ART REVIEW : ‘Printed Art’: Return to Sender

Who but the Museum of Modern Art could have conceived, organized and sent on national tour so lame an exhibition as “Committed to Print: Social and Political Themes in Recent American Printed Art”?

Three little words in the show’s title wave a bright red flag, warning of bumpy terrain ahead. Try saying them, together with the museum’s acronym, all in one breath: social , political , recent , MOMA .

Doesn’t work, does it? The three adjectives, which stand in sharp and defiant contrast to virtually everything one has come to identify with the venerable New York institution, generate screeching dissonance.

Here is a show whose ostensible subject is the making of printed art that is passionately devoted to socio-political issues of great moment and pressing urgency. Yet, in the galleries of the Newport Harbor Art Museum, where it opened Sunday for a two-month run (the show has toured the country since spring of 1988), that passion feels drained and bloodless, those issues embalmed in an aspic of aesthetic delectation, and the urgent moment long past, dissolved in the sepia-toned reminiscences of nostalgia. Some interesting art is on view, but the show comes across as a visual history of its ineffectualness.

As might be expected in modern culture, where the most resonant aesthetic experience is anarchistic and destabilizing, the spectrum of opinion expressed in the show is quite narrow. Politically, the typically ascribed profile of the art world is liberal (the National Endowment for the Arts is currently under siege by conservatives precisely because the L-word looms so large among artists). For a succinct example, see Andy Warhol’s gaily colored, silk-screen portrait of a grinning Richard Nixon. Its blunt and witty message, scrawled below: “Vote McGovern.”

With nearly 170 individual prints and self-published books, by 108 artists and 16 collectives, the show is large. The period under study, which spans 1960 to 1987, is also expansive. General issues of race, gender, war, ecology and class meet numerous specific topics, such as the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, the early prison release of San Francisco murderer Dan White, the sword-of-Damocles threat of nuclear annihilation, U.S. incursions into Vietnam and Central America, and even garbage disposal problems in Manhattan.

The perspective on these myriad subjects is American--all the artists live and work in the United States--and very many of the artists are major: Vito Acconci, Jonathan Borofsky, Louise Bourgeois, Chris Burden, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and more. Likewise, very many of their prints are compelling.

Given the seeming comprehensiveness of this sprawling assemblage of prints and printed books, what makes it so lame as an exhibition? The answer will be found in a concise catalogue statement by the show’s organizer, Deborah Wye.

Outlining the parameters by which she chose to define her subject, the associate curator in the department of prints and illustrated books at the Museum of Modern Art writes: “The particular focus is on printed art by those working in the tradition of painting and sculpture, as opposed to those working primarily with the graphic-arts poster or with political caricature. Ephemeral printed art, such as banners, leaflets, postcards, stickers, and mailers remains an important vehicle for social and political commentary but is beyond the scope of this exhibition.”

Here’s a more concise translation: Don’t worry, this is a show of real art, not kitsch. The exhibition rates as high culture, not low.

The curator never explains just why those who work in “the tradition of painting and sculpture” ought to be singled out for historical review in a show of printed art with social and political themes. But, such wholly arbitrary declarations of what really counts--and, by extension, of what doesn’t--are by now to be expected to echo from the halls of MOMA, as from the Olympian heights.

Rather than share a platform with artists’ voices, the museum talks over them. It says messages are OK, as long as the tradition of painting and sculpture is being served. This may be a show that examines the visual imagery of solid liberal sentiment, but it is profoundly conservative in scope and ambition. The show is flat and dispirited because the one cancels out the other. The traditional divisions, categories and hierarchies of art are emphatically preserved in “Committed to Print.”

Leftist thought is thus fenced in by conservative orthodoxy, like some wild animal tranquilized for a petting zoo. In the 1960s--the turbulent moment identified by the show as having launched the gloriously political and social art now under genteel scrutiny--there was a word for this subtle surrender of individual integrity to institutional imperative. It went by the name of co-optation.

As always with debacles such as this, it is instructive to look at what has been kept out by the conservation of traditional hierarchies--to look at what has been relegated to the other side of the fence, so to speak. Here, what has been excluded is nothing less than the only living, breathing, socially and politically committed printed art that has actually had an impressive impact in our time. I am speaking of the work of the collective that has come to be called Gran Fury. From the show, you wouldn’t know the collective--or the subject of its work--existed.

The collective grew out of the activist AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in New York. In early 1987 its forerunner devised a graphic emblem incorporating the slogan “Silence=Death.” The slogan was printed in white sans serif type underneath a pink triangle on a black ground.

The pink triangle, sibling of the yellow star, was the symbol used to identify gay men in Nazi concentration camps. Then, the triangle pointed down; now, it points up, literally upending the traditional picture. The graphic emblem declares, simply and concisely, that in the time of AIDS the death camps are not forgotten. Actively remembering breaks the silence that equaled death in 1937, and that still equals death today.

This graphically pungent image may not have done much for the history of painting and sculpture, but its instantaneous, wholesale adoption as a logo by a hugely diverse community of people coast to coast is a clear indication of its cohesive power as a socially and politically successful work of printed art. (An illuminating, if occasionally pietistic, account of the relationship between AIDS activism and its exceptional visual imagery will be found in “AIDS-Demo-Graphics” by Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, to be published later this month by Bay Press, Seattle.) That’s a whole lot more than can be said for anything else in the voluminous “Committed to Print.”