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Incorporated exhibit skewers big biz, Big Brother

By Sara Pearce
Enquirer staff writer

Piles of trash from museum employees are growing inside the Contemporary Art Center as part of of the Incorporated show. The Enquirer/Ernest Coleman Zoom

IF YOU GO

What: Incorporated When: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Monday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Through May 8. Admission: $7.50 adults; $6.50 ages 65 and up; $5.50 student with ID; $4.50 ages 3-13; free for museum members and children under age 3. Exhibit tour: Curator Matthew Distel will lead a tour 6 p.m. Monday; free with admission. Where: Contemporary Arts Center, 44 E. Sixth St., downtown; (513) 345-8415; www.contemporaryartscenter.org.

I knew I had to rush to the Contemporary Arts Center to see its new Incorporated exhibit after the confiscation (and subsequent release) of exhibit "fantasy" passports by the Department of Homeland Security.

To be honest, the exhibit subtitle, "a recent (incomplete) history of infiltration, actions and propositions utilizing contemporary art," and the description of it on the center's Web site had put me off. It was difficult wading through the jargon even though I knew that was part of the point: some of the artists groups adopt the trappings of business and government in order to skewer them.

Here are six things I learned ...

A deadpan delivery is always effective

How about a system that allows you to avoid the closed-circuit cameras popping up in public places, or text messaging that connects protesters? Those would be I-SEE, a Web-based application that charts closed-circuit TV CCTV locations and TXTmob,which links users around topics. Both were conceived by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (www.appliedautonomy

.com). Little Brother is another sardonic creation. It is a propaganda robot whose cuteness is the antithesis of the subversive literature it distributes.

These projects, and others, are explained in a video narrated in the upbeat cadence of a corporate training film.

But ... to play the video you must press a scanner, and when you do that, your fingerprint is added to thousands of others and given a number.

Car bombings will not go away

Black-and-white photos line two walls in "My Neck is Thinner than a Hair: Engines," part of the Atlas Group's (www.the atlasgroup.org) documentation of the contemporary history of Lebanon. The photos show car bombings from 1975 to 1991. There are a staggering 100 photos but they represent fewer than half the bombings.

Three days after the exhibit opened, a car bomb in Beirut killed Lebanon's former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, and 11 others.

Citizenship is a state of mind

You can't enter the temporary SoS (State of Sabotage) embassy at the CAC and get a passport on the spot, but you can fill out an application on which you must reveal your shoe size and the total square meters of your territorial property along with the usual information. And you can always apply for citizenship at Sabotage's electronic embassy (www.sabotage.at/sos/). The premise of SoS is that the traditional state has become moribund, so why not create a new one without boundaries and let anyone become a citizen? SoS is a smart adoption of the notion that we are, first and foremost, citizens of the world.

Trash is endlessly fascinating

Stand outside the center and see how many people stop to view what's in the growing pile of trash in the window. The trash is courtesy of center employees. The exhibit, "in side out," is courtesy of Kristin Bly-Rogers and Lyz Bly, the husband-and-wife team behind Cleveland's newsense enterprises (www.newsenseonline.com).

The accumulated trash is bound to say something about the workings of the center, but it's too early to say what.

Contact paper is art ...

... in the hands of the three artists of Chicago's Temporary Services (www.

temporaryservices.org). They specialize in loosely organized outdoor projects such as "Product Placement," in which they applied contact paper to benches and newspaper boxes, wrapped parking meters and fences, and stuck magnetic hooks on signs, meters and even faces.

You, too, can be a spokesperson

Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, the Yes Men, are known for high-profile "high jinks" (www.theyesmen.org). In November, Bichlbaum posed as a Dow Chemical spokesman for an interview marking the 20th anniversary of the accidental release of gas from a Union Carbide plant in India. He promised compensation and clean-up. The duo hoped the hoax, displayed in the exhibit on three monitors, would force Dow to take action in Bhopal. It hasn't.

Was the stunt unethical? Yes. Did they make their point? Yes. Have they been arrested? No.

E-mail spearce@enquirer.com

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