_files/logo.gif){kind=logo} |
|
| Vol 13 No. 50,
Aug 26 - Sep 1 2004 | |
_files/spacer.gif){kind=spacer} |
-ART-
| FIGHT
ALL POWER Vital 5's Agit Proper by Nate Lippens
101 Ways to Remove a President from
Office Center on Contemporary Art
"Most political art is bad art and worse politics. Art is both too
sensitive and too ponderous for the rough and agile ends of civic
controversy," Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker on the
occasion of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977. That statement
treats art like a dreamy dowager aunt with a heart murmur. Art is made of
much tougher and more tensile matter and mind. When political art hits its
target, it can economically express the free-floating rage and anxiety of
the zeitgeist, giving dimension and scale to outsize world events. Look at
the Weimar-era painters Max Beckman, Otto Dix, and George Grosz. Look at
Philip Guston's fantastically creepy 1975 painting of Nixon and his
phlebitis-swollen leg.
The sprawling group show 101 Ways to Remove a President from
Office, which was organized at CoCA by Vital 5's Greg Lundgren,
demonstrates how tricky political art can be--political motivation doesn't
necessarily inspire interesting art. The show is mixed, and much of it
gets lost in a morass of good intentions, righteous anger, and curdled
satire whose message is at the expense of its medium.
One of Vital 5's mediums has always been energy, a sense of performance
and hype, especially at its opening-night parties. Before this show opened
there were rumors of an FBI visit to CoCA, and a sense of anticipation
permeated the party, which was raucous and packed. Not even the painfully
awkward interactive performance art and fake pickpockets working the crowd
(and then disposing of the "stolen" dollar bills in a jar filled with
muriatic acid) could dampen the mood. The art, mostly one-note screeds
against Bush, felt secondary.
On visiting the show again recently it felt like the aftermath of a
political convention: With the pomp gone, there isn't much left in the way
of substance. Conformity reigns. Vital 5's shows are known to be
democratic to the point of dispersion--it's part of the thrill--and in
this case, the show, unintentionally, is a fitting metaphor for the
American democratic process.
There are some witty takes on the show's theme. Jack Daws' Serf's
Up is a photograph of a scale model of the White House made with sand
from Florida. Zac Corum's King of Pop--Dethrone Thyself is a
portrait, made of acrylic and album covers, depicting the infamous moment
when Michael Jackson dangled his son over a balcony's edge. Curtis
Taylor's Good-bye, Good Luck is a cake topped with 2,000
firecrackers and candles in the shape of "43," and nearby there's a box of
matches that say Florida Match Co. Leiv Fagereng's Sneeker Pimp,
with jets flying over a NASCAR track, and Nicole Grant's Bible Bomb for
Gloria Feldt, made of 21 bibles stacked on a pedestal, both get at the
unsettling heart of this country's cultural struggle.
Caricatures of Bush are everywhere. They are meant to be sensational
but instead they made me long for Robbie Conal's poster portraits with
their thanatology and rot--the decompositions in the compositions. Jason
Puccinelli's Yankee Spirit is the largest and most aggressive of
the nearly dozen works depicting Bush; it's a boardwalk cutout of two
clowns shitting and jerking off on a bound-and-gagged Bush, with holes cut
out where the clowns' faces should be. (People were photographed with
their heads through it at the opening.) Tomiko Jones' fake Time
magazine cover features Bush being fucked by a dog, with one headline
reading "Shock and Awe."
I'm neither shocked nor awed by most of this work. Amused? Sure.
Momentarily cheered? Definitely. There is power in fighting the power, and
satisfaction in defiling the president. But there also needs to be more
than the obvious. This work seems mostly uniform, drained of the ingenuity
that these artists usually display. Schjeldahl, in his Richter essay, went
on to say that art which intends to sound an alarm "proves its integrity
by becoming a relic when its occasion passes." May we be so lucky come
November.
|
NICOLE GRANT Higher Power.
|