Poetical Political
Simon Lee, London, UK
This strong group show at Simon Lee tackles one of the major themes of the summer, politically engaged art. The exhibition locates its political critique at the level of the individual, focusing on media influence, consumerism and excess irony in Pop culture. (The titles of two Claire Fontaine works shown, You Pay For Your Pleasure and The Educated Consumer is Our Best Customer (both 2007), could be pro-capitalist t-shirt slogans.) Curated by David Thorp, ‘Poetical Political’ takes its title from the key 1960s mantra ‘the personal is political’, drawing together a number of artists whose practices owe much to that generation: the young New Yorker Jordan Wolfson, the Paris collective Claire Fontaine, the British artist Kate Davis, and Olaf Nicolai, who serves here as the German éminence grise.
The past functions as a major leitmotif for the artists, their works speaking of an unfulfilled promise of the past rather than revealing an activist anger focused on the present. Davis’s installation, Waiting in 1972; What about 2007? (2007), a drawing of a nude woman surrounded by a ring of impaled television sets, directs its frustration as much at the media representation of women as at the complacency of feminism today. Claire Fontaine show Untitled (Identité, Tradition et Souveraineté) (2007), three altered versions of the French flag that look like battle-worn standards from 1789. Nicolai’s diptych of a Vogue cover promises a new body, new clothes, even a new you for the new millennium; the work was made last year. And Wolfson’s 16-mm film uses a long speech from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; it shows a man translating the speech, widely recognized to be Chaplin’s own anti-Nazi polemic, which was once hidden within the fictional register of the film. The work – a hit at last year’s Whitney Biennial – concentrates as much on the matter of encoding as on what is actually said.
I mention this retrospective feel only to make a sour grapes point about a show full of intelligent, skilfully done work. The geographical, generational, and technical diversity of the artists suggests the strength of ‘personal political’ or ‘poetic conceptualism’ as a working method today. Yet grouping these four artists together under the slogan wears down the specificity of each, making equivalences that are not to their favour – I would much rather have seen the artists in very tiny, very short solo shows. Rather than reinvigorating political activism at an individual level, ‘Poetical Political’ makes it clear that the recent attempts to curate politically, from documenta to ‘Memorial to the Iraq War’ at the ICA, have yet to find a persuasive contemporary mode in which to speak.
Melissa Gronlund
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