallery 57--a public art space in the City Hall Annex on Inman Street.

Generating a storm of controversy, Walsh brought the items--which included two dildos--to City Manager Robert W. Healy's office. But Healy returned them to the Cambridge Arts Council, which operates the gallery, and the items were subsequently reinstalled.

While the show closed on Friday, the criminal complaints have opened a Pandora's Box of bitter accusations and invective.

The battle has pitted the local art community's defense of Evers' freedom of speech and artistic integrity, against the charges of city employees and councillors, who say the exhibition is simply pornography and possibly sexual harassment.

The exhibition proved so explosive that Pallas C. Lombardi, acting director of the arts council, placed panels around the exhibition, guarding it from the view of passers-by.

It was the first time in the history of Gallery 57 that barriers had to be placed around a show.

'$25 Worth of Plastic'

At the center of the controversy is Bill Walsh.

Two days after the Evers' October 3 opening, Walsh removed two dildos and a phallic image imprinted on a wooden box from the show, according to his attorney, James J. Rafferty.

"It wasn't art, it was pure obscenity," Walsh said yesterday, defending his actions. "These objects were purchased by [Evers]. They were not sculpted or crafted by him."

"You usually see a theme or purpose in an artwork," the councillor added. "Not one person could give any theme or purpose that made any sense to me."

Walsh, who was convicted in April on 41 counts of bank fraud and conspiracy, awaits sentencing next Wednesday. The councillor has clung to his city council seat, despite other councillors' calls for his resignation.

Walsh said the exhibition had a sensationalizing effect, showing sexually explicit work just for show. "This was 'How far can you go?'" he asked. "That's all it was."

Walsh has refuted the attacks of arts activists who have complained that his actions reflected censorship and a violation of Evers' constitutional rights.

"Where does the First Amendment stop?" he asked. "If you walk nude in the street, you're going to get arrested. You can't even display these objects in a store."

Rafferty blamed the arts council for not exercising more supervision over its shows.

"The arts council all but concedes now they had an error in judgment in failing to predict the offense this would generate," said the lawyer, a former Cambridge school committee member who is representing Walsh pro bono.

He said the arts council is out of touch with public dissatisfaction over the exhibition.

"I find it absurd that they're that out of touch with the public," Rafferty continued. "For them to totally ignore the objections demonstrates an amazing ignorance of what their public function is."

Vice Mayor Sheila T. Russell agreed yesterday that the exhibit constituted artistic recklessness and sexual harassment on the part of the artist.

Russell added that Gallery 57 artists need to be accountable to the city employees who work in the Annex.

"The women down at City Hall Annex felt as though they were victims of sexual harassment," Russell said. "They felt they were being ignored."

"I think there's a boundary between what's art and what's junk," she continued. "Twenty-five dollars worth of plastic is junk. That whole exhibit was a fraud."

Russell insisted that the artist was insensitive to both city workers and the public. "If they're going to put up something controversial, they should think of the taxpayers."

Russell and Walsh were so enraged about the contents of the exhibition that they sponsored two city ordinances affecting Evers' show and future gallery exhibits.

In an October 17 ordinance, Walsh proposed that Healy advise the city council on how to include Cantabrigians on the arts juries that select Arts Council shows.

Future art panels should include "representation from the neighborhoods in the city and a representative of the clergy," Walsh's proposal suggested.

The second ordinance, authored by Russell and co-sponsored by Walsh, called for a public hearing "to explain how an exhibit such as the aforementioned one comes to be chosen to be displayed in city owned property."

The ordinance also proposed the cancellation of all future exhibits at Gallery 57 until that hearing is held.

But at last week's city council meeting, the councillors passed an amended version of the ordinance which strikes out discussion of using taxpayer money to fund shows from the hearing. Russell also removed the clause barring further exhibitions in Gallery 57.

The hearing on Gallery 57 has not yet been scheduled, Russell said yesterday.

'Art Is Not Propaganda'

At the opposite end of the debate is the local art community, whose members say a growing movement to restrict artistic expression is at hand.

"The work asks questions and raises issues," said Julie T. Garfield, an assistant to Barbara Krakow, one of three jurors who chose Evers' work.

"People can take these questions on their own and think about them without the government making that decision for them," she said.

In an impassioned letter to the city council, Robert B. Chatelle, political-issues chair of the New York-based National Writers Union (NWU), implored the city council to leave its hands off the show.

"The City of Cambridge is under no obligation to support the arts," Chatelle wrote. "But having chosen to do so, you cannot now impose content restrictions upon the Arts Council. You are, in fact, prohibited from so doing by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."

