Art

“Consuming War”; drypoint print from Daniel Heyman’s Amman Series

Objective Unclear

Two smart but imperfect group shows about war

Consuming War
Through Sun 1/20: Mon-Thu 9-8, Fri-Sat 9-5, Sun noon-5, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520.

Meanwhile in Baghdad . . .
Through Sun 12/21: Tue-Fri 10-5, Sat-Sun noon-5, Renaissance Society, Univ. of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis, 773-702-8670.

By Bert Stabler

November 29, 2007

The print-media cooperative Just Seeds recently sent out a postcard, designed by Milwaukee artist Colin Matthes, that shows a pattern of grainy shapes beneath the banner “Employment Opportunities.” At the bottom, the shapes coalesce into a heap of dead bodies. This moving example of what art can do when it “makes a statement” acts rhetorically, surprising the viewer into filling in the gaps and reaching an emotional conclusion about military recruiting.

Are there more straightforward ways of making a statement? Sure, but artists seem likelier to take a subtle tactical approach to their principled outlooks that can make them seem secondary, often producing flat, ironic eye candy or its inverse, information-heavy pleasure-hating documentation. Ethical “interventions,” influenced by Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, use art as a nexus for social interaction: images, objects, and spaces are deployed to achieve some moral result, but the means sometimes dominates the end.

Two group exhibits in Hyde Park engage the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from different angles, each show making some hits and leaving some casualties. The Hyde Park Art Center, fulfilling its community-based mission, takes a razzle-dazzle pedagogical approach in “Consuming War,” which essentially offers a safe introduction to “controversial” art. The Renaissance Society has a more scholarly agenda in its rather somber show, “Meanwhile in Baghdad . . . ,” which con­tains more information but is less colorful and more conceptual than the HPAC show. Both institutions are to be commended for attempting to foster discussion—and both are to be chided somewhat for allowing, far less dramatically than the U.S. war machine, confused objectives to interfere with the campaign.

In an interview on WBEZ, “Consuming War” curator Barbara Koenen said that she was interested in adding a prowar point of view but couldn’t find one within the ranks of “serious” artists. Apparently Edra Soto was serious enough to make the cut, though she’s best known for clever, delightfully unpretentious personal artwork, lately in the form of collages featuring her cat. For this heavy topic Soto created One Vision: Hollywood Soldiers, a grid of framed photographic portraits of attractive actors from war films—reminding us, I guess, that John Wayne is a problematic role model. Although the piece echoes Piotr Uklanski’s photo portraits of cinematic Nazis, The Nazis, U.S. soldiers aren’t widely understood to be two-dimensional villains—or, for that matter, heroes. On the other hand, Frederick Holland could have used a bit of Soto’s light touch. His four slick one-liners take up quite a bit of space in the gallery. American Blend is an oil-drum fountain from which a steady stream of red liquid pours; Risky Business comments on imperialism with a board game combining elements of Monopoly and Risk; Flame On is an image of a burning composite Coalition of the Willing flag; and Arms for Oil is a digital print featuring, yes, a prosthetic arm. Get it?

The rhetoric is more lighthearted in Ellen Rothenberg’s Collection/Storage System (HPAC): Stealth, which aims to remove camouflage clothing from public circulation by bundling it with a zip tie so it resembles an IED, then imprisoning it in a cage. The piece is a little too cute, as is Michael Rakowitz’s installation, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, in which missing Iraqi artifacts are re-created in well-crafted amalgams of Middle Eastern food wrappers and newspapers. Both installations are a bit labored and precious, but they’re also thought provoking and eye-catching. That makes them resonate visually with Price War!, Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes’s large, hanging inflated polyurethane bombs printed with images from grocery-store circulars, perhaps the clearest expression of the show’s “consumerism equals imperialism” equation. But the most unforgettable work for me was among the least pop. Harold Mendez’s giant, flat assemblage of transparent and reflective tape, To Leave, to Escape, Is to Draw a Line, is a shimmering semiabstraction that resolves into the fencing, bars, and watchtowers of a prison.

The Renaissance Society’s “Meanwhile in Baghdad . . . ” takes the war as a “backdrop” for artistic responses. Controversy, or nostalgia for it, seemed to be on the minds of many posing questions to the artists’ panel at the show’s opening reception. But as curator Hamza Walker said, in this show the war is “a fixture of the contemporary landscape”—an idea that should be familiar to readers of George Orwell. With the government failing to provide the satisfaction of actually censoring artists, viewers have to make do with the show’s sinister but vague representations of repression set alongside free speech unleashed in manic torrents of text. Jenny Holzer and Daniel Heyman both rely on lengthy first-person narratives by U.S. prisoners of war. Holzer’s I Was in Baghdad Ochre Fade is a row of journal entries rendered attractively in oils on linen, while Heyman’s Amman Series consists of drypoint prints of portraits he made of former Abu Ghraib detainees, with texts from interviews he conducted with them in the margins. In the ink-jet series Siege of Khartoum, 1884 Maryam Jafri pithily combines recent images from the Iraq war with news articles on guerrilla conflict in the Middle East dating back to 1898. Ann Messner is giving away her lushly produced publication, The Disasters of War, which juxtaposes vivid Iraq photo reportage with snippets of impassioned but pious written protests against U.S. criminality in the Middle East. Walead Beshty, by contrast, saves his dense text for his unwieldy titles. He’s created the show’s most opaque and challenging piece: photographs of the Iraqi embassy in east Berlin, which has remained in shambles under increasingly uncertain sovereignty since the dissolution of the DDR and the first gulf war.

As Walker put it, a show about war is in danger of being “all point and no substance,” though the war itself “has no point, and is all wrong.” During the panel discussion Beshty quoted Walter Benjamin, who called for artists to rebuff the fascist aestheticizing of politics by politicizing aesthetics. Perhaps confusing koans are the appropriate highbrow response to war, and the sort of ironic propaganda that pervades “Consuming War” is the middlebrow equivalent. Both are intelligent exhibits with interesting themes. But Bourriaud’s goal of producing art that invades everyday life, disrupting definitions and using social interactions as a medium for change, remains largely unreached.   

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