George Grosz: Politics and His Influence at David Nolan
September 8- October 22, 2016, 527 West 29th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, info@davidnolangallery.com

Sometimes merely to depict the world is to make a political statement. When Sue Coe draws Homeless Woman Dressed in Garbage Bags (1992) and Louis Lozowick’s lithograph depicts Hooverville (1932), both at St. Etienne, those images in themselves reveal injustice, and so should inspire responsive action. And, at David Nolan, the implication of the visual rhetoric of Nancy Spero’s F111- Victims in River of Blood (1967) is transparently clear. But sometimes the relationship between visual art and political ideals is more elusive, as with A. R. Penck’s Ubergang (1968/70), an ink drawing, and Marina Abramovic’s The Hero II (2001/2008), a silver print, both also at Nolan. Penck’s German title describes a ‘transition’, presumably towards a more just society—and Abramovic ironically shows herself as a hero with a white flag on a white horse. And Gerhard Richter’s print 14 Feb 45 (2001), so you can discover by Googling that date, is an aerial view of Dresden made right after the World War Two firebombing.

Galerie St. Etienne presents sixty-five drawings, lithographs, paintings and posters made by American artists associated with (or supportive of) the American communist party. Coe has an illustration NY Soup Kitchen—a Week Before Xmas (1992), George Grosz two works on paper, and Alice Neel a painting Longshoremen Returning from Work (1936). These figurative artists depicted poverty, racism and unemployment. One room at David Nolan shows a group of George Grosz’s iconic works from the 1920s through the 1940s. The rest of this exhibition, in three galleries on two floors, shows a marvelous variety of political artists. You see Leon Golub’s Mercenaries II (1975), Ian Hamilton Finlay’s installation The Revolution is Frozen—All Principles are Weakened. There Remain only Red Bonnets Worn by Intrigue (1991), and Martha Rosler’s photomontage Empty Boys (1967-72). And also Faith Ringgold’s narrative composition, Hate is a Sin Flag (2007); Jorg Immendorff’s painting Only when the rocks are flying we will be appeased (1978), and Robert Rauschenberg’s remarkable collage Untitled (Huey P. Newton, Arts Magazine, Nov. 1970) (1970).

These two exhibitions present a most instructive history of twentieth century political art. In a lengthy essay, which is on-line, St. Etienne traces the career of Grosz, who immigrated to this country when Hitler came to power in his native Germany, and the response of various American 1930s leftists to the Great Depression. And, after noting that the rise of Abstract Expressionism led to the marginalization of political art, it plausibly argues that now we have as much need for socially engaged art as in the 1930s. “Although the American establishment rejected political art in the latter part of the twentieth century,” it claims, “some collectors and dealers remained devoted to the genre.” In fact, for two generations the very influential critics associated with October, have argued that contemporary art should critique our social institutions. And a number of artists extolled in their pages are in the Nolan exhibition. What has changed, and this is an important development, is that the dominant style of political art has been radically transformed. The activist commentary of Jenny Holzer’s cold water (2013) and Glenn Ligon’s Introduction (5) (2004) needs to be being teased out. As also is true of Ciprian Muresan’s Communism Never Happened (2006), a vinyl label reproducing those words. The claims of Coe’s images are as direct as those of the drawings by Grosz, the one artist who appears in both exhibitions. But nowadays the statements made by fashionable political art are mostly elliptical.

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May to October, 2016
941 North Street (at Hurlingham Drive)
Greenwich, CT, 203 869 0611

“My body will not be a tomb for other creatures.”
-Leonardo da Vinci

Guests to the opening of Jonathan Horowitz’s “Occupy Greenwich,” at the Brant Foundation, may have been very surprised: whereas the multimillionaire paper magnate Peter Brant and his wife, Stephanie, typically open the spring exhibition at their art and study center with a pig roast, the carcasses of dead animals forced open and staked on the grounds, this year’s attendees were greeted with vegan catering. Horowitz is vegan, and dressing as a slaughterhouse the beautiful Connecticut estate surrounding his show seems likely to have undermined his work, some which speaks to the politics of what people eat and why.

Even before it opened, the show embraced some surprising contradictions. It runs the gamut, in a way, speaking to a number of social and political problems. It was promoted with a full-page ad, reproducing Horowitz’s print Go Vegan! (Stephanie) (2016), with the slogan underscoring the portrait of a seductive young woman. Horowitz is gay, but he also understands that pretty girls sell better than pictures of cute animals, which are often paired with that exhortation. (Though women are also often referred to with metaphors for penned animals, obviously.) At the bottom was the show’s sardonic title, equating the carefully executed exhibition of expensive collectibles with an anarchist takeover of the exurban enclave.

