ART REVIEW; Caution: Angry Artists at Work

Correction Appended

THE Republican Party's choice of New York for its 2004 national convention, which has made a lot of people very nervous, may have done the city a favor.

The Republicans have triggered an intense reaction on several fronts, and one of them is artistic. The convention, which opens on Monday at Madison Square Garden, has stimulated the city's sprawling cultural sector at the grass-roots level. Or perhaps it has provided the context in which a grass-roots activism building since the 2000 election could come into the spotlight. Political fervor is being translated into art in mediums that range from painting and sculpture to Web art to political ephemera. At the moment, President Bush and the G. O. P. are the chief art-world targets: no one seems to have a critical word to say about the failings of the Democrats.

Some of the protest efforts have been up and running for a while, like the posters sponsored by the groups at norncposters.org and counterconvention.org that can be seen on city walls. The Pierogi 2000 gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, has been holding a T-shirt bee (with varying hours, ending Monday) in which, for $30, shirts are printed with the buyer's choice of more than 75 messages designed by artists to benefit John Kerry's campaign.

The works and settings include Rachel Mason's traditional sculptural portrayal of herself and the commander in chief titled ''Kissing President Bush'' at a small makeshift gallery in Williamsburg; ''Piece Peace,'' an antiwar window installation by Adelle Lutz (with Courtney Harmel and Sara Driver) on view a few blocks from Madison Square Garden; and ''The Experimental Party Disinformation Center,'' a savvy, satirical digital mediarama in a 57th Street gallery, which includes its own cast of political candidates and cabinet members and brings together the efforts of numerous artists and artists' collectives.

Some shows have been organized by artists or by freelance curators at the last minute, often with negligible budgets in gallery spaces conveniently empty because it is August. Other efforts were planned months ago, like an exhibition and film program at the Whitney Museum of American Art that link the present situation in Iraq with the Vietnam era.

Larry Litt's ''Before You Don't Vote,'' an inspirational video of ordinary people talking about democracy, is being screened at the Kitchen along with Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese's short, Warholian ''Line Up: Unofficial Portraits,'' which represents the Bush administration in mug-shot-like images. As part of the Imagine '04 Festival of Arts, Issues and Ideas, the New School is showing the film ''Baghdad in No Particular Order'' by the multitalented Paul Chan, an impressionistic meditation on prewar Iraq that from the present perspective amounts to an unusually strong antiwar statement. Mr. Chan, working with the collective Friends of William Blake, is also responsible for ''The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention,'' a map of the city that details everything from protest routes to restrooms and includes advice on what to do if arrested.

Artforum, the city's leading contemporary art journal, shelved its original plans for its September issue in favor of publishing a portfolio of politically related works commissioned from 14 artists, including Richard Serra, Barbara Kruger and Jonathan Horowitz. One of the works, a portrait of Mr. Kerry by the painter Elizabeth Peyton, which simultaneously celebrates and exaggerates the notion of his being sensitive, is on view at Ms. Peyton's gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, through Election Day. The Artforum issue, which goes on sale Wednesday, includes an array of articles touching on the issues of so-called political art and should keep the art world talking all fall.

Taken alone, no one event is very prominent. But the totality -- the critical mass -- makes a powerful statement about the role of the arts in political activism.

'The Experimental Party Disinformation Center'

As most of these exhibitions demonstrate, the Conceptual Art movement, which was in part propelled by opposition to the Vietnam War, continues to expand art's means, meanings and reach -- with considerable help lately from the Web. This is most strikingly evident at the Luxe Gallery on 57th Street, where in its commercial gallery debut the Experimental Party has created a total-immersion parallel universe of virtual government and media.

It may all be fictional, but in a time when the pseudo-anchorman Jon Stewart is television's most incisive news commentator, who cares? The Experimental Party was founded in 2001 by Randall M. Packer, who in real life is an artist and writer who teaches at American University in Washington. In his art life he is the secretary of the tongue-in-cheek United States Department of Art and Technology. As seen in the installation at Luxe, the party has expanded into a kind of umbrella organization that includes, or taps into, the activities of a multitude of artists and collectives (Web and non-Web), among them Lynn Hershman, Paul Miller (a k a DJ Spooky), Rev. Billy and Wetheblog.org.

