PLACE

Written by Lisa Hunt

[Sarah Farahat’s Can You See Me Now? (Part 1)]

Politics, war, art, society— never are these words able to be free from one another.  Place is currently housing a collection of work handling contemporary issues of war and protests in the Middle East.  Sarah Farahat is addressing the topic of Israeli and Palestinian conflicts with the recent bombing of Gaza.  Ray Boyle gave life to a collaboration of Middle Eastern and American artists and refugees and questioned what beliefs in a society would push a nation to war and at what cost.  When dealing with political issues there are two main forms that lead the basis of art: propaganda and journalism.  The distinction between the two is that propaganda has a creative element that drives the aesthetic; the beliefs behind the artist are more invasive to the viewer.   Journalism functions to describe an event in clear prosaic form, but has an unspoken understanding of bias opinions at play.  Very rarely is art able to address politics, especially politics of war, and create a neutral environment for reflection from any viewer— this area functions better in the art market and in “Art” in general, than propaganda or journalism.  For example, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial conceptualized by Maya Lin in 1981.

 Sarah Farahat’s Can You See Me Now (Part 1), is a photo documentary aspect of the series Reflections on Palestine, which includes lectures, stories, and film concerning the West Bank and Gaza.  Prints and slides projected onto the wall show images of war grounds— children standing next to barbed wire, armed forces standing in the streets of commoners, dishes of food on bare ground, et cetera.  This type of photo documentation functions as journalism.  Images of war have consistently flooded the media since the late 1960s and have become an ineffective way to address the politics of war within the walls of a gallery.  Conducting a Google image search of the phrase “bombing in Gaza” produced 1,580,000 results in under half of a second.¹ This ineffectuality of this method is explained by Boris Groys in his essay “Art at War:”

Every act of terror, every act of war is immediately registered, represented, described, depicted, narrated, and interpreted by the media… It requires no individual artistic intervention, no individual artistic decision to be put into motion…Indeed, the contemporary mass media… [is] vastly more extensive and effective than our contemporary art system… So it seems that the artist… stands no chance of rivaling the supremacy of these commercially driven image-generating machines.²

There is an opposing aspect that an artist using this medium utilizes an individual artistic decision when considering composition and selecting the images.  However, journalism encompasses these same decisions and yet is not considered a high art form.  The Can You See Me Now? series are informative and foster an environment for discussion, but lack a progressively creative craft element to function successfully in a gallery.

[Baher Butti’s piece in Mirrors]

Ray Boyle curating the Mirrors: Middle Eastern American Collaboration partitions the gallery and fills the space with an array of works.  Including a collection of medicine cabinets housing individual interpretations of what artists hold valuable to themselves—the majority of which contain personal objects and commodities relating unexplained personal histories which are vague enough to invite open interpretation. Three works in this series stand out. The most effective being from Baher Butti, whose cabinet (a first attempt at creating a piece of art) formulates an interesting, creative collage of himself and his community with anecdotes ranging from political to personal. This comprehensive view of what he values resonates with the idea set by the artist’s statement: the cost of war.  

Another artist, Marwan Nahle, reflected on a capitalist, conservative society by using propaganda to illustrate injustice.  His collage broadcast blatant rebellious remarks stating ideas of basic humanitarianism.  A golden toothbrush hanging behind steel bars, which mimic a jail cell, relates to the idea that when imprisoned a toothbrush is worth its weight in gold, and like other small items within daily life, can be taken for granted. 

[Jim Lommasson’s piece in Mirrors]

Jim Lommasson’s cabinet was the least ornate, but evokes the highest emotional response. The back of the cabinet is wallpapered with a photo collage of what seems to be his or his families first hand experiences with being in the military, on war grounds.  There is text that wraps around the sides and back of the cabinet, but neither the photos nor the texts are necessary. The one item which carries the emotional impact is an old postcard mailed to Idaho, and in pencil a cursive script writes, “Destination Unknown.” 

The dichotomy of Farahat and Boyle’s interpretations creates an interesting venue with which to discuss the limitations of propaganda and journalism within political art.

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1. http://tinyurl.com/3jzdyo7 
2. Boris Groys, Art Power  (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), 121-122