With just over five weeks to go until Election Day, the two major presidential candidates are spending millions each week on TV ads, but you'd never know it here in New York. The federal Democrats take the city for granted, and the Republicans never bother putting up much of a fight. Which means that the political dialogue happens everywhere else: in city squares, on talk radio and, especially over the last few election cycles, in museums and galleries.
Last week the public art organization Creative Time took over the Park Avenue Armory for a political convention unlike either of the ones that unfolded in St. Paul or Denver. True, there were speeches and pamphlets and floor demonstrations, but I'm pretty sure neither the Republican nor Democratic gatherings also featured protest karaoke or a so-called Anarchist Ice Cream Truck providing flyers on the Black Panthers or conflict and consensus alongside every free Fudgsicle.
Democracy in America: The National Campaign began about six months ago when Creative Time, wanting to get out of what it called "the bubble of Manhattan," sent artists and performers to a variety of states, red and blue, to hold town-hall meetings on the engagement of art with politics.
When I learned about the project back in March, it sounded invigorating. During the 2004 election campaign, most New Yorkers had been so certain that George W. Bush's cynical exploitation of Sept. 11 would mean his defeat that his re-election was almost as dispiriting as another act of terror in the city. Four years later, the stakes are so much higher that there's something deeply uncomfortable about being too comfortable. So the idea that artists might head into the heartland and have their beliefs tested by clashes with others seemed to be just what this city needed. Besides, on a purely intellectual level, there's a thudding monotony to so much of this city's political dialogue.
I already know Bush will go into history as the worst U.S. President; I don't need art to tell me that.
But I'd love to know how a creative individual on the right wing is grappling with his or her feelings about the Bush administration's manifold failures. I asked Anne Pasternak, the head of Creative Time, about the left-wing inclinations of artists, and she admitted it could be a challenge. In the end, while some of the local issues that came up in those town halls might not be top of mind in New York, all of them fell comfortably on the progressive side of the political spectrum: It turns out that "Manhattan bubble" has miniature clones in New Orleans, Chicago, and Baltimore.
Still, while the Democracy in America Convergence Center, which closed on Saturday night, may have been stuffed full of the work of lefty creatives, there was no Bush Bad agitprop in sight. Nor was the event a love-in for Barack Obama or the Democrats. The only thing all the artists seemed to agree on was that dissent was a necessary - and largely absent - element in American politics.
To that end, performance artists as varied as Karen Finley, the Yes Men, Pia Lindman, and Rev. Billy took the stage in the Armory's drill hall over the course of the week, alongside political figures like Matthew Diaz, the former U.S. officer stationed at Guantanamo Bay who released the names of prisoners to the Center for Constitutional Rights and thus earned himself a six-month prison sentence.
Historical documents in the Armory's central corridor stood as the exhibition's lodestar: a 1787 newspaper reprint of the U.S. Constitution; an 1823 copperplate engraving of the Declaration of Independence; and an 1863 copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln.
The installations at the Armory, many propped up on simple wooden soapboxes, articulated a rich ambivalence about partisan politics. What, after all, are we to make of Rachel Mason's Kissing President Bush, a white double bust of Bush and Mason in an open-mouthed smooch? The lovers' eyes are closed and Mason, her head cocked back in a swoon to receive Bush's kiss, seems to be on the edge of transcendence. It is power as an aphrodisiac, and Mason's succumbing to Bush, albeit only in sculptural form, is not entirely ironic.
For his Port Huron Project, Mark Tribe re-enacted and filmed three famous speeches from the 1960s and '70s in their original locations: Angela Davis in Oakland, Calif., talking about civil liberties; one by Cesar Chavez in Los Angeles calling on underpaid farm workers to fight for an overhaul of the economic system; and one by Stokely Carmichael, staged in front of the U.N., protesting the racism and exploitation of the Vietnam War.
Erick Beltran's installation Fear consisted of thousands of pieces of blue paper scattered along the Armory's second floor corridor printed with only the word: FEAR. Steve Kurtz, the Buffalo professor who spent years under a cloud of suspicion after his wife's death prompted the FBI to raid his home for biological agents, contributes Seized, a collection of detritus (pizza boxes, pop bottles, etc.) left behind by investigators after the raid. Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung's HD video installation Residential Erection is a five-minute pop culture mash-up that razes the whole sorry landscape of U.S. presidential politics, featuring John McCain in a cheerleader's outfit and Barack Obama as the Baby Jesus suckling at Oprah Winfrey's teat. (You can see for yourself at Hung's website, tinkin.com.)
Looking at the two major presidential tickets, you'd never know there's a vibrant, scrappy, intellectually rich political culture in this country. But Democracy in America recognizes the wisdom of the age-old saying: Politics is too important to be left to the politicians.
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