Art during wartime Hera Gallery examines American Democracy Under Siege BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Fighting back Troy West passed along a good Jay Leno wisecrack: If Iraq is having a hard time deciding on a constitution, why don’t we send them ours — it worked well for more than 200 years, and we’re not using it anymore. Shaking our heads and complaining or joking — perhaps writing a letter to Washington — is about as far as most of us get in responding to the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. But South Kingstown artist West and his artist wife Claudia Flynn have done more. They have curated American Democracy Under Siege, an exhibition of 23 artists at Hera Gallery. It continues through November 8. Last August they curated Artists Defend the Environment Under Siege, so this was a natural segue. "I guess the light bulb went on and we said, ‘Holy cow, democracy is under siege!’ " West says. "Since that time, I think the removal of our basic rights has been escalating at a rate much faster than we ever dreamed," he adds. "So in a sense I think the show is about a call to action. We’ve got to take back the Constitution, we’ve got to take back the flag, we’ve got to save democracy. Art is at the barricades, and we’ve got to fight back." This became particularly important to them after they vacationed in Tunisia and Europe earlier this year, speaking — and marching — with people opposed to American intervention. "We realized in a very visceral way that it’s Bush against the world," West says. "It seems to me that the one good thing about the Bush presidency is that it’s united the world for peace." But this exhibition is not about the Iraq war, West points out; it is about domestic consequences. "We were very consciously not making this about the war. We made it very clear that we wanted this to be about the war against our freedoms. So we’re not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan. And I think that’s reflected in all the pieces." West calls this exhibition "a patriotic show." "I believe that this is a turning point in America right now," he says. "As we said in the introduction, the government that’s come to power is systematically destroying the basis of our country’s greatness. So the only way that we could keep sane, I felt, was to get involved by putting on the show." Flynn, seated next to him in the gallery, adds: "Nothing here is anti-American, really." Her own work in the show is a black-and-white digital photograph of her up-stretched hand — connoting both "Stop" and a Buddhist gesture of peace — with red stitches along the life line. An art therapist, she is also a poet and has exhibited in Boston, San Francisco, and India, as well as Rhode Island. West is an educator and architect who specializes in urban design and public projects. His sculpture is often environmentally oriented, and his drawings of abandoned mill buildings have been in numerous solo and group shows. "I was thinking about war," Flynn explains, "but in the context of how life is sacred, and the context of humanity. I’m not an overtly radical artist in any stretch of the imagination. I don’t try to be an activist to the hilt. All my work is subtle, if it’s political." West is hoping that the exhibition might attract people who do not ordinarily go to art shows, and get them thinking and discussing. Flynn hopes so too. "Americans don’t reexamine their culture, it seems to me, until something shakes the very core of their complacency," she observes, "like that which happened in 2001." — B.R.

The highly charged show now at Hera Gallery is unusual for several reasons, not the least of which is that for an exhibition that makes a political statement — it’s titled American Democracy Under Siege — it comes across as thoughtful more than strident.

Agitprop fist-waving has its place in a collective j’accuse such as this, if only for art-history perspective. But that impression is limited here, even though we enter the gallery through co-curator Troy West’s "Freedom Doorway." It consists of facing painted steel flags on street-sign posts — the perfect medium. The flag stars say "WAR" and "FEAR" on one side, "OIL" and "$" on the other.

The most blurted statement might at first seem to be Umberto Crenca’s large acrylic on paper, "Reigning Terror." The impassive face of George W. Bush is popping sweat, beads of which are turning red or black as they fall. But the text that brackets the image is understated, merely holding up evidence. It consists of a 1989 statement by Bush saying, "You know I could run for governor, but I’m basically a media creation — I’ve never done anything," and a "résumé" of nefarious accomplishments by him, reprinted from the Internet.

In unfortunate contrast is Rubert Nesbitt’s satire-destroying explicitness. On a bar-coded display card is a come-on best left unstated: "America’s Most Cherished Values and Traditions Rendered Irrelevant and Reduced to Decoration — Collect Them All!" An actual store display of bubble-packed, painted resin-cast "collectibles" is under it — rows of flag-draped eagle heads that would have been a super-realistic commercial fever dream come to life, if not for the joke-ruining editorializing.

The most articulate artist statement is always the work itself, of course. That’s a good reason for those usually prolix "artist statements" to be kept in ring binders in galleries, where they can do the least harm. Having that prejudice, I was pleased to find that the wall titles of these works by 23 contributors are accompanied by brief artist statements, few of which overstay their welcome. In the context of an art show whose focus is polemical more than esthetic, artists’ left-brain urgencies undoubtedly clamored for equal time. Being short and sometimes even cogent, the statements serve to complement, rather than compete with, the art.

The artists employ a variety of approaches. One involves taking back the flag and patriotism. Michele Leavitt’s "She’s Come Undone" has a mooring rope flapping along with Old Glory. Two stripes are missing, and those that remain are scribbled with published commentary about the Patriot Act. Issuing a similar warning, James Montford and Denyse Wilhelm’s "Inside the Declaration of Independence" arrays copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence on an Empire writing table, currently pertinent passages emphasized, inviting us to add our signatures to a parchment in support.

Art and life can diverge farther than form and content, but the inclusion here of Providence artist Annu P. Matthew brings that all back home. A South Asian immigrant, Matthew combines quotes from patriotism victims with photographs — a close-up of an eye, a fingerprint — in graphically compelling ways. Anne Rocheleau makes the focus of the show a life-and-death matter in another way. She inscribes a tombstone-like slab of glass with a description of how in Islamic tradition color is as much metaphysical as perceptual. Below that work, she has a coffin-like box ready to bury arguments that the Fifth Amendment is being threatened.

Sometimes we’re asked to make an historical comparison, as with Paul Forte’s "Mitchell to Ashcroft," a blow-up of three frames of crowd shots from some 1960s campus rally. Sometimes we’re made to feel a comparison, as with Boris Bally’s "Brave," a modern version of an Indian bear claw necklace, made from 100 handgun triggers. The piece is chilling, ironic, and visceral. Sometimes we’re just left to our own devices to make personal connections, as when Dan Potter’s "Racing to Cumbancha" presents two toy cars facing dangling Dance of Death legs, a faucet above it all — a reminder that life can be turned on and off at will?

One entry here, well circulated in previous exhibitions, might seem at first glance tangential to this show, but on further reflection lays claim to being central. Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid’s "The People’s Choice" consists of five silkscreen prints and a 1994 market research poll commissioned by the artists. As the included bar graph of popular art subjects indicates, the most saleable art in America is a realistic landscape, heavy on the blue sky, and the least desirable is an abstraction. In a democracy, when the thoughtless majority is making decisions according to what keeps them comfortable and unchallenged, the public can be easily trained to not pay attention at all.