“Occupy Greenwich” touches on a number of seemingly partisan themes, often with messages that are superficially evangelist but which also include a subtext of uncertainty or perhaps even irony. That’s especially useful as America’s political discourse has grown increasingly polarized, in spite of the fact that people don’t lead polar lives and usually have beliefs and practices that differ radically from common stereotypes about, say, vegans, Republicans, working class voters, queer people, gun owners and so on.

Hillary Clinton is a Person Too (2008), staged in one early room, is a cartooned, life-sized bronze sculpture of a woman being crowned by a small boy standing on a chair, with the sculpture’s title cast into the base, in a corny comic font. Next to it, a whole wall of similar figurines — the size of paperweights and cast in the style of 1970s Sillisculpt statues, titled We the People are People Too (2008) — are marked with affirmations that “Young Mothers Are People Too,” “Socialist Medics Are People Too,” “Donald Rumsfeld Is A Person Too,” “Ellen And Portia Are People Too,” “Fetuses Are People Too,” and others. It’s not at all obvious how sincere Horowitz is being in his parodic coronation of Mrs. Clinton and the insistence on a common humanity shared alike by working people and Rumsfeld et al. It is absolutely essential to remember that everyone is a person, but it’s also important to recall that both of those politicians were managers of massive death, and putting them on the same scale as mothers, doctors, and embryos, etc., is discomfiting.

A stairway leading to galleries downstairs is lined with Go Vegan! (200 Celebrity Vegetarians Downloaded from the Internet) (2002/10). Each low-resolution-pictured person eats (currently, formerly, occasionally) a vegan or vegetarian diet, including Vincent van Gogh, Prince and Franz Kafka, among many others. Similar mosaics are found in vegan restaurants, online, and on posters produced by PETA. But they’re also dubious; Horowitz commends the plea and also slyly digs at its cheesy, superfluous celebrity endorsements, which seem to put animal-cruelty-free eating in the same basket as Coca-Cola and Nike.

Downstairs, a large room recapitulates Horowitz’s November 4, 2008 (2008) installation, originally staged at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, wherein viewers watched live election returns in a room divided between red and blue, FOX News and CNN, on back-to-back LCD screens. Here is the same set up, balloons poised to drop from the ceiling. The TV monitors are still playing the ‘08 election, and all of 24-hour cable news’ on-screen signs of urgent immediacy — rapidly moving graphics, breaking updates, a scrolling crawl at the bottom, and more — all this stuff that’s meant to convey nowness, is, eight years later, manic, diminutive, impotent.

The last installation, I, Hillary (2016), is a room empty save for a spare white bench, desk and chair, and an ink-jet printed and framed low-res portrait of Mrs. Clinton. From a small PA system comes Horowitz’s voice, giving a meandering, rational and sort of defensive account of the show and his support for Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy. He describes how capable she is, and that her policy aims seem pragmatic and reasonable. Although Horowitz sounds like he’s speaking extemporaneously, if haltingly, his remarks also seem canned, robotically parroted from Clinton surrogates, partisans and pundits. Many of the same claims were repeated at the Democratic National Convention in July and have been found in the opinion media for the past year — the thrust being basically that he’s not crazy about her, but thinks she’s capable and will do a good job and have you seen how insane the alternative is? Horowitz’s minimizations of Clinton’s closeness to Wall Street money and influence are followed by preemptive defenses about working with the Brants at their ostentatious estate, drawing a sharp parallel between her compromises and his own.

“I guess I am not a big proponent in general of supposed ideological purity,” says Horowitz in his monologue. Probably few people are. More than that, though, Horowitz seems deeply interested in apparent contradiction, performativity, appropriation and allusion, both in politics and culture, and in his own life. One can hope that poking at those conflicts and misconceptions might lead to better elections, or maybe more civility. Or perhaps even just a few more vegans.

