REVIEWS
Fighting Back
MCA Exhibit Responds to
War
War (What is it Good For?)
Museum of Contemporary Art
Through May 18
The new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, War (What is it Good For?), strikes a refreshing note in the chorus of anti-war sentiment. A group of students, faculty, and staff at the Art Institute of Chicago named Artist Emergency Response proffers a profound piece of material, with their video petition against the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories. Strikingly simple and blatant, these testimonies were a recognizable presence amidst the painterly detachment of other works.
What is profound about the piece, like the video nearby from Barbara Hammer of the Ad Hoc Artist protests, is that it's waging a war on war. Certainly, many activist artists use their works as a means of separating themselves from the intimacy of street conflict. Our civil duties in such crises are to speak "against the condemning of all citizens during war," as one testimony mentioned. What this video shows is the collaboration of artists as citizens, and civilians as citizens, in a courageous use of museum space, and thus national space, to garner their collective voice. Perhaps it is hard to categorize the video as "museum quality," even in this ever-morphing modern aesthetic, but for the fact that it breaks with the museum's inherent nationalism. For what it's worth, which is a lot, the selling price of the Barbara Kruger hanging next to it would pay for the distribution of the AER video throughout all three branches of our government.
There was other striking art, particularly the work of Ben Shahn and Alfredo Jaar. Ben Shahn could be considered the most socially active artist in American history, with his posters, pamphlets, and murals that documented living and working conditions in 1930s America. Under Roosevelt's New Deal, Shahn depicted poverty as a failure of our society and believed strongly in the the necessity of changing structures of social power. "Democracies Fear New Peace Offensive" (1940), an ironic headline included in his painting at the MCA exhibit, proves how Shahn effectively blends satire and social realism. A more contemporary rendition of economic warfare can be found in Alfredo Jaar's work, "Geography=War," a grid of 55-gallon drums filled with water. Representing the barrels of toxic waste a corporation paid farmers in Koko, Nigeria, to store in their homes, the surface of the water is colored by four projections of press photographs documenting the resulting disasters. Both Shahn and Jaar take a different approach to the meaning of war, exchanging the idea of physical combat with the human destruction that is symptomatic of economic oppression.
What can't be found in the MCA exhibit is that meddlesome, ubiquitous, third party: the general public. Of course, this is only because the museum has become a relic of the turn of the century, despite its claims of contemporaneity. But by inhabiting such a dinosaur, War (What is it Good For?) proves how art can be more than subversive, it can provide for some necessary change.