Chatelle yesterday blamed Walsh for starting the controversy and supported Evers' criminal complaint against the councillor.

"Bill Walsh vandalized his piece," Chatelle said. "If I were to walk into the Museum of Fine Arts, vandalize a painting on the walls, I think a complaint would be leveled against me."

Chapter 266, section 127 of the Massachusetts General Laws states the maximum penalty for destruction or injury of personal property is up to ten years in state prison or a fine.

"The controversy was caused by the rash actions of one city councillor who appointed himself chief of the morality police and who took it upon himself to break the law and vandalize Mr. Evers' property," Chatelle wrote in his letter.

Yesterday, Chatelle defended the artist's freedom of expression. "How Mr. Evers expresses himself is Hans' business and responsibility. You don't tell an artist how he or she should express himself. That's what art is. Art is not propaganda," he said.

Evers, the Holland-born artist who has lived in Cambridge for the last six years, is in the Netherlands this week and could not be reached for comment.

James E. D'Entremont, spokesperson for the Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression (BCFE), also defended the artist's message yesterday.

"The pieces that were exhibited, only three of which included phalluses, are about masculinity and identity," D'Entremont said.

Like Chatelle, he blamed Walsh for starting the hubbub. "I find it highly suspect that a councillor awaiting a trial on 41 counts suddenly finds it upon himself to be the guardian of public morals on the eve of his sentencing," he said.

D'Entremont further denied the charges that "Identidem" constituted sexual harassment.

"The slightest bit of sexual imagery opens up the artist to charges of sexual harassment," he said. "This was not intended by those who developed the legal theory of sexual harassment."

D'Entremont sees the "Identidem" affair as a reflection of a nation-wide silencing of artists' voices.

"It is a national trend and it's been getting worse for five years now," he said. "Part of it is a general fear of the unknown and of sexuality."

The Process

At stake in the arts affair is the arts council's peer-review process. The arts council invites members of the art community--curators, artists, art historians and art educators--to serve on its annual juries.

The arts council annually selects a three-person jury to choose eight artists who can display their works in Gallery 57 for one month each, according to Lombardi.

This year's Gallery 57 jury included James B. Cuno, director of the Harvard University Art Museums; Doris Chu, president of the Chinese Cultural Institute in Boston and Krakow, owner of the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston.

One point of contention among the participants in the "Identidem" struggle is whether the jurors knew what they were getting into.

Chu, an art historian with a doctorate in Chinese painting, said yesterday she had not known that Evers' pieces contained sexually explicit material when she voted on his work.

Chu did not see the exhibition. But she said the content of the shows does not always reflect the slides the jury sees in order to make their selections.

"We saw 15 to 20 slides from each artist, but then the gallery selected art works from the artists' studio, not from the slides that we saw," Chu added.

Chu said she would not have chosen the works if she had been aware of their explicit content.

"To be very frank, I wouldn't have chosen him if I saw slides showing sexually explicit things," she said. "I have looked at enough art works through history, and great art does not have to be sexually explicit."

But Lombardi gave a different account of the jury process.

"They saw the work of 65 to 70 artists," Lombardi said of the jurors. "[Chu] saw 700 to 1,000 slides. It's no wonder in one day that she doesn't remember. It's not the kind of contemporary art that she deals with, anyway."

"These people know what they're looking at and what to expect from an artist they select for exhibitions," she said.

Garfield said Krakow was aware of the sexual content of the artworks and approved them with full knowledge.

"[Evers'] work is about his gender and his place in society," Garfield said. "It is not meant in any way as a combative and insulting view towards people."

Cuno was in New York yesterday and could not be reached.

As for the upcoming city council hearing, neither Walsh nor Russell would comment on the changes they hope the city council will install in the jury process.

But D'Entremont and Lombardi hope the format will remain.

"The peer-panel process should be respected," D'Entremont said.

"I don't think the controversy reflects on the process," Lombardi said. "It's fair and democratic."

Court Appearances

On Monday, the clerk magistrate will decide whether to press criminal charges against Walsh, Evers, or neither.

At the hearing Evers will have to prove the intrinsic value of his pieces, and the damage to their value caused by Walsh. The councillor will try to show the arts council was negligent in its decision, and that Evers spread material he knew was obscene.

Meanwhile, Rafferty said he has subpeonsed the dildos and "other relevant items" from Evers.

The new exhibition in Gallery 57 features far less questionable water-colors by Michael Compton, a Cambridge resident.

"I'm wondering if all the people who came to see the last show will see this one," Lombardi said.

Back in September the city council declared October to be "Arts and Humanities Month" in Cambridge.

In light of the Gallery 57 affair, it apparently was.