|
|
|
|
|
From Social Media to Action
John Haberin New York City
Perpetual Revolution and Catpc
And here you thought the Woman's March on Washington was a triumph. There and across the nation, it dwarfed the presidential inauguration only the day before.
It also caught Donald J. Trump in yet another lie about his support. But so what? Big numbers come easily these days, and they mean nothing without a follow-up to translate enthusiasm into votes. Disappointed? Blame it on the Internet—or on demands for "Perpetual Revolution." That dream survives even now, in photos at the International Center of Photography. 
Sure, social media can pull people together fast—much as people came together at airports to protest Trump's turning them and countless others away. By the same token, though, earlier demonstrations look that much more impressive. If marches of the civil rights era were smaller, they took months of planning and years of vision. No wonder they live on in memory and in legislation. A second show, by an artist collective calling itself Catpc, remembers.
Journalism as Twitter feed
"Perpetual Revolution" still believes in marches. Its first room, devoted to design for climate change and sustainable architecture, includes images of the 2014 People's Climate March, in a "time line" by Rachel Schragis. It documents a clash with protestors at the Dakota Access Pipeline, in footage from Democracy Now! Yet its real interest lies not in feet on the ground, but in changing minds online and off. Here the medium is indeed the message: new forms of "production, display, and distribution," the show explains, "are simultaneously both reporting and producing . . . epic social and political transformations."
Subtitled "The Image and Social Change," the exhibition opens with a glorious example of both. Earthrise, from the Apollo 8 mission of 1968, shows the planet as a precious blue haven in a larger universe. It was no longer humanity's alone to exploit or to lose. The room also includes videos of climate data, also from NASA, and of sea-level rise and methane leaks, both from activist groups. Even the show's few artists mostly recycle the news. Apparently the revolution will be televised after all, and you can watch it on your cell phone.
But what revolution, apart from the digital for them as for Rachel Rosheger in digital media? The show has rooms for six, each with its own curators in conjunction with Carol Squiers and Cynthia Young. The revolutions can change lives for the better and widen communities, as with Latin American women and Black Lives Matter. They can also, be warned, narrow minds and do serious damage, as with the Islamic State and the "alt-right." As for the first two rooms, for climate awareness and the refugee crisis, the revolution is still underway, and the jury on its success is still out. Within a room, the arrangement pays little attention to chronology, no more than the latest Twitter feed.
The show does, though, have a trajectory. It moves from data, as with temperature and sea levels, to propaganda, becoming more resolutely update along the way. It also leaves the creative act further and further behind. The first room has a chilling vision of arctic ice. James Balog compares the loss of ice to the breaking up of an entire city. But Mel Chin then captures his attendance at a UN climate conference in Paris, at the risk of falling into solipsism at the expense of politics or the planet.
The risk only grows in the course of the exhibition, as the reliance on photojournalism or art falls away. The second room has the most vivid installation, a relief map in white dotted with digital clutter and, at times, broken by a child asleep in Syria, meant by Hakan Topal as an echo of a drowned child on a beach in Turkey. It also has the first of two walls for photos from the collection—here of an earlier crisis, that of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Classics by Robert Capa, Chim, and Ruth Gruber serve as a reminder that the British returned the refugees to Germany and to their doom. Clips today pale in comparison—even one of migrants subject to Slovenian riot police, by Sergey Ponomarev for The Times. Yet the room also insists on its dedication to the new, and here that means people preoccupied with themselves.
Thair Orfahli landed in Italy with nothing but a law degree, his phone, and, one presumes, a charger. At least it sufficed for a video record of his life leading up to and in exile. For all his remarkable story, it only underscores how often social media, selfies, and happy endings go together. They do so again on the theme of gender fluidity—a fast-paced mix of magazine covers, the evening news, music videos, and Instagram. These people strut their stuff, with the implication that this alone embodies a revolution, quite apart from human particulars, feminism, and gay rights. LGBT art becomes prouder and more sympathetic, but also as much an acronym as a life.
In perpetua
The room for Black Lives Matter moves more quickly still, in a wall of thirty monitors by thewayblackmachine, a collective. Projections by Sheila Pree Bright make similar use of found footage. The room also has the show's second wall for context, with photographs from the 1960s. Gordon Parks lends dignity to Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and a charwoman in the Capitol building. She poses in front of the American flag like a Civil War enactor, but with her broom in place of a rifle. Even the horrible deaths on videocam come across as less epic, because they dwell on what one knows.
Images of the alt-right are more cartoonish, like the movement itself, although bear in mind that the right-wing mindset takes root less online than on TV, with Fox and Breitbart. They include Trump's post of Hillary Clinton ("Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!") with a Jewish star—and of course that surly frog. The most revealing section, though, leaves behind the familiar for the Islamic State. It, too, allows its subjects to present themselves, to the point that it has to post something of a disclaimer. (This, the curators explain, is not a traditional museum exhibition, but a study center.) Alarmingly, they do it often and well.
