See it for yourself: Seattle art venues show controversial Wojnarowicz video

Film the world frankly, and what you get won't always be pretty. See that world through the lens of a brutal childhood and a horrific wasting disease like AIDS, and it's bound to make for some unsettling sights.

That's the case with David Wojnarowicz's vital, visceral video, "A Fire in My Belly," now at the center of a national controversy after its removal from an exhibit of gay-and-lesbian-related art at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." The piece was removed, the Smithsonian said, due to "strong response from the public" who "interpreted the video imagery as anti-Christian."

In his Dec. 12 New York Times column, Frank Rich pointed out that the piece elicited no protest during its first month on display. The controversy, Rich wrote, was "a completely manufactured piece of theater," orchestrated by William Donohue of the Catholic League. The Smithsonian, deluged by unfavorable calls and e-mails, withdrew "Fire" from the show, while maintaining they hadn't "caved into conservative critics."

In Seattle, Tacoma and Bellevue, the response of local art museums and galleries has been to protest against the protesters. In a statement issued Dec. 14, the directors of the Seattle Art Museum, Henry Art Gallery and other prominent art institutions took issue with "unwarranted and uninformed censorship from politicians and other public figures, many of whom, by their own admission, have seen neither the exhibition as a whole or this specific work."

Local arts leaders' other response has been: Havealookforyourself.The Henry Art Gallery and Greg Kucera Gallery are showing three versions of "A Fire in My Belly," including the 4-minute Smithsonian edit, along with other less-controversial works by Wojnarowicz. SAM will put all three versions of the video on display starting Tuesday. And on Jan. 9 at the Henry, SAM director Derrick Cartwright and other arts leaders will partake in a public discussion about Wojnarowicz and his work.

I visited Greg Kucera last week to see "Fire" in its several forms and came away with a better idea of the video's content and genesis.

Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) came from a violent family background and wound up as a New York street hustler by age 16, if not earlier (accounts vary). As a boy, he attended a Roman Catholic grade school, so Catholic iconography naturally figured prominently in his artwork. He also traveled extensively, and it was on a trip to Mexico that he gathered — on Super-8 film — the raw material for "Fire."

Mexican Day of the Dead festivities inevitably caught his eye, and in the 13-minute version of "Fire," a makeshift shrine — a candy skull, a burning candle, paper money and coins — is filmed on a gravel backdrop swarming with ants. A crucifix, with a bleeding Christ on it, appears against the same backdrop and is also beset by busy ants.

Apparently, the ants are the source of the controversy, because while the 7- minute and 13-minute edits of "Fire" include some sexually explicit content, the 4-minute Smithsonian edit trims Wojnarowicz's surreal collage to make it merely R-rated (it contains brief male nudity). The effect of seeing all three versions of "Fire" side by side is to lure you into a troubled and incredibly restless mind seizing on the rawer aspects of an unfamiliar culture as a way to come to grips with an extreme personal predicament.

Day of the Dead shrines aren't the half of it. Every clip is about a fight of some kind: bullfighting, cockfighting, street entertainers (fire breathers) and beggars (amputees) fighting for existence. There's a virtual open call here for any image of struggle, suffering and decay, and that's where Wojnarowicz's Boschian vision of ants racing over a crucifix fits in. He found it, there it was — and there it belonged.

It would be a stretch to call "A Fire in My Belly" a disciplined masterpiece. But it is an intense reaction to Mexican culture's counter-intuitively rambunctious rebuttal to death. Wojnarowicz, HIV-positive at a time when there were few treatment options for AIDS, clearly latched onto it as a way of facing his doom and his demons head-on.

His effort to make artistic sense of his plight deserves to be seen.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com