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June 13 to August 30, 2015
41 Franklin Street
Stamford, CT, 203 595 5211

Over the last few years, Connecticut has passed progressive policies regarding in-state tuition for undocumented students, drive-only permits for undocumented residents, and protections for domestic workers. Franklin Street Works, located in Stamford, one of the state’s most immigrant-heavy cities, is currently exhibiting “Acting on Dreams: The State of Immigrant Rights, Conditions, and Advocacy in the United States.” This group show is curated by Yaelle S. Amir and tackles immigration issues through a variety of political and visual tactics, creating an engaging and moving viewer experience.

The Index of the Disappeared: 34,000 Beds (2015) is a multimedia installation by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani that features a poignant and expansive archive of immigrants who have disappeared since the attacks of September 11, 2001. In shelved binders that viewers are encouraged to flip through, the archive materializes both the scope and the invisibility of the disappearances. The binders’ official documents, secondary literature, and personal narratives highlight systems of deportation, as well as the nature of the language and protocols used. Selected passages are collaged in an accompanying light box, as well as in take-away postcards. Around the shelves are 34,000 silkscreened beds, representing the detention bed quota required by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The prints recall Warhol’s Death and Disaster series, which depicts car crashes, electric chairs, and other disasters in similar, brutal repetition.

A few weeks before the show’s opening, the Connecticut legislature passed the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. Marisa Morán Jahn’s (Studio REV-) project CareForce: Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers, Families and Allies United for Sustainable Care Solutions (in collaboration with the National Domestic Worker’s Alliance and Caring Across Generations) utilizes tactics of empowerment, advocacy, and education. The display features an informational video, pocket resources (including Rights and Responsibilities Under the Massachusetts Domestic Bill of Rights & Other Laws, 2015), as well as a photo corner where participants are encouraged to take pictures of themselves as superheroes. Brightness and effectiveness coexist in Jahn’s display. Imagining domestic workers as superheroes and asking viewers to don masks for a photo booth is as playful as it is political. Considering that only seven states have enacted the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights since the first, in Massachusetts in 2004, and even the limited scope of what recently passed in Connecticut, the CareForce remains relevant and timely.

Through photographs, paintings, and souvenirs, Jenny Polak’s work depicts activist efforts against a for-profit detention center in Crete, Illinois. A background in urban planning gave Polak a particular entry point to a case where the decision about the detention center came down to the city’s planning committee. Her multi-media paintings capture city’s mobilization and the hearings (Under-painting for a History: Citizens and Immigrants Converge on the For-Profit Detention Center Site, 2015 and Under-painting for a History: The Village Council Discusses the For-Profit Detention Center Plan, 2015); photographs capture the activists and their allies ((n)IMBY, 2012); and 3D-printed souvenirs ((n)IMBY—Souvenirs, 2012; (n)IMBY—Souvenirs at Home, 2013) capture an effort to historicize the successful campaign. As with the ongoing work of CareForce, keeping for-profit detention centers out of communities across the country continues to be an important endeavor.

Queerocracy’s 2011 Columbus Day action (in collaboration with Carlos Motta) sought to publicly vocalize a timeline the queer migrations, spanning from 1492 to 2013. Newsprint copies of the timeline piled alongside the projection of the action (A New Discovery: Queer Immigration in Perspective) served as a gesture of connection and physicality. The timeline’s extensive historical, policy, and organizing milestones communicate how the vulnerabilities of queerness and immigration have constantly intertwined. The piece’s audio — the voices of the action’s participants dictating the events on the timeline — echoes powerfully through the gallery.

Another collective in the show is CultureStrike, co-founded by Favianna Rodriguez, whose Migration is Beautiful monarch butterfly icon has become ubiquitous with immigrant rights. The show includes Migration Now!, a diverse and stirring portfolio of posters by CultureStrike and JustSeeds with messages such as “Dignity Not Detention,” “Deporting and Detaining Parents Shatters Families,” and “Stop the Raids,” as well as a station encouraging the coloring-in of one’s own wings (Migration is Beautiful Coloring Activity, 2013) .

“Acting On Dreams” is insistently interactive. It asks the viewer to not just to look, but to take — to flip through binders, to color, even. Through takeaways like the CareForce resource cards, the Migration is Beautiful monarch, and the queer migrations timeline by Queerocracy, the viewer becomes the recipient of a reminder — of evidence that makes the issues expressed difficult to ignore. The show demonstrates an understanding of mass — mass migration, mass organizing efforts, mass deportations — and couples it with an understanding of individual agency and experience. Although diverse in its media, tones, and approaches, the show retains cohesion.