The walls are papered with images. There are amusing yet plausible sound bites, including one from a fictive Under Secretary of Homeland Insecurity: ''It is important to identify the threats to our nation from our government-in-action.'' Among the video screens is one that will show a remix of the network coverage of the actual convention, without, one imagines, departing too much from reality.

A video by Mark Amerika unveils Grandmaster Bush, a D.J. in a presidential mask, who skillfully spins a rap song that samples presidential speeches. Sincerity is allowed. Above the din you can hear the National Anthem sung by Jill Steinberg, a young opera singer and performance artist from Seattle who calls herself ''The Voice of America.'' Occasionally you see Ms. Steinberg on a video screen, standing before the Lincoln Memorial with an American flag draped carefully over her shoulders as she sings.

Mr. Packer's motto for the convention is ''10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation.''

'Republican Like Me'

Not everything is of a Bush-bashing nature. The opening of a group show organized by Dean Daderko at Parlour Projects, his intermittent ground-floor gallery (and home) in Williamsburg, included the artist/activist/archivist Martha Wilson, who resurrected her impersonation of Barbara Bush. (A vote for George W. Bush is ''the next best thing to voting for the Son of God!'')

But the show really amounts to a sketchy account of various activist artworks past and present. It includes Gran Fury's famous black and pink AIDS poster that proclaims ''Silence=Death.'' There is less-well-known ephemera from the recent presidential campaigns of the poet Eileen Myles and the performance artist Sparrow, as well as Carrie Moyer's colorful semi-abstract minglings of paint, glitter and political symbols and phrases (''Off Our Backs!'').

The centerpiece -- almost by default in this small space -- is Rachel Mason's double portrait/self-portrait bust ''Kissing President Bush,'' a decidedly ambiguous work that is in some ways touchingly vulnerable. On first sight, the piece can trigger a number of associations: Jeff Koons's marble sculptures, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, an incestuous Pietà, entrapment. It may also make you wonder whether any marital infidelities lurk in President Bush's shadow.

But the sculpture also gets to the essence of charisma and great political power, which is that there is always an erotic undercurrent to which both men and women are susceptible.

'Freedom Salon'

''Freedom Salon'' at Deitch Projects was being installed when I visited, but it may be the most ambitious of these shows, with an international, intergenerational selection of more than 40 artists bolstered by an impressive number of relatively new names. It also affirms that current politically driven work comes in so many different guises and styles and degrees of obviousness that it may be time to think more deeply about the political aspects in all art.

At one extreme is Wayne Gonzales's ''Yellow Poster,'' a gaudy work that casts the Republican National Convention as a common theatrical production, and the satiric ''Let's Go Republican'' pamphlets by the artists' collective Yes Men that let citizens sign away even more rights than those restricted under the Patriot Act.

At the other are a tiny drawing by Devendra Banhart that tenderly pays homage to Native Americans and the lushly mysterious red paintings by Cristobal Lehyt. Somewhat in the manner of Glen Ligon, these are inscribed with fragmentary book titles like ''Dream Worlds:'' and ''The Politics of Cultural Despair:'' that conjure up a sense of fin de siècle melancholia.

Keep an eye out for A. A. Bronson's large color photograph of himself hanging naked upside down, an image of powerlessness and humiliation; ''War Devil,'' an intense little voodoo doll by Benjamin Jones, a self-taught artist from Atlanta; and Emily Roysdon's handsome large-scale embroidery that is part painting, part rug and part bedspread, ''Fighting for More Fun Not Less Pain.''

Filled out with ''The People's Guide to the Republican National Convention'' of Mr. Chan and the Friends of William Blake, as well as works by Leon Golub, Christoph Draeger, Mel Chin, Taryn Simon, Dread Scott, Mark Lombardi, Yoko Ono, Sharon Hayes, Martha Rosler, Siemon Allen, Jo Jackson, the Critical Art Ensemble, Clare Rojas, Julia Scher and Enrique Chagoya, this exhibition promises a lot to look at and even more to contemplate.

'Bush League'

In ''Bush League,'' at Roebling Hall in Williamsburg, the gamut of expression runs from Dan Ford's Turneresque painting ''The Burning of the National Library, Baghdad, Troops Observing Looters'' to Laura Parnes's 30-second television ads, which were commissioned by Downtown for Democrats, a group of art world professionals who organized last year.

The show also includes Guy Richards Smit's watercolor reworkings of New York Times front pages and Joan Linder's caricatures of officials in the current Bush administration. Using tiny strokes, she depicts them in their underwear and they look like naughty, slightly furry children.

The best work, although available only on request, is Bjorn Melhus's ''In Beautiful, Sunny Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.'' In it he converts the tape of a 2002 news conference conducted by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld into a dazzling bit of self-incriminating rap music.

At Roebling's off-site project space, Satellite, at 94 Prince Street in SoHo, one can see Moises Saman's photographs of the Iraq war through Sept. 4.

'AmBush!'

''AmBush!,'' a group exhibition at the Van Brunt Gallery organized by the artist Trong Nguyen, reminds us that when the going gets tough, artists of all types may feel compelled to make political statements. An earlier example is Barnett Newman, who in the wake of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, momentarily abandoned paint on canvas and abstraction to make ''Lace Curtain for Mayor Daley,'' a rough wood frame strung with barbed wire with touches of red paint.

In that mode, if not exactly at that stature, the capable painter David Humphrey turned from his suave mode of Pop-Surrealism to make a protest sign, handle and all, for this show. It features a robustly Expressionistic, highly unflattering depiction of President Bush.

In general the show is strongest where it lives up most fully to its title. Norm Magnusson graphically reveals what he believes is the true message embedded in Mr. Bush's 2004 State of the Union address. The American cartoonist and writer Jeremy Hutchins contributes a cunning little book titled ''Loving the Cheney Within: A Recovery Manual.'' As at Deitch, Mr. Chagoya is represented by works from his recent ''Poor George'' series, which adapt the garrulous style of Philip Guston's caricatures of Richard M. Nixon (''Poor Richard'') to skillfully recast Mr. Bush as a hapless Pinocchio and in once case as a knight in shining helmet pacing an empty stage.

And There's More . . .

Other exhibitions of political art are opening, including a group show, ''Watch What We Say,'' that began last night at Schroeder Romero in Williamsburg, and one that opens tonight at A. I .R. in Chelsea. The latter shows art made from or inspired by the images in ''The George W. Bush Coloring Book'' by Karen Ocker, an artist from New Orleans -- proving that New York City isn't the only home of political protest art. On Sunday, under the sponsorship for Downtown for Democracy, ''A More Perfect Union,'' an exhibition of posters by 300 to 400 artists from around the country will open at Max Fish on the Lower East Side, a bar that regularly gives its generous if dingy walls over to art shows.

A handful of disparate exhibitions provide some helpful historical backdrop to this panorama of activist art. At the Whitney, David W. Kiehl, curator of prints, has organized a small but haunting show of works from the museum's permanent collection that were made during the war in Vietnam or touch on the subject. Titled ''Memorials of War,'' it includes only six artists and each piece fastens unflinchingly on the brutal realities of war and violence. Chris Burden commemorates ''America's Darker Moments,'' from Emmett Till's lynching to John F. Kennedy's assassination, in tableaus made in the tradition of tiny tin soldiers. In a portfolio of five rarely seen lithographs from 1970, the sculptor Robert Morris imagines bitterly political earthworks, including a cross-shaped trench filled with chlorine gas and a grid made of see-through coffins that is titled ''Infantry Archive'' and is meant to be walked on barefoot. Another little-seen work is the equally blunt ''Non War Memorial,'' also an earthwork of sorts, which Edward Kienholz proposed in 1970.

The deep division caused by the Vietnam War is borne out in ''War! Protest in America 1965-2004,'' an excellent film program organized by Chrissie Iles, a Whitney curator, and the artist Sam Durant. The works include stunning short films by Stan Vanderbeek, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits and Carolee Schneemann, the last a savage montage using photographs of war victims that most Americans didn't see. Also included is Richard and Pat Myers's heart-rending documentary ''Confrontation at Kent State,'' and newsreels of clashes between protesters and police, including the prolonged and violent 1967 march on the Pentagon.

The program comes into the present with Julie Talen's ''Sixty Cameras Against the War,'' a kaleidoscopic documentary of the 2004 march in New York City against the Iraq war, and Brigitte Cornand's ''Not in Our Name,'' which features angry, thoughtful interviews with artists like Mr. Serra, Lawrence Weiner and Martha Rosler.

A footnote to the Whitney's offerings is ''Defend Freedom: Lost Life Magazine Photos From August 1965 Protest'' by Nat Finkelstein, on view at the offices of People for the American Way on Lower Fifth Avenue. The pictures depict more close encounters between protesters and the police during a march in Washington. After the commotion of the films at the Whitney, one is grateful to be able to look at still photographs

Another resurrection of sorts has transpired at Foley Square in Lower Manhattan, where Creative Time and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council have installed the ''Freedom of Expression National Monument,'' an interactive sculpture originally seen in ''Art on the Beach'' (a series of outdoor exhibitions held from 1978 to 1985 on Hudson River landfill at the end of Chambers Street). It is the work of the architect Laurie Hawkinson, the performer John Malpede (who also figures in ''Freedom Salon'' at Deitch Projects) and the artist Erika Rothenberg. The work is a red Constructivist-style structure that consists of a giant megaphone and a six-foot-high platform reached by a ramp. Anyone who wants to can mount the platform and speak his or her mind. Try it. It's an American tradition, to be exercised in the art world and everywhere else.

Politics on Display

A complete schedule for the Imagine '04 Festival of Arts, Issues and Ideas, which includes some of these shows, is available at www.imagine04.org. The exhibitions in Roberta Smith's review:

''AmBUSH!'' Van Brunt Gallery, 819 Washington Street, near 12th Street, West Village, (212) 243-8572. Through Sept 18.

''BAGHDAD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER,'' New School University, Alice Rice Cook Lecture Hall, Room 404, 66 West 12th Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 229-5353. A film by Paul Chan, to be screened on Aug. 31 at 7:30 p.m. Free.

''BUSH LEAGUE,'' Roebling Hall, 390 Wythe Avenue, at South Fourth Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 599-5352. Through Sept. 6.

''DEFEND FREEDOM: LOST LIFE MAGAZINE PHOTOS FROM AUGUST 1965 PROTEST,'' by Nat Finkelstein, People for the American Way, Andrew Heiskell Center for Democracy, Seventh Floor, 149 Fifth Avenue, at 21st Street, Manhattan; appointment suggested: (212) 420-0440. Through Sept. 24.

''THE EXPERIMENTAL PARTY DISINFORMATION CENTER,'' Luxe Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, Manhattan, (212) 404-7455. Through Sept. 4.

''FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION NATIONAL MONUMENT,'' Foley Square, Lower Manhattan, (212) 206-6674. A public art project presented by Creative Time and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Through Nov. 13.

''FREEDOM SALON,'' Deitch Projects, 26 Wooster Street, at Grand Street, SoHo, (212) 343-7300. Through Sept. 4.

''THE GEORGE W. BUSH COLORING BOOK'' GROUP SHOW, A. I. R., 511 West 25th Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-6651. Through Sept. 2.

''JOHN KERRY, APRIL 1971,'' by Elizabeth Peyton, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, at Leroy Street, West Village, (212) 627-5258. Part of a portfolio of 14 works commissioned by Artforum magazine for its September issue. Through Nov. 2.

''LINE UP: UNOFFICIAL PORTRAITS'' AND ''BEFORE YOU DON'T VOTE,'' the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-5793. Films by Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese (''Line Up'' and Larry Litt (''Vote''). Through Sept. 3.

''MEMORIALS OF WAR,'' Whitney Museum of American Art, 975 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, Manhattan, (800) 944-8639. Works from the collection, in the fifth-floor print gallery. Through Nov. 28.

''A MORE PERFECT UNION,'' Max Fish, 179 Ludlow Street, Lower East Side, (212) 529-3959. Posters by artists from around the country. Sunday through Sept. 12.

''PIECE PEACE,'' Chashama, 208 West 37th Street, Manhattan, (212) 255-7857. A window installation of performance documentation by Adelle Lutz. Through Sept. 30.

''REPUBLICAN LIKE ME,'' Parlour Projects, 214 Devoe Street, Apartment 1, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, www.parlourprojects.org. Through Sept. 20.

''WAR! PROTEST IN AMERICA 1965-2004,'' Whitney Museum, 975 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street, Manhattan, (800) 944-8639. Film program. Through Oct. 24.

''WATCH WHAT WE SAY,'' Schroeder Romero, 173A North Third Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718) 486-8992. Through Sept. 2.

Correction: August 31, 2004, Tuesday An art review in Weekend on Friday about exhibitions with political themes misidentified the artist who created a video about Grandmaster Bush, a D.J. in a presidential mask, for the ''Experimental Party Disinformation Center'' show at the Luxe Gallery in Manhattan. The artist was Rick Silva; Mark Amerika was another artist in the show.