Agitprop

By Steven Menashi
The New York Sun
July 22, 2004

The diehards at MoveOn.org don't want Fox News Channel calling itself "fair and balanced," so they've filed a false-advertising complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. That's fine, but shouldn't we also register New York's art galleries with the Federal Election Commission? Galleries from Chelsea to Madison Avenue are stuffed with anti-Bush exhibits. As long as we're being such sticklers about the law, perhaps we should call this artwork what it really is: political advertising.

Chelsea's White Box gallery is running an exhibition called "Six Feet Under: Make Nice." The idea is to have artists respond to those advertisements about the Republican National Convention where Mayor Koch says, "The Republicans are coming. Make nice." The suggestion "that New Yorkers or anyone visiting New York this summer should not voice their opinion against the Republicans nor harass them at their National Convention is paradoxically the prime motivation for White Box to invite curators and artists to add their voices," according to a press release from the gallery. Every week, a new work goes on display at White Box's street-level window. Last week, pedestrians on West 26th Street could see a dead elephant, fashioned out of polymer clay by artist Tim Hawkinson, that appeared to have been flattened by a steamroller. Not exactly a masterwork, but the political message is clear enough.

Just across the street, John Connelly Presents is hosting "Boys Gone Wild," an exhibition of collaborative works by Scott Hug and Michael Magnan. The gallery has been transformed into "a Syrian Desert High School gymnasium," as the press release describes it, which means that the floor is covered with sand and the walls filled with cartoons. When I visited the show, I was lucky enough to overhear the artists expounding on their work to a group of art students. Mr. Hug pointed to the west wall, on which was emblazoned the giant seal of Cobra, the outlaw army from the "G.I. Joe" television series. In "G.I. Joe," Mr. Hug explained, Cobra was the villain. "Now our army is basically Cobra," he said before launching into a theory about "corporate government."

The press release promised that the show would tackle "Extreme Capitalism's quest for global domination," which was apparently addressed by the artists' digital image of military tanks rolling by a McDonald's franchise. Another collage, entitled "Home is Where the War is," puts a picture of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who had formerly been a soldier, in a military recruitment poster that reads, "Sign Me Up." Mr. Hug was clear that he means for his show to change minds about the war in Iraq. "Especially now with what's going on in the world, I feel it's important for artists to address those issues," he said. "The revolution is within the message."

At the Derek Eller Gallery on West 25th Street, art lovers can explore these issues further with Dominic McGill's "Project for a New American Century," a winding 65-foot mural hung from the ceiling. The work is Mr. McGill's timeline of world history from Hiroshima to the present, consisting mostly of notable names, places, and famous quotations ("The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of fascism"). There are drawings interspersed with the text. The Pentagon, for example, appears with a large brain at its center, from which various evils emanate.

Toward the end of the tapestry one sees a forest of dead trees. On the first tree is carved "None Dare Call It Treason." The rest list the names of various Bush administration officials, conservative think tanks, and corporations. One lists "Preemptive Defense," "Infinite Justice," and "American Enterprise Institute." The mural proceeds through "Richard Perle," "Ahmad Chalabi," "John Negroponte," "Elliott Abrams," "Carlisle Group," "Cheney," and "Halliburton" before it culminates in an apocalypse of nuclear fire. I asked Gary Schmitt, the executive director of the Project for the New American Century — the Washington think tank from which Mr. McGill's fevered vision takes its name — how he felt about inspiring such a work. "In bizzaro world, it's flattering. Frankly, I was hoping for something of a 'School of Athens' motif," he said, referring to Raphael's painting of the classical philosophers.

A similar apocalyptic fantasy is on display at "Terrorvision," a group show at Exit Art on 10th Avenue. There a video exhibition called "Scenes From an Endless War" includes slow-motion footage of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Richard Cheney set to portentous background music. Interviewees also appear on film to explain that the war on terrorism is really meant to "make the world safe for capitalism."

This is a pervasive idea, it turns out. Another work, "Cuban Long Filter" by Barbara Broughel, depicts miniature Russian missiles dressed up like Cuban cigars in a box. Ms. Broughel chose to focus on the Cuban missile crisis, she writes in an artist statement that accompanies the piece, because it "seems to have provided both a model and a fertile (if unconscious) psychological groundwork for the Bush administration to use in its selling of its war with Iraq."

The artist statement elaborates, "Elements throughout the piece make reference to America's foreign policy and defense strategies of embargo, containment and invasion, which are laid out as punishment for a small country bold enough to defy America's corporate economic interests. Again, these policies function as a metaphor for the current situation in Iraq, inviting other parallels to be made between the two situations: the use of WMDs by the Bush administration to scare the American population, the demonization of both Castro and Saddam (whether the parallels are appropriate or not) and the use of embargo, containment and finally invasion as a means to make the world a safer place (for America to do business)."

One artist, Francisca Benitez, explains her work by writing, "September 11 brought upon America a schizophrenic sense of both exceptional power and exceptional vulnerability. How to deal with both? The Bush answer is 'Homeland Security' coupled with the rather dubious doctrine of 'preemptive self-defense' to neutralize any country, anyone or anything that poses a 'threat.'" Elsewhere, a painting of a boxcutter addresses what the artist calls "social paranoia issues attributed to terrorism."

Another brief against the war on terrorism is a stethoscope nailed to a wall in the corner of the gallery. "The intention of this piece is to transform the wall into an imaginary body, a hidden body that needs to be closely examined via the stethoscope," reads the accompanying statement. "This body is the body of the unknown, the terrorist, a body that is hurt but that is nevertheless trying to convey a message."

At the Roth Horowitz gallery on the Upper East Side, a show called "Power, Corruption, and Lies" makes more direct statements. One artist took a picture of Henry Kissinger talking on the radio and inserted a text bubble that reads, "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." A comic strip by David Rees has cartoon characters simply reciting the artist's commentary on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with barbs directed at Ahmad Chalabi or President Bush. "How psyched is George W. Bush to defeat Saddam Hussein for his dad?" one character asks. Across the hall, there's a portrait of a grinning Mr. Bush that apparently inspires fear within the New York art world, but that would appear rather innocuous to the average Republican.

That's the problem with all this political art. It assumes that everyone comes to the work with the same perspective. The artist presupposes that his viewers all share the same opinions, and he makes no attempt to engage observers with different views. It's a failure of imagination, and that makes it a failure as art.

A flattened-out elephant isn't going to change anyone's mind about politics or anything else. The artwork doesn't voice dissent. It expresses collective rage. It debases rather than elevates the public discourse. Much of the political art on display is really agitprop: aimed to rally those who already agree.

The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibits corporations, including non-profits, from expressly advocating the election or defeat of any candidate, a test that's met when "Reasonable minds could not differ as to whether it encourages actions to elect or defeat one or more clearly identified candidate(s)," according to federal regulations. That some of New York's art actually meets this definition only serves to highlight how silly our campaign finance laws can be. And how uninspired much of our art already is.