Artist’s own FBI files turn the political into the personal

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. government employed thousands of snitches to rat out their neighbors, co-workers and friends. These low-level informants were nothing like spies in the movies. Misbehaving playboys, such as James Bond, did not fill their ranks. Nor did clear thinkers whose can-do efficiency approached that of the team players on “Mission Impossible.”

In the real world, these journeyman snoops were wannabe patriots. Neither trained as specialists nor hired full time, they were sorry folks whom someone had over the barrel or two-faced lowlifes government officials generally despised on principle -- and would have nothing to do with, if given their druthers.

But dark times made for odd bedfellows, and the two groups collaborated on a sad chapter of American history. At the Skirball Cultural Center, the unholy alliance between the federal government and anonymous Americans gets turned inside-out by Arnold Mesches, an 80-year-old artist who was shadowed by an army of snitches for the better part of three decades.

From 1945 to 1972, the FBI kept tabs on Mesches, recording the facts of his life as he lived it: working day jobs on a food truck, as a caterer and as a movie-set painter for “Tarzan”; getting married and having children; making paintings; going to bookstores; writing letters; attending meetings; marching in protests and joining picket lines; becoming a member of the Communist Party; and teaching art at institutions all over Los Angeles, including the People’s Education Center, the New School of Art, USC, Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA.

In 1999, through the Freedom of Information Act, Mesches gained access to his 760-page FBI file. This boxful of copied reports, pockmarked with blacked-out words, sentences and sections, became the raw material for his art. For the next three years, Mesches cut, pasted and painted, decorating the radically edited documents with abstract patterns, Polaroid snapshots, handwritten messages and a satirical stew of loosely brushed portraits of historical figures, newspaper images and consumer icons.

The result is “Arnold Mesches: FBI Files,” a rambunctious scrapbook of an exhibition of about 50 painted collages and seven acrylics on canvas. Organized by P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, N.Y., where it was seen last year, Mesches’ show is a poignant free-for-all fueled by the accidental poetry of the street. It doesn’t chronicle the daily grind of life as a politically engaged painter as much as it captures the atmosphere of absurdity, paranoia and near insanity that ran through a large slice of American life from the end of World War II to the thick of things in Vietnam.

Mesches’ spunky collages and scrappy, mix-and-match canvases resemble an illuminated manuscript made by an adventuresome thinker who’s too restless to settle down and too ticked off to bother with compositional niceties. Elaborately worked-up refinements are not Mesches’ forte. Rough around the edges -- and all the way through -- his pieced-together pictures embody urgency and anxiety. Individually and as a group, they convey the idea that if viewers don’t make connections between their lives and the world around them, they’ll never see the big picture.

“What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” could be the motto of Mesches’ mischievous exhibition. Rather than sitting back and bemoaning the notion that the government’s got all the power -- and that there’s not much one guy can do -- Mesches takes things into his own hands. He makes one of the most humorless branches of the federal government into an unwitting collaborator in the creation of art. Take that, his resilient works taunt: Even your most hapless agents are artists, fabricators of fictions that are more duplicitous and fanciful than anything a full-time artist could come up with.

Stylistically, Mesches’ works are not especially inventive. Most are frankly derivative, drawing heavily on the history of collage, Dada, Expressionism and Pop, with a hefty dose of image-and-text Conceptualism thrown in alongside a heaping helping of Pattern and Decoration ornamentation. It’s a heady, indigestible mixture that pays equal and open homage to Robert Rauschenberg’s ghostly, homemade transfers, Robert Heinecken’s fugitive distillations of appropriated images and Alexis Smith’s bittersweet evocations of damaged dreams.

A dyed-in-the-wool populist, Mesches animates his collisions of photocopied documents, cutout reproductions and hand-painted images with a sense of democratic accessibility. An ethos of see-for-yourself skepticism drives his gregarious art, which has much in common with the political posters that activists of all shapes and stripes have used to galvanize opinion and consolidate strength, particularly in the 1960s.

In a sense, Mesches is a propagandist with an intimate story to tell. His exhibition is autobiography via social engagement. If he didn’t invent this mongrel genre, his works stand out within it.

There’s nothing touchy-feely about them. Nostalgia and sentimentality are kept to a minimum. Behind-the-scenes intrigue, so sought after by voracious consumers of tell-all memoirs, is not to be found in Mesches’ levelheaded art, which insists that the most important battles are fought in the social space of a citizen’s public life, not in the privacy of his or her home. Of course there’s a connection between the two realms, but Mesches never turns his FBI dossier into a salacious expose or laundry list of juicy anecdotes.

The humor that suffuses his works is biting and wise. Irreverent and irrepressible, it’s leavened by a touch of melancholy that accompanies most glances at the recent past.

Although the exhibition has not been installed chronologically, it isn’t difficult to see how Mesches’ ambitions evolved over the three years he worked on this series. The pieces from 2001 are the most cluttered, cacophonous and unwieldy. All follow a horizontal format, but many include pictures and pages pasted atop one another so that their corners overlap. Their smeared stencils and smudged patterns have the crude simplicity of a kid’s potato print. Their frayed edges, broken borders and irregular grids recall crazy quilts that have been used so long and hard their patches have patches.

Most of Mesches’ works from 2002 are diptychs. They juxtapose a page taken from his FBI files with a similarly scaled painting. Fiery sunsets, hooded Klansmen, party delegates and rounded-up suspects contribute to the atmosphere of apocalyptic hysteria, which is sustained by the blacked-out files.

Only eight works from 2003 are displayed. Visually, they’re less crowded. Emotionally, they’re not as overwrought as the earliest works. Their tone is gentler. Several replace pages from Mesches’ FBI records with old newspaper clippings. Their stories lack the inflammatory aspect of the ill-gotten documents.

It is as if Mesches has laid to rest the pain and violation of being spied on by his own government and gone on to bigger questions. These pieces ask: How does history get made? How badly is the deck stacked against you? And what does one person’s best effort add up to?

It’s a generous legacy, the effects of which continue to ripple outward as Mesches’ works quietly inspire others to link art and citizenship in their imaginations -- and then in the world.

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‘Arnold Mesches: FBI Files’

Where: Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., L.A.

When: Tuesdays to Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Ends: March 28

Price: $6, $8

Contact: (310) 440-4500