Perhaps most striking are the ways in which “Acting on Dreams” consistently encourages personal connections to issues that are too often abstracted and made impersonal. It respects and successfully highlights the visual and textual language of activism and couples systemic analysis with individual expression. As Connecticut and the nation continue to address complex immigration issues, the perspectives offered by the works in the show are bound to remain pertinent.

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April 2 to May 2, 2015
525 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 727 2070

Primarily known for his staged photographs of seemingly natural scenes from everyday life, Philip-Lorca diCorcia has spent the last three decades considering artificiality, ambiguity and narratives veiled by emptiness. Whereas his previous series have tended to be organized around single motifs — whether prostitutes (Hustlers, 1990 – 92), anonymous street pedestrians (Heads, 1999 – 2001), or pole dancers (Lucky Thirteen, 2003 – 04) — the photographer’s fifth solo exhibition at David Zwirner refreshingly veered towards a less rigid premise, both conceptually and aesthetically, while maintaining the scrupulous execution for which he has been credited.

Entitled East of Eden (2008 – ongoing), this work-in-progress was stimulated by the 2008 financial collapse. Although a moment of great despair, diCorcia realized that there were people who still thought “they were just going to keep getting rich and buy another car.” His intention, therefore, was for the photographs to act as a revelation of sorts, depicting national disillusion and American decline. diCorcia perceived connections between this catastrophic mess and narratives from the Bible. The central motif, to which the series title alludes,[1] denotes the place in the Old Testament from which God expelled Adam and Eve for their original sin. References to other biblical tales, concerning notions such as guilt and redemption, are also invoked in the works, although loosely. Indeed, the photographer recently hinted at the happenstance of the biblical associations, and stated that he felt he was “already stretching it quite a bit.”’ The series was first shown at Zwirner’s London location in 2013 and, given its rooted linkage to the US, it’s perhaps intriguing to find that the exhibition marks the first time that the works have been presented in this country.

Generously spaced out across nine walls, the exhibition consisted of 15 framed inkjet prints, all over three feet at their shortest point. Arranged into two seemingly random groupings, five photographs were presented in the front gallery and another nine in a connected second room. Oddly, the last photograph in the set was hung in a different space altogether, detached from the main display and easy to miss.

The stark layout created a strangely solemn atmosphere, both curious and cold. This mirrored the contents of the photographs on display: whether sprawling landscapes, grave interiors or object- and figure-focused compositions, diCorcia’s pictures evoke the discomfort endured by a scarred America. Gloom was counteracted, though, by the sharpness of diCorcia’s lighting, which added vigor to each frame.

Outward appearances are kept in tact by neat houses, as in Mount Ararat, Pennsylvania (2012) and Stockton, California (2009). Indoors, it’s a different story. Lynn and Shirley (2008) centers on a blind couple at their homely dining table, their faces just missing the spotlight. Their guide dog rests in the background. DiCorcia allows them to gaze towards the camera — the only figures in the exhibition captured in this way. The solitary elderly woman at the center of Iolanda (2011) looks out to the dark skyscrapers emerging from the grim, gray river viewed from her bedroom. Her own somber expression is reflected back to the viewer through the large, rectangular window that consumes the composition.

Although many of the titles make explicit biblical allusions, it would likely be difficult to relate any of these images to the thematic aspects of the series unless the viewer had prior knowledge of the artist’s intent. As diCorcia has previously commented, although the Book of Genesis was a starting point for the work, he didn’t think that this was especially apparent and claimed that “most people would need a press release to work out what the series is about.”

But the symbolism is there, if you’re looking for it, and the handful of pictures that seem to directly make such references are, for the most part, obvious. This is more owing to their deliberately staged quality, rather than a commitment to offering any literal translation of a story. Works such as Cain and Abel (2013) and Abraham (2010) reveal obscure narratives bathed in suspense. The former portrays an unclothed pregnant woman watching two men entangled in an embrace. The latter shows a dart being thrown in the direction of a teenage boy, who stands frozen, statue-like, awaiting the outcome.

In the end, nature reigns. In Upstate (2009), the lusciousness of the sun-saturated tree, which looks like it flourished from out of nowhere, is punctuated by the vivid red apples it bears on branches climbing towards the sky. Sylmar, California (2008), with its panoramic view of dust-colored mountains and earth-filled plains, is practically painterly. The cowboy situated at the corner of the picture may look out to a landscape that has, in fact, been deeply scorched, but it cannot be doubted that the American sublime is still present.

