Carrie Lambert-Beatty

CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY

Say “political art” and the first images that come to mind are protest pieces: posters, logos, and other weapons of symbolic warfare. Such expression has been important here in the U.S. in the context of the current war, even when the forms are not necessarily those of the past. We’ve had Richard Serra’s Abu Ghraib image haunting the festivities at the last Whitney Biennial, but also new types of attempts to stimulate political will through identification and empathy—like those in which superimposed maps of here and there provide GPS-era updates of the “bring the war home” strategies of protest art past. For instance, the “dislocative tourism agency” You Are Not Here (Thomas Duc, Kati London, Dan Phiffer, Charles Pratt, Ran Tao, and Mushon Zer-Aviv) posted a series of signs in New York with phone numbers; dialing them on your cell phone gave you a tour guide’s chipper description of a site in Baghdad physically corresponding to your location in New York, audio “visits” whose tour-guide pabulum was subtly punctuated with ideology- deflating factoids (as by the guide to Firdos Square, who mentions as if in passing that when the square’s statue of Saddam Hussein was famously toppled in April 2003, the crowds in attendance were predominantly U.S. troops and international journalists) (http://www.youarenothere.org/tours/). Pushing more aggressively on the idea, Alyssa Wright has a project in progress in which she walks the streets of Boston/Cambridge wearing a backpack rigged so that whenever she crosses into an area corresponding to one on an overlaid map of Baghdad where a bomb- ing has recently been reported, the pack “explodes,” sending up a cloud of smoke and a sheaf of confetti bearing names of dead Iraqi civilians (http://web.media. mit.edu/~alyssa/about.html). Dispersed in space, complex and time-consuming to put into action, and likely to be experienced more often online and in retro- spect than live on the ground, these new tactics compare strangely with those of, say, Martha Rosler’s Vietnam War–era photomontages, the Art Workers Coalition And Babies? poster, or GAAG’s [Guerrilla Art Action Group’s] gory protests at the Museum of Modern Art. But they nevertheless share with the now-canonical instances of antiwar artistic activism an impulse to force a connection between the complacent here and the there bloodied in its name. It’s certainly worth debating the relative efficacy of the two periods’ differ- ing tactics. Is it self-evident that when awareness of a gesture develops gradually and collectively through links between blogs and other forms of digital word of mouth it is less effective in building solidarity and spreading indignation than a physical protest like GAAG’s? Is the new work’s lower-pitched, even subtle con- demnation of the war insufficiently pointed? How would the older work’s tone of emergency come across in the contemporary context? Do the current examples succeed in bringing the war home, or do the opposite? After all, as the group’s moniker reminds us, “You Are Not Here.” But did the earlier examples escape this dialectic?

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You Are Not Here. Preparing to leave the Conﬂux HQ, Brooklyn toward Firdos Square, Baghdad. Photo: Alice Planas.

All interesting questions for the debate about artistic protest. But in consider- ing the future of intellectual and artistic opposition to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, what may matter even more is that, under the heading of political art, the most daring and exciting efforts of the last decade have not been “protest art” at all. Around the world, artists and NGOs working with artists have given us rich examples of projects that direct artistic creativity and imagination—and art institutions’ funds, space, and cultural capital—into efforts to highlight, debate, and offer prototype solutions to complicated social problems. Consider a soft drink produced with farmers’ collectives to challenge multinational corporations’ control of a Brazilian crop (Superflex, www.superflex.net/tools/supercopy/guarana.shtml); a boat to take women from countries where abortion is illegal into international waters to receive counseling and treatment (Women on Waves, www.womenon- waves.org); or the staging, in specially designed chambers, of private, face-to-face conversations between conflicting parties, such as immigrants and their ultraright antagonists, or developers and citizens groups in the city of Nuremberg (Wochenklausur, http://www.wochenklausur.at/projekte/13p_kurz_en.htm). Such endeavors lack the punch of a poster like Serra’s Abu Ghraib image, or even the emotional power of the there-is-here map works. Their means are less expressive

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than administrative, and while they may be truly heroic in intent, they are charac- terized by compromise and controversy. Moreover, as important as the issues they address may be, one would be hard-pressed to put them in the same category of emergency as that in Iraq today. Yet projects in this vein seem to me for these very reasons all the more important to encourage in relation to the current crisis. Because as of this writing, in summer 2007, while public opinion and even political energy seem to be shifting toward U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, there remains a disturbing dearth of public debate about how the U.S. and its allies will meet our moral obligations to Iraq and Iraqis in the troops’ wake. As much as I value the art of protest, what I long for now is an art of policy. Are they out there? Cells of artist-wonks incubating ideas and launching experiments that inspire imaginative solutions while publicizing the needs of Iraqis and calling to conscience the U.S. and its allies? I wonder whether the fact that I can’t call up strong examples in this vein is my failing, or that of art media and institutions oriented toward forms of political culture from another war, another media-political environment. I hope I’ll now be deluged with e-mails informing me about such efforts—even though we all know that like any examples of political art, such projects would be mere drops in the bucket of political need; even though, more than posters or paintings or protests, they’d risk accusations of not only futility but foolishness in comparison to the scale, complexity, and seri- ousness of the situation on the ground. But how worth the risk it would be: to wring out of public fatigue, disillusionment, and despair a few drops of energy, responsibility, and hope.

—August 2007

CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

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