Party Lines

Party Lines

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

Wayne Gonzales's "Self-Portrait as a Young Marine" (2004), for which the artist superimposed an image of his own face over an existing photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Judy Chicago Robert Mapplethorpe Martha Rosler Thomas Hirschhorn Jenny Holzer Emily Jacir Krzysztof Wodiczko Nancy Spero

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Political art doesn’t sell? Tell that to the socially conscious artists who are reshaping America’s vision of itself—and finding eager buyers in the process.

Four years ago this summer, during the GOP nominating convention in New York, Paul Chan helped organize a group of artists and activists called the Friends of William Blake, which distributed some 25,000 copies of an alternative tourist guide to the city. Designed as a foldout map of Manhattan, the People’s Guide to the Republican National Convention highlighted basic visitor services but also identified locations related to the Republican politicos who were about to descend on the metropolis—hotels used by the various state delegations, offices of corporate donors and more. The map, one of the few artistic forms of protest during the convention, was created not for the conventioneers but for the demonstrators who were gearing up to offer a public counterpoint to the kickoff of the Bush administration’s campaign for a second term.

Although this subversive, grassroots endeavor garnered attention for Chan, the young artist was not well known in the mainstream gallery world. Four years later, in the midst of another presidential election season, Chan is still committed to political engagement—witness his staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot  in the wrecked heart of post-Katrina New Orleans last November—but his professional situation has changed dramatically: Last year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum mounted a major show of his digital animations, light projections and drawings; this spring, the New Museum, in New York, showcased The 7 Lights, an elegiac cycle of projections meditating on destruction and loss, debuted in May 2007 at the Serpentine Gallery, in London; and this fall, Chan will present a new large-scale animation piece for his much-anticipated second solo show at the Greene Naftali gallery, in New York.

There is often an assumption that the market is at best indifferent—and at worst, hostile—to political art. So Chan’s career trajectory prompts the question: Is addressing the issues of the day really the commercial liability conventional wisdom would suggest? “Generally, I think the market loves art that loves the market,” says Carol Greene, the director of Greene Naftali, but “I think people are dying for content right now.” She adds that an artist like Chan, whose pieces have “no direct engagement with how the market functions,” has been able to carve out a strong collecting base because “there are so many points of access in his work. Here’s an artist who wants to talk about the world, he wants to talk about ideas.”

Chan is not unique. Today’s widespread dissatisfaction with social and political conditions—a CBS/New York Times poll released in May found that more than 80 percent of Americans believed the country was headed in the wrong direction—may not have coalesced into a popular cultural force, as it did in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But artists at the highest levels consistently pose difficult questions about politics and society. Indeed, the run-up to this year’s election has seen a number of politically charged exhibitions, in prominent New York venues, of work by established names, including Raymond Pettibon’s scathing anti-Bush show last fall at the David Zwirner gallery and a miniretrospective of the legendary provocateur Hans Haacke at the Paula Cooper Gallery earlier this year.

Younger artists have also made issues-oriented outings. In her show this spring at the Elizabeth Dee gallery, the German-born, New York–based Josephine Meckseper used video and the vocabulary of department-store displays to examine what the gallery release called “totalitarianism in the current era of war, globalization and domestic crisis.” The exhibition opened, symbolically, on May Day. And, as with Chan, political engagement has not meant market limitation. “To be able to develop someone like Josephine from the very beginning of her career, when she had very few collectors, to placing her work for over $100,000 is a sign of success in my mind,” says Dee.

Socially conscious artwork, both historical and contemporary, is clearly on the minds of curators, too. Recent provocative traveling exhibitions include “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” a survey organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and, at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, “Brave New Worlds,” a consideration of the state of political consciousness in the U.S. and abroad. In Robert Storr’s “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind” section of the 2007 Venice Biennale, there were a large number of politically inflected works, from the tortured faces hanging from chains and ribbons in Nancy Spero’s Maypole/Take no Prisoners, to Paolo Canevari’s video of a teenager kicking a skull like a soccer ball outside a bombed-out Serbian building. Also notable was Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film, 2005, an ongoing text-and-photo project about the assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, for which the artist received a Golden Lion award.