The videos include a "reeducation" center and demands for ransom, but mostly tools for recruitment. They may focus on a single charismatic figure, such as an American convert, or a theme, in Arabic or English. One boasts of the movement's medical facilities, one of feeding the people. Another replays the 9/11 attack as the "first blow against the satanic financial empire." They may be slick or amateurish, but then so is the Web. The show itself might insist on just that, as essential to the revolution.
You say you want a revolution? Be careful what you wish for. You may find a greater autonomy—much as an interactive slide show in the museum's lobby lets you flip through over three thousand more images, as Unwavering Vision. Then again, you may find yourself trapped in a world of Facebook and Instagram, unable to look up from your phone. You may find yourself, too, judging by the show's themes, a stereotypic East Coast liberal, too, caring more about identity politics than economic or political change. Then again, you may find yourself dying to set aside social media in order to march.
Does it even make sense to speak of perpetual revolution? V. I. Lenin's promise of a "permanent revolution" in Russia did not work out so well either. Then, too, surely a perpetual revolution would take time, starting in the past. For "Public, Private, Secret," ICP's opening in its new location on the Bowery, on the way to a still newer home to the southeast, it integrated surveillance footage with its collection—to boast of an older institution's relevance for a new generation. Here its images pay little attention to traditional sources. Even the walls for photos, hung Salon style with captions off to the side, amount to photo collage.
Photography has had a greater role in political change than appears here. A room for refugee crises could have extended to Alfred Stieglitz's The Steerage, the Middle East of Stephen Shore, the Caribbean diaspora for Renée Stout, an airport for Naeem Mohaiemen, or "This Place" in Brooklyn—even without the fences by Ai Weiwei around New York. The prison population as seen by Danny Lyon anticipates Black Lives Matter and then some. Gender fluidity has occupied photography from Hans Bellmer to Cindy Sherman and beyond. Somehow a brilliant show has a short attention span. Trump might feel right at home.
Unfree samples
Sorry for all that "theory" up front, but for once theories made The New York Times—and not just on account of Donald J. Trump. And Zeynep Tufekcim, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has a real point. Talk is just talk, even from people out in the streets. Still, what if he has it backward? What if the numbers confirm that social media can direct action? What if technology can create a perpetual revolution?
Such is the premise of "Perpetual Revolution." With well over one hundred examples, almost all of which take watching, it proves as overwhelming and thought-provoking as its subject. Yet it has a discomforting lack of ICP's heart in photography and of new media as art. It feels far less heart-rending and transformative than photos and new media by any number of others. It also proves less addictive than chocolate. So what if chocolate is also a byproduct of colonialism—and yet another reason to call for revolution?
The least a show of chocolate could do is to offer free samples—and the least viewers could do is to refuse them, in solidarity with labor and with art. The African artists at SculptureCenter insist on their role as plantation workers. They also insist on the exploitation of workers by global markets. It appears in their sculpture, of people reduced to animals. If appears, too, in the sculpture's history, as cacao, and in its future, as profits that they can invest in worker ownership of the means of production. They do not offer samples, but do they do their best to ensure that viewers would turn away in disgust.
You may have found chocolate disgusting enough when Karen Finley smeared it on her body as performance art. (No one would remember the act had not conservatives used it as an excuse to smear funding for the arts.) The Congolese Plantation Workers Art Collective (or Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise) leaves its stench in the air—only subtly on opening weekend, but growing as one lingers and sure to grow further over the course of the exhibition. They begin with its production by poorly paid workers, shift to more traditional media to shape their sculpture, convert the clay to molds with 3D printers, and then reintroduce chocolate. The show comes with no end of documentation, in a video, a slide show, books, drawings, and handouts. It comes to life, though, with a dozen works in roughly four rows, facing ominously the same way.
The show runs perilously close to self-parody. As I wrote back when about Finley, "So then it hit me—the artist as chocolate manufacturer. Minimalism is sugarless chocolate, Warhol a stack of Hershey bars. Conceptual art is just the wrapper. Postmodern art is chocolate with the beans traced to the white male exploitation of Third World resources." When it gets to sculpture, though, it has some memorable images.
The collective's acronym, Catpc, sounds like feline political correctness, and most of the figures have cat-like faces. A woman reaches forward in anger or desperation, with something between a mammal and a fish at her feet biting down on something more powerless still. A gaunt art dealer thrusts out his tongue, while others appear only as victims or heads. They draw on myth, self-portraiture, and "the spirit of palm oil." The hectoring can grate, badly, including the obvious mockery of the art world along with plantation owners. Yet the pain in the faces is genuine, even if the bad taste remains.
"Perpetual Revolution" ran at the International Center of Photography through May 7, 2017, Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise at SculptureCenter through March 27.