Heady Art of Propaganda

If propaganda, as the Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange defined it, is simply whatever one believes in strongly, then we are all propagandists for our favorite causes. But some propaganda transcends its political or social agenda to achieve a formal intensity that could stand alone but that ultimately empowers that agenda.

Leonilo Doloricon’s prints, at the Centro Cultural de la Raza in a two-person show called “La Mano Grafica” with Diego Marcial Rios, abound with that two-pronged power--political and visual--that only the best socially committed art possesses.

Doloricon lives in the Philippines, and some of his work addresses political issues particular to his homeland, such as the degenerative impact of American military bases there. Most of the time, however, Doloricon adopts a more universalist stance, siding with the proletariat and peasant against the forces of oppression, the capitalist landowners and big businessmen. By shying away from specifics and reiterating the basic terms of the class struggle, Doloricon makes his art more broadly accessible and applicable to those beyond the Philippines’ borders.

His strategies are not unique; the use of reductive, repetitive forms has a parallel in verbal propaganda with its short, memorable slogans. But Doloricon invests his images with such purpose, energy and dynamism that the originality of his approach matters less than its tremendous visual and visceral impact.

Doloricon has adapted many of the images and themes used by German printmakers of the 1920s and ‘30s. Like them, he has consciously chosen a medium that can reach a broad audience directly and cheaply, through posters, broadsides and illustrations.

George Grosz appears to be the artist’s most direct model. Doloricon’s linocut titled “Class Struggle” echoes precisely the visual scheme of a Grosz print from the 1920s, in which the stoic persistence of the working class is contrasted with the grotesque, licentious indulgences of the bourgeoisie. In the bottom half of Doloricon’s bisected image, a family of six shares a meager repast: a single, skeletal fish. Above them cavort the upper classes, playing cards, drinking and groping women, satisfying their hunger for profit, power and sex.

In another scathing print, “Labor’s New Christ,” Doloricon exposes the base impulses of the bourgeoisie by endowing them with the rude features of animals, another method favored by Grosz. Here, the capitalists in their suits sport pig snouts, and several pigs feed at a trough filled by the dripping blood of the sacrificial worker.

The wrenching power of Kathe Kollwitz’s prints of the inter-war years also comes to mind in this show, especially in Doloricon’s compassionate depiction of the family. Father, mother and children often form a tight visual knot in these prints, an inviolable unit of power. When that compact is violated, the tragedy has repercussions both personally and politically, as suggested by Doloricon’s image of workers shot down in a demonstration. Those who mourn the fallen men are not just honoring their cause, but are parents mourning the loss of their own children.

Whether in black and white or in a few deep colors, Doloricon’s prints pulsate with unequivocal power. The gouged lines of the linocut create sweeping directional force, and the images, like bullets, race to their targets. Such analogies are not gratuitous in Doloricon’s work, where the arrangement of visual forms frequently echoes the structures of society that he is critiquing. It is a world of haves and have-nots, of the powerful few and the powerless many--a world of extreme contrasts represented in the dramatically opposing colors of black and white.

The drawings and prints of Diego Marcial Rios are more metaphorical than Doloricon’s. Though the terrors that Rios examines are no less real, they have the quality of futuristic, phantasmagoric visions rather than palpable problems of the here and now. Torture, interrogation, violence and threat crowd the stage in Rios’ theatrical scenarios. Flames and claws accompany the more conventional weapons of warplanes, guns, bombs--as both wreak devastation on a scarred, apocalyptic landscape.

Rios, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, focuses on power gone amok, and his warrior figures are beastly, mutant versions of the military general. Some bear scales in place of skin, their joints look mechanically fastened, and their faces are masks of leather, scales and spikes. They are the guardians of this new horrific world, a godless place of lies and terror. While futuristic in feel, their laced boots and plated armor also hark back to medieval torturers. Rios tries, however, to root his characters in the present with such titles as “We Must Make Kinder, Gentler Nations,” with all of their obvious political implications.

Like Doloricon, Rios achieves a kind of equity between the world he portrays and the way he portrays it. Rios describes a society governed by the notion of overkill, and his images, too, are governed by excess. They are powerful, though overwrought, and occasionally as dismissible as science-fiction fantasies. Together with Doloricon’s more earthy proclamations, however, they make a fine, fiery show, well curated by the Centro’s Patricio Chavez and guest co-curators Gary David Ghirardi and Terry Olson.

* Centro Cultural de la Raza, Balboa Park, through Sept. 20. Open Wednesday through Sunday, noon-5.

ART NOTES

Installation Gallery is back in action, having quickly and quietly mounted a new exhibition, Robert Feeley’s “Dull Sloth.” The show, whose latex body casts evoke shades of that hot young sculptor Kiki Smith, will run through Aug. 28 at the Mission Brewery Plaza, 2150 W. Washington, Suite 406. In September, Installation will launch its most ambitious program in recent years, “In/Site 92,” a series of installations taking place at 22 venues in San Diego and Tijuana. A calendar of events with a guide to the shows will be published soon. . . .

Local artist Anna O’Cain has an installation on view now at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyo.