ART : Symbolism Is Etched in Stones : Installation at UCI focuses on corporate power, anti-union activities and the media, using solid elements to build a case.

Our text today: Never underestimate the power of symbolism. Whether it is in the hands of the Left or the Right, whether it celebrates the righteous overthrow of oppression or the justified application of force, symbols provide a rallying point--so long as you understand the context.

“Monumental Fictions and Lost Histories: Chicago Stories”--an installation by Deborah Bright and Nancy Gonchar at UC Irvine’s Fine Art Gallery through April 27--employs a number of devices to focus attention on corporate power and anti-union strategies, and the likelihood that news reflecting unfavorably on a major daily newspaper’s own corporate actions will not be printed on its pages.

The key symbols are a group of stones arrayed on the floor, photographs of various architectural details of the Chicago Tribune building, and a series of projected slides describing the 1886 Haymarket Riot and the rival statues commemorating both sides of the event. Appropriately enough, stacks of copies of an eight-page tabloid “newspaper” (written by Bright) provide deep background on events and ideas that the visual aids can only summarize or suggest.

The human linchpin of the piece is Col. Robert R. McCormick, the dapper personification of ultraconservative journalism whose statue (replicated in the installation by a three-dimensional photograph) stands in the Tribune building. McCormick was the publisher of the Chicago Tribune from 1914 to 1955. He was also the grand-nephew of reaper magnate Cyrus McCormick, whose company policies led to a chain of events that provoked the Haymarket Riot.

In the 1920s, when the newspaper’s Beaux-Arts Tribune Tower was designed and built, Robert McCormick asked international correspondents and foreign dignitaries to send him fragments of stone, marble and brick from famous buildings around the globe, so they could be embedded in the tower’s exterior walls.

Photographs of some of these building fragments--from St. Peter’s in Rome, Westminster Abbey in London, the Cologne cathedral, the Parthenon in Athens, an ancient temple in China’s Hunan Province, and so forth--are arranged to form a pyramid on one wall of the UCI gallery.

As symbols, the fragments in the Tribune Tower--chosen by the avowedly isolationist publisher--proclaim the United States in the 20th Century as the pinnacle of historical and global achievement, able to colonize the far-flung glories of the past at will.

The stones on the floor of the installation symbolize something quite different. These fragments are labeled with names of American cities (Jamestown, Philadelphia, Ludlow), a park (Tomkins Square, in New York) and a notorious factory (Triangle Shirtwaist, also in New York).

Triangle is the tip-off to this otherwise mysterious assembly of place names: It is known primarily for the fire that broke out in 1911, causing the deaths of 154 women workers. They died in the fire or from jumping out the windows--because the doors were locked by management to keep the workers at work.

The other stones commemorate other events in U.S. labor history. (Jamestown, for example, was the site of the first American strike, in 1619, when a group of Polish workers refused to work until they received voting rights equal to those of English settlers.)

Stones also play a role in the infamous Haymarket Riot on May 4, 1886, long viewed as proof of the wild-eyed radicalism of the labor movement. It began as a meeting protesting the police shooting of workers who had thrown stones and bricks at strikebreakers employed at the McCormick Reaper Works, where a lockout had been declared several months earlier.

Near the end of the meeting, Bright relates, when the crowd had shrunk to a few hundred people, an organizer for the International Working People’s Assn. called for revenge against the police. Alerted, the police rallied and ordered the group to disperse. Then someone threw a bomb into the gathering, which provoked the police--whose numbers eventually swelled to about 1,000--to shoot into the crowd and club anyone who stuck around. Seven officers were killed, along with at least four workers.

“The pro-business press whipped public opinion into hysteria,” Bright writes. Eight labor leaders (mostly immigrants) were arrested. Ultimately, four were hanged, one killed himself and three more were pardoned seven years later by a new governor, John Peter Altgeld, who blamed the police and press for their xenophobia.

The Chicago Tribune responded that Altgeld “does not reason like an American.”

Other symbolic stones holding bronze monuments are also part of this story. On the Haymarket Martyrs Monument in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, a cloaked female figure of Justice holds a laurel wreath above the head of a dying man. An inscription quotes the last words of one of the executed men: “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today.”