[1] diCorcia has disclaimed any reference to John Steinbeck’s book of the same name.

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“This willingness continually to revise one’s own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education.” -Elaine Scarry, “On Beauty and Being Just”

When photography was introduced into Africa in the mid-1800s, almost immediately after it had been invented in Europe, many photographic studios proliferated across the continent. Colonial fascination and curiosity established portrait photography as one of the major means not only for the European exploration and imagination of Africa, but also for creating typological and pictorial tropes of its people. When thinking about African Photography historically, from a Western perspective and in terms of an image-based creation of identity, those early ethnographic images were later joined and eventually questioned by practices such as war- and so-called documentary photography. The problem embedded within this visual archive and the perceptional expectations it can provoke, lies not in the fact that it is false or inadequate, but that it is fragmentary and exclusive. And in being so, this ‘Eurocentric’ archive prevails over the counter-archive of aesthetically rich and complex images African photographers have been producing since the late 19th century.

Samuel Fosso, born in Cameroon in 1962, is a photographer who challenges various visions of African identity through the means of self-portraiture. Since the mid-1970s, Fosso has been reflecting and commenting on African and Afro-American topics and tropes prevalent in global visual culture. His exhibition of 39 photographs currently on view at The Walther Collection provides a selective, yet thorough, survey of his early commercial and personal work, as well as his more recent, explicitly iconographic series, all of which are connected through Fosso’s almost unbelievable capacity of transforming his body through costume and performance. After fleeing the late-1960s civil war in Nigeria, Fosso ran a photo studio in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. While taking pictures for paying clients during the day (some of which are exhibited in library), he turned the camera on himself at night. His earliest works are represented by a series of six black-and-white photographs capturing him in thoughtfully elaborated poses and styles, which were inspired by images of celebrities, such as the Nigerian musician Prince Nico Mbarga and James Brown. These silent, almost contemplative pictures not only transmit a teenager’s pleasure in showing his lithe body in tight shirts and bellbottoms, but also allude to the transformative power that studio photography had assumed during the CAR’s dictatorial rule by Jean-Bédel Bokassa. During this time, citizens’ social and cultural life was restricted just as much as their relationships with their bodies, which were considered sacred and therefore not supposed to be exhibited or exalted. Fosso’s photographic work is not only an escape or modality to embrace the beautiful, but an artistic means providing the capacity to heal and reinvent oneself, to treat the roots of suffering, instead of anesthetically masking their symptoms.

A more satirical and colorful approach is found in Fosso’s “Tati” series, named after the Parisian department store — located in the neighborhood of Barbès, where many immigrant communites from Africa live — which invited the photographer to create the series in 1997. While exploring himself through different identities, Fosso assumed stereotypical characters such as the tribal chief or the “liberated” African-American woman. Le chef qui a vendu l’Afrique aux colons (1997) refers back to ethnographic pictorial tropes, promoted by early colonial studio photography, but is simultaneously a critical, even mocking comment on iconographic self-staging of African chiefs. Seated in front of multiple panels of printed fabric (a studio setting, of course) “le chef,” alias Fosso, is dressed in a fake leopard pelt, covered with gold chains and wearing narrow white shades, while clutching a bunch of sunflowers in his hands. In a 2004 interview, Fosso said, “I think that also very colorful, apparently happy photographs can express anger and indignation. […] We have this ugly history of lacking respect for our own people, a history from which we are still unable to escape with many of the new politicians.” The “Tati” series consequently presents not only a photographic mode suggesting the need of self-reflection, but also an intelligent strategy of merging archival and political, African and Western imagery of Africa without being didactic. Yet another notion of healing and pain reappears in a more literal sense within two series from the early 2000s. “Le rève de mon grandpère” (2003) is a reenactment of and homage to Fosso’s grandfather, a chief and healer, who cured Fosso of a paralysis he suffered as a child. The highly saturated color photographs emphasize Fosso’s facial expressions and thereby counteract his physical presence captured in the two black-and-white images of the other series, “Mémoire d’un ami” (2000). As opposed to most of his other works, this series was not staged in a clearly discernable studio, but in the privacy of a bedroom, deprived of any special scenery. Instead of performing an appropriated character, it is now Fosso himself who poses for the camera. His body is captured from the back, naked and almost naked, as if trying to escape and not inviting the photographic lens. The delicate balance in posturing exposes Fosso’s usually so-metamorphic features as lonely and vulnerable — even more so because of the carefully scattered lighting, that simultaneously emphasizes and blurs the contours of his body. In fact, these grainy images recall the traumatic experience of loss, anger and helplessness, when an acquaintance of Fosso was burglarized in his neighboring apartment and the photographer could not come in time to help him.

