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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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.

Despite the increased visibility of political art, its relationship with the marketplace remains complicated. When asked how he would describe the interaction, Chan says wryly, “Think Iran-Contra.” Few of those who make such pieces—and obviously even fewer of the dealers who represent them—would characterize selling it as trading with the enemy. But there is general agreement that political art does present certain marketing challenges, not the least of which is the designation itself.

“I’m not sure political art is a term that’s all that useful,” says Mary Sabbatino, the vice president of the New York branch of Paris’s Galerie Lelong, “even though we understand that certain works obviously fall under that rubric more than others do.” The gallery has long relationships with several artists whose oeuvres consistently address social and political issues, including Alfredo Jaar, Spero and Krzysztof Wodiczko. For the Boston–based Wodiczko’s last show at the gallery, in 2005, he presented “If You See Something … ,” a large indoor projection-and-audio installation that gave voice to victims of civil-liberty abuses after 9/11. “Krzysztof is always discussing his work in terms of public space and the access to public speech,” Sabbatino says.

Political art is a heterogeneous entity, and any attempt to define it, much less to gauge its market temperature, is difficult. In the United States in the late 1960s, a time of student uprisings and the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War and to racism was expressed within the art world via activist organizations such as the Art Workers’ Coalition, GAAG (the Guerilla Art Action Group) and WAR (Women Artists in Revolution). Efforts to bring about reform went hand in hand with new art forms that explicitly took on political issues: the social critiques of such first-generation feminist artists as Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Miriam Schapiro and Martha Rosler; the 1970s interrogations of image and language by Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and others; and the probing of sexual and identity politics in the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, Andres Serrano and David Wojnarowicz, which ignited the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s—remember Jesse Helms and the ousted National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer? All these forms rose, had an impact and then were, to varying degrees, brought into the mainstream by a fluid cultural marketplace always able to transform itself to accommodate ideas and things that had previously been outside its structure.

The art world has changed in many ways since those movements emerged. Some might argue that its increased pace and professionalism—not to mention the massive expansion of the audience for contemporary art—have tended to favor less contentious work. Yet the growth in the market has also, perhaps paradoxically, made it possible for efforts that might once have been relegated to the street to find their way into high-end commercial galleries. Think of Thomas Hirschhorn’s searing 2006 “Superficial Engagement,” which confronted viewers with arrays of gruesome photographs of Iraq War victims sharing space on stagelike platforms with headlines clipped from newspapers and nail-studded mannequins. The show was installed not at an alternative space, as it likely would have been in the ’70s, but at the blue-chip Gladstone Gallery, in Chelsea. Or consider Zwirner’s show last fall of Pettibon’s irate zinelike drawings, texts, wall paintings and collages—including one of Bush closing himself inside a flag-draped coffin—which was merciless in its attacks on the administration’s foreign policy.

“I’ve always been interested in political art,” says Zwirner, “not in art that tells you how to think and moralizes, but in political art that asks questions. I thought Raymond’s show was extraordinary—great political art is challenging both conceptually and intellectually and is also interesting to look at.” It was also a commercial success, despite what the dealer characterizes as “an art market that is dominated by aesthetics and not content.” He notes that the current collecting climate is somewhat contradictory: “You have a much broader art market than you had 10 years ago, but I’m not sure that the number of very serious collections has grown proportionally. It takes a while to get to deeper levels of discourse in a work of art.”

In fact, he says, it was the more-seasoned collectors who were drawn to Pettibon’s show. Similarly, the key buyers of Chan’s pieces—which start at around $4,500, for drawings, and go up to $60,000, for his animations, produced in editions of five—have been established collectors who, according to Carol Greene, “function at a very high level.” Moreover, they patronize museums. For instance, the New Jersey–based contemporary collector David Teiger bought Chan’s Happiness (finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization—an allegorical 17-minute digital animation referencing the works of the Outsider artist Henry Darger and of the 19th-century social theorist Charles Fourier, among others—and then promised it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Particular galleries have also maintained a commitment to political engagement. Paula Cooper was the first dealer to open in SoHo, and her inaugural exhibition, in October 1968, was a benefit for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The gallery’s political consciousness has remained strong over its four decades of operation, whether in offering itself for fundraising events or through its representation of artists who frequently probe social and political issues, such as Sam Durant, Wayne Gonzales and Haacke.

