Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

E pluribus museum
"Shocked and Awed" at the CMAC; Kerry at Kayafas; "Particpatory Democracy" at Art Interactive
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Shocked and Awed: Drawings from the Al Assail Primary School of Baghdad"
At Cambridge Multicultural Art Center, 41 Second Street, Cambridge, through July 30.
"John Kerry: A Portrait 1969 to the Present"
Photographs by George Butler. At Gallery Kayafas, 450 Harrison Avenue, Suite 223, Boston, through July 31.
"Participatory Democracy"
At Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Central Square, Cambridge, through July 29.


Early in my first stint at Yaddo, the artist colony in Saratoga Springs, a tenured novelist who has since gone on to acclaimed obscurity asked me whether the poetry I wrote was political. I was too young to detect the sarcasm in his voice. "Isn’t everything we do political?", I asked.

Clearly I had missed the point. When academics ask whether a work of art is political, they’re not asking about content. What they mean is, can the poem or painting or song be judged according to the current conventions of good taste? "Political art" can’t be — it’s too new, too topical, it strikes too tender a nerve, for its audience to know whether the effect it creates will be temporary or lasting. All you’ve got to go by is your own reaction, which is why so-called political art is anathema to the academy. It requires no mediator to decide its worth.

The good news is, three exhibits around Boston timed to coincide with the Democratic National Convention (dinner at my house for any delegate who goes to all three) have thrown academic caution to the wind and are presenting works whose content is decidedly political. The most upsetting of the three takes its title from the Pentagon’s coding of the inaugural bombing of Iraq that began on March 17 of last year. Over 19 days, more than 32,000 bombs and missiles struck Baghdad; the campaign was dubbed "Operation Shock and Awe."

In June of 2003, filmmaker Patrick Dillon, whose footage of the devastation of Baghdad had been confiscated by the American military, collected 76 drawings from a Baghdad elementary school, and what the pictures share is a child’s perspective of the carnage being visited on their neighborhoods and homes. A few of the children, mostly 10- and 11-year-olds, show promise as artists, but that’s beside the point. The point is to deliver another view of the devastation of war, and what makes "Shocked and Awed" so effective is the sharp difference between the naïveté of the kids’ technique and the murderous cynicism that accounts for their experience, the simple directness of their emotional appeals and the hints of the high-tech barbarism to which they’ve been subjected.

The show also serves another purpose, the same one that in part accounts for the importance and popularity of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11: it’s informative. In the context of the pervasive censorship of images and information coming from the war, any alternative interpretation fulfills a deep need — and not just on the part of the viewer. You sense at once the need these drawings fulfilled for their makers. The order they impose, the silence they embody, the clarity they imply — tanks lined up like bowling pins, dead bodies indistinguishable from the living except for their lack of verticality, tears running in orderly cascades down faces — make the exhibit feel like an after-image from a flash of light, a visual echo of violence. The unsettling power of "Shocked and Awed" lies in the very act of each work’s composition. It’s no wonder the word "compose" refers both to peacefulness and to creativity: each drawing becomes an argument with death and agony and chaos.

There’s nothing special about the drawings per se. Their range in subject matter and complexity is great, however, and a few do stand out for their style and poignancy. In A dream, a sleeping body occupies the left half of the sheet of typing paper; to its right is the dream itself, a dove. In many, bombs fly into houses; in one, a child’s hand has written, "Where’s my Daddy?" Hospitals, rifles, the Tigris River flowing blood-red, aerial bombardment — these are children’s records of daily life. And I would argue that one reason we’re drawn to them is that we all bear some responsibility for what happened.

This is also an exhibit about what’s going on and what’s to come. It’s a snapshot into the psyche of a generation, and in the context of the US Senate’s conclusion that it was hoaxed into approving the war, the bitter cruelty of the images is almost unbearable. "Shocked and Awed" wants to inspire us to do something, an ambition that little art aspires to and even less achieves.

ACROSS TOWN, another show timed to coincide with the DNC also transcends the æsthetic. In 1969, the photographer and filmmaker George Butler, now best known for directing the 1977 Schwarzenegger-starring Pumping Iron, met another future politician, this one of less steroidal stature, and just back from Vietnam. Butler’s portraits of John Kerry stand up as a photographic homage that few in public life get to enjoy — three decades of skilled photojournalism by an artist who also happens to be his subject’s friend.

Not that there’s anything particularly intimate or unexpected about Butler’s photos. In fact, there isn’t a single shot in the show that hints at any particular relation between the photographer and our latest JFK. Kerry appears at anti-war rallies in the 1970s, at earlier Democratic National Conventions, waiting for results on various election nights, campaigning in the Fifth Congressional District, or standing beside celebs who include John Lennon, Arthur Miller, and the late New York congresswoman Bella Abzug. But the photographs don’t come across as automatic or adulatory, either. John Kerry isn’t a symbol for George Butler but a reflective, perspicacious, indefatigable flesh-and-blood human being, casually self-conscious, perhaps overly rehearsed, disinclined to allow his face to register emotional extremes (he smiles once and he scowls once, and that’s it). Butler appears to have perceived early in his friend what much of the country now recognizes: earnestness, intelligence, focus, leadership. His John Kerry might not be someone you’d want to kick back with on a Sunday afternoon or share a dinner table with on a long ocean cruise. Spontaneity and sparkle are not part of Kerry’s appeal. Purposefulness and perhaps passion are. Even in the couple of pictures when he’s not making an official appearance or writing a speech or conducting an interview — in one 1988 shot, he’s a lone figure walking on Cape Cod; in another, he’s sailing — he’s still at work, cogitating in the former, tying a rope in the latter.

It’s impossible to separate George Butler’s John Kerry from the status the Democratic presidential candidate now occupies, just as it’s impossible not to look at the Iraqi kids’ drawings from the perspective of the invading country. Those of us who struggle with trying to figure out how the same images might register from a different perspective will continue to do so. That struggle doesn’t diminish the power of these shows.

SATIRE RATHER THAN STRUGGLE describes "Participatory Democracy," the spirited, iconoclastic show at Art Interactive. The five artists whose interactive installations constitute the exhibit — Ravi Jain, Natalie Loveless, Jeff Warmouth, Andrew Warren, and Douglas Weathersby — share the assessment that participation is America’s way of undoing democracy. Each installation is a hybrid of a voting booth and a carnival act, with four candidates running for who-knows-what: the Bearded Lady (whose motto is "The Difference Is Clear"), Two Headed Ed ("We Cover Both Sides of Every Argument"), the Contortionist ("I Can Wrap Myself Around Any Issue"), and the Great Incumbo ("You’re in Good Hands"). In one installation, a roll of a ball decides your vote; in another, it’s the toss of a dart. Try to drop your ballot into the ballot box in a third booth and you discover it doesn’t fit. When you finally do squeeze it into the slot, you find that the box has no bottom and the ballots are all piled up like trash on the floor. It’s incisive stuff, and great fun.


Issue Date: July 16 - 22, 2004
Back to the Art table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group