Fosso is not a photographer who declares himself as explicitly political, informative or educational. Instead he wants to speak about what he knows, what concerns him and about what he feels morally. This artistic belief is also found in what is perhaps Fosso’s most important series, entitled “African Spirits” (2008), in which he embodies iconic figures from the African Independence and American Civil Rights movements, ranging from Angela Davis to Haïlé Sėlassié, Patrice Lumumba to Muhammad Ali. Drawn from magazines and newspapers, these figures are not only symbols of postcolonial freedom, but also images that have been republished in different contexts and for new ideas. They are part of a visual archive, a collective memory that is not fixed or finished, but subject to change. Fosso’s self-portraits are images that oscillate between documents and appropriations, imagination and performance, challenging Western, as well as Eastern iconographies and modes of creating identities. Instead of plainspoken obviousness, he carefully dissects and reassembles photographic tropes, and thereby re-directs and — locates our perceptive habits and assumptions. In his most recent series, entitled “The Emperor of Africa” (2013), for example, Fosso explores the propaganda imagery of Mao Tse-tung, while implicitly alluding to China’s more and more prominent economic presence in Africa. What is so satisfying about his photographs is not only that they are beautiful and smart, but that they reveal the deep cultural and visual thinking that created them, without losing a sense of humor and satire.

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The words followed a well-worn refrain: “An unarmed, black teenager was shot and killed by police in….” Fill in the place. In this case, it was Ferguson, Missouri on August 9, 2014. Later, we heard his name: Michael Brown, 18. Brown was fatally shot by a white member of the Ferguson police department, Officer Darren Wilson. Brown was unarmed, walking in his own neighborhood, then shot at least six times by Wilson, and his body left in the street for over four hours to be seen by his friends, family and neighbors. Anger flickered into a flare. On the evening following the shooting, protesters coming from a vigil at the site of Brown’s killing were met by police with military weapons. In addition to peaceful protests, rioting and looting did occur off and on over the last month.

The ease and speed with which the police donned military armor and weapons, while supported by military vehicles, to meet fellow citizens is disturbing. These images are a warning to all American citizens. A “militarized police” (a new phrase for the common lexicon) has become a standard police action. Most recently, police used similar military weapons both during the Occupy protests and in the search for the Boston Marathon terror suspects. Lines that should be firm — between protest groups with an agenda; a search for violent, unknown terrorists; and a shocked, angry, and grieving community — have been worryingly shattered.

Before we knew Michael Brown’s name, images appeared on social media. Antonio French, an alderman from St. Louis, posted a photograph on Twitter, on August 9 at 4:55 pm. It is a strange tableau: a row of nearly all-white policemen stand on one side of a tape cordon. Their stance — legs firm, hands on their belt buckles — projects arrogance in its studied nonchalance. A lone black officer stands at the far left edge of the photograph, as if stepping out of it. A handful of black men and women sit and stand on the other side of the cordon. One man faces the police, gesturing; another looks at him with arms crossed; three men sit on the ground with their backs to the police. The monotone deportment of the policemen contrasts with the restless uncertainty among those on the other side of the tape. The contradiction in French’s comment, “Tensions are high, but the scene is peaceful in #Ferguson,” adds to the confused disquiet. David Carson, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch staff photographer, posted a photograph at 5:07 pm. People coming together from different places begin to head in the same direction. Carson writes: “Cops have cleared the scene of shooting in Ferguson upset crowd gathering talking about marching to police station… [sic]” In the forefront of the image a couple and child are talking together. Another woman watches the accumulating crowd. In every place along the road, people’s postures are becoming decisive.