Steve Henry, the gallery’s longtime director, claims that political material today commands “an increasingly open and broader audience.” Haacke, for instance, has been making socially conscious pieces since the mid-1960s and has sold a lot of work in Europe but traditionally has had fewer takers Stateside. Henry says that is changing. “What we have found recently is a very strong interest in the work among institutions and collectors in the U.S.,” he notes, adding that the gallery recently sold Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, perhaps Haacke’s most famous Conceptual piece, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. This is quite a turnaround. Part of a series of text-and-image projects that questioned the role of political influence in New York’s low-income-housing market, the piece, tracking the financial transactions of a New York landlord named Harry Shapolsky, was slated for a 1971 solo exhibition of Haacke’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Its slant and subject matter, however, provoked the institution’s director at the time, Thomas Messer, to cancel the entire show, claiming it had “aims that lie beyond art.” After that, says Henry, Shapolsky et al. “was so tainted by the Guggenheim controversy that no [New York museum] wanted to touch it.” Haacke’s art is “still daring” and “has not lost its power to provoke,” says Donna De Salvo, the chief curator and associate director of programs at the Whitney, “but museums and the public are perhaps more able now to grapple with [the critique] that is at the heart of his work.”

Henry, too, attributes some of the new institutional interest in politically charged work to the different tenor of the times. “I think that when you look back 20 years to the culture wars,” he says, “there was no way an American museum could collect a politically challenging work. They just couldn’t, for risk of losing support, both from the private side and from the government. And the legacy of that was still being felt not too long ago—museums were afraid to take that on because they would be subject to such scrutiny and criticism.” He mentions that the gallery also recently sold a work by the Lebanese artist Walid Raad from a series examining military activity in Beirut in the 1970s to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C. Ten or even five years ago, Henry notes, the Smithsonian’s branch for contemporary art would have been unlikely to have acquired a work by an artist “who is critical of Middle East policy on all sides. It’s quite surprising.”

“I think the strength of the market and perhaps even the number of institutions showing contemporary art can lead to the impression that art’s role as a commodity to be bought and sold … has surpassed its ability to tackle difficult political and social concerns,” says Anne Ellegood, a curator at the Hirshhorn. “But I don’t think this is actually true when you look at artistic production. Many artists—and curators and institutions—may even say they feel a certain responsibility to address social issues and put them forward for contemplation and discussion.”

For the dealer Elizabeth Dee, this sense of commitment to furthering political discourse has become part of her business model. The decision to sign such artists as Meckseper, Adrian Piper and others, Dee says, “was a calculated risk on my part, but at a certain point, the work I was most interested in and excited about was speaking to critical issues—issues of politics, of the economy, of the problem of … the relationship of the marketplace to artistic practice.” Moreover, she adds, representing someone like Piper—long celebrated in the political-art community for her witty, fearless examinations of race and gender—is “a real coup.”

Piper, who has shown in New York with such dealers as John Weber and Paula Cooper, had a much-touted debut at Dee’s Chelsea gallery this past spring, her first solo show in the city since a 1999 retrospective at the New Museum. Entitled “Everything,” the exhibition displayed a mix of drawings, video, altered photographs and objects, plus a sculptural installation, all playing on themes of loss and on forms of personal, social and political violence. “We have a couple of major acquisitions that are coming to close,” Dee says of Piper’s work, adding that once those sales become public, they will “really change the nature of her position in the marketplace.”

Success has the potential to breed success—for the gallery, for the artist and for others who might pursue a similar path. “It encourages me,” Dee says. “I want to take more risks now and show work that might be outside the comfort levels of most people.”

So it seems that even in today’s thoroughly, some would say overly, professionalized art world, one can create art with a strong political content and still make a living. The lesson for young artists and dealers alike may be that to survive, accommodations are necessary. This was recognized some years ago by Haacke. “As to selling the works, let’s not forget that we are not living in an ideal society. One has to make adjustments to the world as it is. In order to reach a public, one has to enter the institutions where this discourse takes place,” he told an interviewer in 1984, adding, with a pragmatism that the younger generation hoping to enjoy his longevity might want to emulate: “If I had not made adjustments, by now I would be consumed by bitterness, and nothing would have been achieved.

"Party Lines" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.