Politics put outraged artist on 'Periwinkle' alert

Politics put outraged artist on 'Periwinkle' alert
Kenneth Baker
Saturday, January 24, 2004
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URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/01/24/DDG0Q4G2EI1.DTL

The appalling turns taken by American politics have had the unanticipated benefit of forcing many activist artists to respond with more than facile outrage and despair.

The group show at Southern Exposure acknowledges recent events on varying levels of directness and sophistication.

Packard Jennings' work with found objects -- including junk mail -- runs to the sophomoric and slapstick, but his satire of the government's terror alert system gives an easy target what it deserves.

Jennings has built, or possibly found and modified, a standing wooden sign to which he has attached a Homeland Security Department emblem. It advertises the day's "Terrorist Alert" above a slot for an appropriate sign. On the day of my visit, the sign read "Far-fetched." Others leaning on a nearby wall included "Manipulated," "Fictitious," "Subjugating," "Pineapple" and "Periwinkle," with colors corresponding where possible.

Former Bay Area resident James Harbison, who now lives in New York, approaches bigger issues more obliquely.

His "Unfinished Money Map of the World" recalls Alighiero Boetti's world map of embroidered national flag designs. But Harbison composes his work using currencies, within an ocean of blank Chase Manhattan Bank checks. A wry, smart nod to the modern equations of national -- and personal -- self-image and self-interest with economic standing.

Harbison's "Where My Clothes Come From" (2004) resolves the old post- minimalist problem of how to justify a scattering of form. Taking labels from his own mass-marketed clothes, Harbison has pinned them to the wall in patterns conforming to their countries of origin, producing a loose, patchy map of industrial globalization from an individual American consumer's perspective.

We can barely recognize the pattern of continents in the dither of labels, pinned in place like the specimens of a disorganized butterfly collector.

In a different context, James Gouldthorpe's watercolor and ink images on paper might not look like political art at all; it barely does here.

His "meat, donuts and guns" spans the longest gallery wall. With the brio of a gifted sign painter, Gouldthorpe has turned out briskly summary pictures of hunters and game, cuts of meat, campers and road food. Paint drips give many of the images a rained-on look.

Gouldthorpe maintains a relaxed balance between description and a self- conscious hand that faintly evokes the bad faith of advertising and anyone who takes it to heart.

Harrell Fletcher all over: Harrell Fletcher -- the one Bay Area artist tapped for the 2004 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art -- points to the new direction of activist art. Or so one hopes.

At Jack Hanley, Fletcher shows a series of unique posters advertising his friend Shaun O'Dell's considerably less involving show of drawings at Hanley's other space next door. Each poster features an enigmatic photograph taken by Fletcher in O'Dell's apartment.

Fletcher's one-of-a-kind posters intervene in the promotional devices of the art world and raise stuff usually belittled as ephemera to the status of artworks.

Two video pieces display Fletcher's quirky angle of vision on the world. One compiles 6,000 shots of the sun -- unmasked as the star that it is -- blindingly reflected in car windshields and other bright surfaces.

The collegial spirit of the posters at Hanley appears more expansive in Fletcher's work at New Langton Arts. A series of handouts reminiscent of Report" collects in Xerox form various people's answers to his questions, supplemented by their drawings. "My idea," Fletcher says in exhibition notes, "was that these publications could take the place of art magazines, so that no one would have to read Artforum again."
The "Chris Doyle Report," the "Miranda July Report" and the "Charles Goldman Report" are keepers.

In the projected video "Hello There Friend," Fletcher shot a friend's pudgy hand opening like a blossom over and over to reveal some object found on the street: a feather, bottle caps, a push pin, a gorgeous tiny maple leaf, a crumpled plastic straw that uncurls and darts away. The video persuades the viewer to see a kind of openhandedness in the unkempt abundance of the material world.

Various pieces at Langton document public projects by Fletcher that show an inclusiveness and good-humored respect for ordinary folks to which most political art merely pretends.