The subsequent images of black protesters and white police are familiar. To see them is to see the marches against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963. The police relentlessly attempted to subjugate the marchers with high-pressure hoses, police dogs and arrests. Now-iconic photographs of young African-Americans, with their hands on their heads as they are sprayed with torrents of water or bitten by dogs, galvanized support for the Civil Rights movement. On August 9, 2014, at 9:04 pm, Carson posted a quadriptych: a snarling German Shepherd held back by a policeman; protesters with arms raised; a confusing but clearly agitated interaction between police and protesters; a group all looking at the place where Brown died. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the protests of the Birmingham campaign as a series of deliberate, non-violent actions intended to challenge the laws of segregation, inevitably resulting in black youth in conflict with white police. In contrast, the protests in Ferguson began spontaneously (though they are now planned). Images of the protests first circulated through social media and then were picked up by other media outlets. Much like the protesters themselves, the images stuttered into tremendous activity. In contrast to the photographs of the Civil Rights movement, the effect of the unstructured exchange of images is harder to pinpoint. The glut of images momentarily overwhelms. How does it spur change?

The high-resolution media images of the interactions between police, protesters, and looters differ from the amateur images coming out of Ferguson. The saturated colors and sharp details produced by professionals have a sense of stability and act as part of a narrative. Scott Olson, a photographer for Getty Images, was arrested for photographing outside the designated media area. This restriction seems to violate first amendment press protections and appears completely arbitrary considering the ubiquitous presence of cellphone cameras and social media. Olson’s photograph of August 11 shows a dozen police officers in army fatigues, gas masks, and Kevlar tactical body armor, aiming rifles at a single protester with his hands over his head. Someone has graffitied, “Fuck the police” on a mailbox. The gross disparity in force is unjust in the extreme and a cause for distrust. By contrast, cellphone images bring action on the fringe into the heart. The images of looting on a loop — nighttime, fire, masked, tear gas, at the QuikTrip or Shoe Carnival — are bewildering in their daily repetition and indeterminacy. The impression, it is only that, is of indistinct violence. Cellphone photographs and films are blurred, raw, shaky and unexpected. They catch the act as it is occurring and as quickly pass it on. Chaos and panic are echoed in rapid movements, grainy stills and spontaneous utterances. The iconic images of the social media era will not have the visual clarity of Olson’s photographs, or those of Birmingham. As the ease of production and access to images increases, the idea of a single iconic photograph as an agent of change will no longer exist. Instead, it is the exchange of imagery — tweet, retweet, like, favorite — as the galvanizing action.

Of all the images to come out of Ferguson, pictures of Michael Brown himself are those that most need to be seen and valued. In a haunting video, Piaget Crenshaw, a witness to the shooting from her apartment, captured the immediate moments after Wilson shot Brown. Wilson stands, shoulders slumped, looking at Michael Brown’s body. No details can be seen clearly, heightening the shocking simplicity and tension in the aftermath of the encounter between the man and the teenage boy. However, the sequence’s broadcast on CNN distracts from its poignancy. Michaela Pereira interviews Crenshaw, sitting with her lawyer. As it played on CNN’s program New Day, the video, shot on the cellphone vertically, has to be adapted to fit the horizontal aspect ratio of the television. In the central third, Wilson paces with Brown’s blurred body. On either side, the two pillar boxes are distorted echoes. The effect is like tunnel vision. The faces of Pereira and Crenshaw join the looping film on screen to discuss what Crenshaw saw. In its raw form the video pierces; mediated by CNN (as such videos were on other cable news shows) it is surreal, even grotesque.

A much-circulated photograph of Michael Brown shows him in green and red robes for his recent high school graduation. He has a little smile and a little facial hair, both in keeping for a boy of his age. His posture is tall and straight. Officer Wilson did not see the Brown in that photograph when he shot him. Instead of an unarmed teenager, he probably “saw” someone much like the looter photographed by Carson for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. That man’s face is covered and a gun sticks out of his belt. He is anonymous and threatening. Hilton Als, in his essay, “GWTW,” which addresses photographs of lynching, writes, “So much care, so much care is taken not to scare white people simply with my existence.”[1] He recounts crossing the street to avoid frightening white women, not coming up behind a neighbor at his front door, and more than one encounter with the police where he is surrounded with guns pointing at him.

Wanted (a collaboration between Harlem youth, Dread Scott, No Longer Empty, Stop Mass Incarceration Network, Kevin Blythe Sampson, and Street Attack) tackles the misperception of Black and Latino youth as criminals. Wanted posters, featuring individuals rendered anonymous except for race, were included as part of an exhibition organized by No Longer Empty, “If You Build It,” at Sugar Hill Apartments in Harlem that ran from June 25 to August 10, 2014. The posters continue to be displayed on sidewalk sheds and storefronts throughout Harlem, drawing crowds, unsure of what they are seeing at first, looking closely and reading the details. Using bureaucratic, police-like reports of “suspicious behavior,” such as walking or gesturing, they account the systemic view of Black and Latino teenagers: they are threats and they are disavowed as individuals. They are anonymous — until death. On too many occasions and in too many places, unarmed black teenagers have been threatened and/or killed by the police and armed civilians. The widespread dis-recognition of teenagers like Michael Brown is a profound social crisis and must end.

