Consider It an Artist’s Exit Poll

The Republicans are coming! The Republicans are coming! What will artists and art organizations do?

The question arose some time ago, when this quietly conservative Southern California city was announced as the site of the 1996 Republican convention, getting under way Monday in the downtown convention center. One thing artists decided to do--and have been doing since late May--is canvass residents and tourists visiting this sun-drenched Biggest Small Town in America in order to inquire: What does it mean to be an American today? And: What are the most pressing issues facing the American public?

Those are two of the questions posed by “Re: public/Listening to San Diego,” an installation at the Museum of Photographic Arts assembled by Los Angeles-based artist Richard Bolton. Working with a team of six other California artists, Bolton has turned the museum’s galleries into a kind of serendipitous research center for the study and display of what’s on some people’s minds these days, socially and politically speaking.

The show’s title, “Re: public,” is memorandum shorthand for “as regards the public,” but it’s also a pointed play on the term, Republican. I’ve no idea what Bolton’s political affiliation is, but I’d be willing to wager that neither he nor any of the six artists he invited to participate is registered in the GOP. And with good reason.

The Republican Party has, shall we say, a less than beneficent profile in the arts. Three simple dates tell the ghastly tale.

In 1989, Republican politicians launched their full-scale culture war, setting sights on the National Endowment for the Arts as vulnerably symbolic of cultural decay. False or sensationalized accusations were repeatedly volleyed at the tiny government agency.

By 1992, denunciations of the NEA had escalated to the status of centerpiece in Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential stump speech, helping his triumph in New Hampshire. The culture war even raged from the podium during his malevolent sermon to the Republican convention in Houston.

Finally, in 1995, the first Republican-led House and Senate in 40 years earned an enduring nickname--the Yahoo Congress--when it slashed the NEA’s budget to a point that has rendered the agency largely ineffectual.

Not exactly a track record to warm the hearts of artists and art organizations. But then, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Democrats in Washington haven’t displayed much backbone on the subject during the past seven years. Many trembled in their boots and voted with their Republican colleagues in the Yahoo Congress, while those who didn’t have rarely been vocal in their concern for the appropriateness of public arts support. The juggernaut of privatization continues.

“Re: public / Listening to San Diego” perceptively sees the withering of the public sphere as a fundamental danger to American society. The exhibition isn’t partisan. But it does capitalize on the presence of the Republican convention, using it as a springboard for its publicly minded activities.

The museum’s galleries are loosely divided into six areas. One is for a computer on which visitors can access the exhibition’s home page on the World Wide Web. Another is an informal theater, where videotapes being produced during the exhibition are projected; adjacent is a video library, where a visitor can choose from among those tapes and play them privately on a video monitor.

Visitors are also invited to respond in writing to the “Question of the Day” and to have their picture taken and stapled to the response, which is added to one of several notebooks that can be perused. In the rear is a work space for the seven participating artists, while a group of chairs forms a conversation circle in the center.

The style of the installation is urban-chic. Pumpkin colored paint, plywood shelving and accent walls, wood-and-glass tables and folding chairs put you in mind of obsolete industrial buildings that have long since been converted into postindustrial uses--restaurants, craft shops, desktop publishing business, architects’ and designers’ offices and, well, art galleries and artists’ lofts.

The conversation circle is the symbolic heart of the show, and maybe visitors actually sit down to engage in political dialogue with other visitors--though it’s hard to imagine. The home page on the Web simply points out the show that already surrounds you, and the opportunity to answer a “Question of the Day” seems vaguely onanistic.

It’s the short videos that really anchor the show. They are being taped, edited and produced throughout the three-month run (the show opened May 22 and closes Aug. 25). Although all feature sprawling San Diego and its people as location and participants, they vary widely in style, subject and viewpoint.

Danielle Michaelis, a graduate student at UC San Diego, is working with area teenagers to examine the mythologies of youth culture at a time when kids are increasingly conceived as a lucrative commercial market. L.A.-based Kaucyila Brooke has made an informal documentary, featuring straightforward interviews on the city’s lesbian bars as a charged example of where some women find a sense of community. Oakland’s Chris Johnson has built a video “question bridge,” in which ordinary citizens look into the TV camera and pose blunt social questions about the causes of drug addiction, the appropriateness of role models, the pathology of gang violence, the effects of welfare and so on, while other ordinary citizens step up to offer candid answers.

The San Diego-based team of Richard A. Lou and Robert J. Sanchez have made a very funny, faux-anthropological study of their volatile border town, casting themselves as scientists examining the shifting demographics that are producing the “Menudo-fest Destiny” of the region’s ongoing Latinization. And James Luna is looking at the ways in which the heroic figures of Ernest Hemingway, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac have shaped our image of masculine white culture.

Other tapes are in the works and will be added to the show in its closing weeks. I watched those by Brooke, Johnson, Lou and Sanchez, and all of them are marked by an ingratiating casualness that stands in sharp contrast to the sleekness of commercial television. Johnson’s conversational queries about pressing social issues, for example, remind you of daytime TV talk shows, but without the exploitative mediation of Oprah or Sally Jesse that transforms such programs into star vehicles for selling audiences to advertisers.

In Johnson’s tape, the speakers’ answers--and even their questions--range from insightful to dumb, provocative to loony. Almost always, though, you’re aware that the viewpoints have already been shaped by past encounters with the ubiquitous lens of mass media.

That’s why “Re: public” is appropriate for a museum of photographic arts. The show seems principally concerned with the fate of citizen speech in an era when politics are inevitably molded according to the complex contours of corporate media.

The Republican convention, like the Democratic convention in Chicago later this month, will be carefully scripted for television. It’s “a political variety show,” as one GOP organizer has described the event.

To maximize audience exposure to what amounts to a mega-infomercial, which will only get daily excerpts from the networks’ news divisions, the Republican convention also will be broadcast gavel-to-gavel on cable. Using a $1.3-million gift from Amway Corp., which in 1994 made the largest corporate political donation in history (a $2.5-million gift to the Republican National Committee), the taxpayer-funded San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau has purchased time on televangelist and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson’s Family Channel to present the show in its entirety. Democrats are contesting the legality of the gift.

Against this daunting, high-profile, corporate-manufactured virtual community, the modest little exhibition at the museum gallantly strives to give a glimpse of an authentic community composed of individual citizens. The David of community video art is put up as one antidote to the Goliath of corporate television.

Not surprisingly, the noble effort seems fragile. Yet, more significantly, it also feels thin. “Re: public” isn’t an effective slingshot, perhaps because of an unexamined assumption at the core of its community concept.

“We are losing the ability to speak from our hearts,” artist Richard Bolton asserts in a pedagogically inflected introductory statement, written on a chalkboard at the entrance to the show. “We are losing the ability to listen to others whose lives are different from our own.”

It isn’t cynical to doubt that we ever actually possessed those hard-won abilities for heartfelt expression and open-minded curiosity about human differences, which we are now said to be losing. Exhorting faith in a restoration fantasy of a lost Golden Age might be inspirational for the Christian Coalition; but, finally, mimicking the tactic of the opposition is not a useful recipe for creating the public virtue of either statesmanship or leadership.

Public statesmanship and political leadership are what we need now, and why not artists in that vanguard? The genre of community arts is hamstrung because truly powerful works of art never represent existing communities; they create new ones instead. It’s art that makes civilization.

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* “RE: PUBLIC / LISTENING TO SAN DIEGO,” Museum of Photographic Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego. Dates: Daily, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Ends Aug. 25. Price: $3.50. Phone: (619) 238-7559. Internet: https: // www.artswire.org / Artswire / listen / republic.html