A group of Chicago businessmen erected their own statue--modeled after the police inspector who led the bloody crackdown--on the Haymarket site. This memorial, which was moved four times and is now at a police training center, was a target of 1960s protests, including two in which the statue was blown up, prompting then-Mayor Richard J. Daley to put the reconstructed statue under 24-hour guard.

Fast-forward to July, 1985, when some 1,000 production workers from three unions struck the Tribune. The key issue, according to a news brief that ran in the Los Angeles Times a few days later, was the Tribune Co.’s demand to be allowed to transfer printers to other departments because modernization of the presses left them with insufficient work to do.

As Bright describes the issue, however, the pressmen had helped to develop the new, computerized presses and willingly transferred to other departments when automation made jobs redundant.

Meanwhile, Bright says, the Tribune had brought in new company executives to break the three unions, whose contracts were coming up for renewal in the mid-’80s. Rather than negotiate with the workers, the new director of employee relations demanded (among other things) to replace full-time people with part-timers, establish a three-tiered pay scale, reduce benefits and eliminate the typographers’ pension plan.

After the walkout, Bright reports, the Tribune changed its legal representation to a firm whose specialty was union-busting, and subscribed to Southern Production Program Inc., a firm that advises management on strike tactics.

The videotape playing in the installation is one of the firm’s products. Panning over the bunker-like exterior of the Tribune’s Freedom Center printing plant, it reveals guard booths (the video monitor in the installation is housed in a replica of one of these structures), gargoyle-like video surveillance cameras and the barbed-wire fence enclosing the plant. These objects--which conceivably might have been installed primarily to discourage thieves or drug dealers from the surrounding neighborhood--have a strong symbolic value no matter what their actual use.

The voice-over makes such remarks as “tight security operations are an absolute must,” and “the public will accept a statement from a responsible businessman as having more value than a responsible labor official.”

The newspaper is advised to run no news items on the strike “after the first or second days” and to have “at least two levelheaded men” record any “curse words” or “threats” uttered by strikers. Most ominously, the paper is instructed to keep a file “of all persons who might be expected to go on strike,” listing the color and make of their cars, their home addresses and physical descriptions.

In the tabloid, Bright discusses the effect the strike has had on the Chicago Tribune in subsequent years. While management lauded markedly increased percentages of women and minority production workers, they glossed over the fact that virtually the entire skilled work force with its many years of seniority had been replaced by economically deprived young people with little or no newspaper experience.

Working part time “for approximately half the wages and without health and pension benefits enjoyed by former employees,” Bright reports, these employees perform small, isolated tasks that don’t involve “any understanding of the overall production process,” which “rests solely with management.”

“Monumental Fictions” works very well on an unemotional, rational level to draw attention to portions of American labor history that have been whitewashed or ignored in books and the media. Bright (who teaches photography at the Rhode Island School of Design) and Gonchar (associate director and curator of the University Art Museum at the State University of New York at Binghamton) offer crisply documented support for their largely positive picture of union activity and damning view of Tribune management tactics.

Given the aura of sober, unembellished fact that permeates the work, however, its one-sidedness almost escapes notice. Just as in the original newspaper accounts of the strike, fact shaded by opinion emerges as pure truth. Would it have been out of place to take the journalistic approach one step further, and ask Tribune management for comment on the issues raised in the piece? Are there other media companies that can be said to give their work force, unionized or not, a fairly square deal? Are union demands ever inappropriate?

Of course, it can be argued that, since the Tribune (and other papers) successfully control the content and positioning of news relating to their management difficulties, labor’s point of view deserves an equally biased public forum of its own. Yet in today’s troubling climate of immense racial and social divisiveness--when we are constantly called upon to be squarely on one side or the other of any given issue, no matter how complex--a modicum of even-handedness can be a very welcome thing.

In any case, the best thing about this remarkably far-reaching installation is its ability to serve as the fulcrum for open discussion regarding the status of workers’ roles and rights today, and the responsibility of newspapers to tell their own labor-management stories as fully as they report on other matters.