[1]Hilton Als, “GWTW,” Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, 2000), 42.

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The facts are more or less clear. Invited by the architect Philip Johnson to propose a public artwork for the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, Andy Warhol chose as his subject a set of mug shots from a New York police department bulletin of 13 Most Wanted Men. Silkscreened on a 20-by-20-foot grid, the resulting work was installed high above the fairgrounds on the oval Circarama building—an oversized rogues gallery canonized by its reverential placement. Once the pre-fair media buzz had reported the public’s objections over what was essentially a series of massive wanted posters in a setting meant to celebrate civic achievement, Warhol, seemingly immune to the controversy he’d set in motion, wrote a letter to the Fair’s organizers suggesting that the work be painted over in a color “of the architect’s choice.”

After the silkscreened panels were covered over with silver paint, the large monochromatic grid remained for the entirety of the fair, an enigmatic blank in a place that had been designated to glorify New York’s vibrant cultural life. In an interview 10 years later, Johnson confessed that it was not Warhol’s displeasure with the work that inspired its erasure (as Johnson stated publicly at the time) but a bow to pressure applied by Governor Nelson Rockefeller who was concerned that the work would alienate his large Italian-American constituency (the ethnicity of the majority of the mug shot subjects) during the initial stages of his campaign for the presidency.

In a small but carefully organized show of paintings, films, and archival material, the Queens Museum, in association with the Warhol Museum, has reconstructed not only the details of the above incident, but the social and political context within which it took place. Addressing the homoerotic subtext of the “most wanted men” subjects (Warhol’s 1964 The 13 Most Beautiful Boys screen tests are shown in an adjoining room), the exhibition also includes archival support material that documents mainstream media’s reportage on a changing cultural landscape. Revealing an atmosphere of repressive “cleansing” in New York City leading up to the opening of the World’s Fair, along with concern about protests from civil rights groups, news articles describe police raids on “underground” film screenings of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), as well as a fear of a planned “stall-in” (a group of protestors in cars that planned to collectively “run out of gas” to block the main highway to the fairgrounds) by the Congress for Racial Equality.

With pavilions sponsored by big business offering branded optimism accompanied by ethnic caricatures at the national pavilions, the fair merged a corporate futurism with Disney’s “It’s a Small World” motto, shrinking difference and locality into a cartoonish internationalism that spoke to America’s post-war ambitions of empire while dissent and “difference” were being bottled up at home. While outwardly fun and carnivalesque, the 1964 World’s Fair was a massive propagandistic effort and financial risk, with a great deal at stake for organizer Robert Moses (whose 1939-40 fair at the same site had gone bankrupt) and Governor and presidential aspirant Nelson Rockefeller. Any controversy that might compromise the fair’s success had to be dealt with quickly and decisively. With public pressure mounting, the 13 most wanted men were visible for a mere 48 hours before being covered over with silver paint (and, briefly, a black shroud for good measure).

There’s a beautiful irony in the idea that a set of (mug shot) portraits commissioned by the state, presumably with the public’s welfare in mind, are appropriated by an artist to fulfill a public art commission which is then censored by the state over concerns of alienating the public. While it’s true that the subject of criminals is clearly out of step with the laudatory atmosphere of a World’s Fair, Warhol’s coy literalism (he said he was asked to do a piece that had “something to do with New York”) threatened to distract from the orgiastic mingling of a rising corporatism with national and regional pride so prominently featured at the Fair. On the floor of the Johnson-designed New York State Pavilion, adjacent to where the mug shots-turned-monochromes remained on display, was an enormous terrazzo road map of New York sponsored by Texaco, indicating all the locations of their gas stations across the state. In keeping with the Fair’s agenda, which collapsed distinctions between business and everyday life, the “walkable” map realized a new scale of corporate paternalism within the public realm. With Warhol’s (brief) elevation of the marginalized and feared now safely muted under the all-purpose glimmer of silver paint, visitors below wandered across a map of the “new world,” a place where, the Fair seemed to promise, all their needs would be taken care of, as far into the future as they could imagine.

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