Courtesy Judi Rotenberg Gallery, Boston

Dave Cole, "Knitting with Loaded Shotguns (Safeties Off)" (2008). Spun statuary bronze with 12-gauge shotguns, 72 x 102 x 37 in.

   November 2008 Reviews

Total Enlightenment

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Roger Hiorns

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Alexandra Grant

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Clare Woods

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

Joachim Koester

The Talamoni Collection

Amelie Von Wulffen

Jasper Johns Stunt at Sotheby’s Lands Tape Artist in Jail Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring A Showdown for Doig at Christie’s Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78 New York Sales Preview Picasso Leads Sotheby's Print Sale Healthy Results at Christie's Prints and Multiples Sale

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With US troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan for much of the past decade, one may safely assume that the “war on terror” has wound its way into the inner recesses of the collective American psyche. Dave Cole’s second solo exhibition, considered within the genealogy of postwar American art, suggests that all registers of civilian life have been radically transformed in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Cole articulates this new reality through his militarized adaptation of the Stars and Stripes. Updating Jasper Johns’s iconic artwork from the mid-1950s by using recovered bullets and bullet fragments in place of encaustic, oil, and collage, Bullet Flag (2008) suggests that the operations of power have lodged themselves within forms of national identity. This new world order lays the groundwork for Cole’s more eerily disturbing pieces, children’s clothes fabricated from Kevlar bulletproof vests worn in the Gulf War and “military issued” baby bottles cast from Babbitt metal. As far-fetched as these items may seem, they are only a step behind the adaptation of camouflage and Humvees as civilian commodities.

Art practice, Cole reveals, cannot be isolated from modern forms of power. In Knitting with Loaded Shotguns (Safeties Off) (2008), a large spun-bronze scarf knitted by the artist, as the title suggests, with two loaded 12-gauge shotguns, he implicates all material practices and means of visual representation, no matter how seemingly innocent, as equally involved in the production of America’s current martial mentality. This point is driven home in the sculptural readymade Baseball Study #6 (2008), in which a juxtaposed baseball and grenade (à la Johns’s Ballantine Ale) indict the rampant psychosis that often constitutes what is today considered “all-American.” "Dave Cole" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.