ART REVIEW : ‘Committed to Print’ Committed to the Left

Where are the right-to-lifers, the neo-Nazis, the evangelical Christians, the members of Ronnie and Nancy’s fan club? Not at the Museum of Modern Art, where a show of political art called “Committed to Print” continues to April 19.

Instead, the museum’s new ground-floor galleries for contemporary art are filled with views from the left. Diatribes against big business and slumlords, assaults on male aggression, anti-nuclear proclamations, arguments against U.S. involvement in Central America and pleas for racial equality are among the social and political themes addressed in recent American prints and artists’ books.

The slant reflects much more than curatorial preference. The history of political art is overwhelmingly weighted to the left. Exactly why that is so is open to question, but the artistic community has long been identified with liberal politics, and it’s difficult to come up with even a short list of well-known right-wing artists.

Curator Deborah Wye has assembled a long list of leftists--108 individuals and 16 collectives--for “Committed to Print.” And there’s no shortage of celebrated figures: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jonathan Borofsky, Leon Golub, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Edward Kienholz, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Frank Stella, to name a few. Politics is the life blood of some of them, but one of the messages of this complex and provocative show is that even artists who are more strongly connected with other themes are likely to delve into politics at some point in their careers.

Take Warhol, the late Pop genius who is often said to have sold out to commerce. Here he is at MOMA with a likeness of Richard Nixon intended to convince people to vote for George McGovern and a hazy print of an electric chair that--whatever Warhol’s intention--reads as a chilling indictment of capital punishment.

Borofsky, an idiosyncratic and immensely energetic talent who has included everything from a basketball court to towering, mechanized figures in his museum exhibitions, offers one of the show’s strongest images: a flag-waving nude man whose genitals have been replaced by weapons.

But “Committed to Print” is not a star show. So far as its reach goes, the exhibition is quite democratic in its mix of celebrities and unknowns, social and political issues and artistic approaches. Divided into an introductory section and six thematic categories, the exhibition simply lays out a plethora of material and entices viewers to read accompanying text.

Very little of the work impresses purists as art of great quality. Most of it is inexpensively produced and much of it has a fevered look, but it amounts to more than illustrated slogans. Over and over again, the work captures attention with a hard-hitting image and holds it long enough to deliver a message.

In the segment on “Economics/Class Struggle/The American Dream,” for example, we find Paul Marcus’ 4-by-6 1/2-foot woodcut dealing with the plight of an American farmer forced to sell his farm. The outdoor auction takes place in a toylike, spot-lighted scene overshadowed by giant vultures hovering and picking at a scarecrow in an adjacent field. Michael Lebron’s poster “Out in the Cold” divides space between a picture of a black woman and text describing what an urban renaissance can do to the working poor.

Rebecca Howland’s poster, depicting an octopus with an apartment building in every tentacle, recalls the 1980 “Real Estate Show,” an artist-organized exhibition in New York that addressed issues of tenants’ rights and land speculation. That particular event was held in an abandoned city building, but it is typical of collaborative efforts that often gather force in political art.

One artists’ group, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, was organized to “demonstrate the political effectiveness of image making.” “Concrete Oasis,” the group’s project on housing problems, led to a show of posters by 87 artists, 14 of which were selected for a limited-edition portfolio. One example, Robert Longo’s “Monument to the Homeless,” has names of homeless people who have died inscribed on tombstone/gateposts of an inaccessible city.

Another collective, called Group Material, shows a selection of works from a project called “Subculture” that installed posters on 1,400 advertising spaces of subway cars. Instead of contemplating products to buy, riders were asked to consider such issues as U.S. interests in Central America, the menace of television and the prospect of a nuclear holocaust.

The show roughly surveys the period from 1960 to 1987, from the Kennedy presidency and the entrance of the birth control pill to Iran Contra and AIDS. Without the cushion of history, the raw images and searing commentary in “Committed to Print” are sure to offend part of the museum-going public. Even aficionados of political art may be relieved to find some relatively subtle statements among the screams of outrage--say, Rauschenberg’s poetically affecting “Earth Day” lithograph and Nauman’s backwards spelling of war on a blackboard-like print.

In the end, the exhibition makes its point not in masterpieces but cumulative impact. Rather like a train that runs through all the grubby neighborhoods and trouble spots of the world, picking up the mistreated and the malcontents, it steams to the conclusion that political art is alive and fighting back. If nothing else, “Committed to Print” serves as an antidote to the notion that art is a fashionable commodity available only to the rich.