Irvine's 'Regime Change': Strikingly Blunt
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 7, 2008
Like a yard sign, the latest art exhibition at Irvine Contemporary wears its political heart on its sleeve.
For one thing, there's the five-foot-tall portrait of President-elect Barack Obama staring down visitors from the back of the gallery. Chances are it's not the first place you've seen it. Captioned here with the single word "Hope," the iconic image by artist Shepard Fairey has been available for free download during the run-up to the presidential election as a viral marketing tool. Another large version, captioned "Progress," is plastered to the wall of a building on 14th Street NW, just north of U Street.
Then there's the little matter of the show's title, "Regime Change Starts at Home." Anyone in this town who doesn't get the dig at the outgoing Republican administration's foreign policy hasn't been paying attention. Along with Fairey, artists Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky) and Al Farrow have a bone to pick -- in Farrow's case, quite literally -- with business as usual.
Fairey is the best known of the three, and his works pack a graphic punch. Three silkscreens from his "Duality of Humanity" series use Vietnam-era photographs of soldiers to contrast the elusiveness of peace with the certainty of war. Bandoliers of bullets and guns are paired with peace signs in each. Fairey is sometimes accused of plagiarism (he freely lifts imagery from other artists' work and repurposes it), but the fact that you recognize it, instantly and often from across the street, is the point. Andy Warhol did the same thing.
In terms of visual impact, Fairey's work is striking, but it's not the best that "Regime Change" has to offer. Nor is Miller's, which consists of several posters hawking something called a "Manifesto for the People's Republic of Antarctica" and an 18-minute film, "North/South, Part 1." All are parts of a larger project touching on themes of global warming and land squabbles. But the points Miller is trying to make are blunted, especially compared with Fairey, whose work hits you in the face like a 2-by-4. "True North is the market's unregulated access to the vanishing ice!" screams one of the enigmatic titles in Miller's film, which appropriates silent-film footage about polar exploration.
Farrow's work, neither obscure nor overly obvious, is the most rewarding, visually and conceptually. Fashioned almost entirely from guns, bullets and artillery shells, the artist's scale architectural models, based on old churches, synagogues and mosques, can't be called subtle. Yet the historical link between organized religion and war is only part of the story.
Three of Farrow's pieces come from a series of reliquaries in which the artist incorporates bones from real fingers. Called, alternately, "Trigger Finger of Santa Guerro" or "Trigger Finger of Santo Guerro" -- the names refer literally to "holy war" -- the sculptures are all about blame. Yet it's not just Judaism, Islam or Christianity that gets the rap for war. It isn't even one political party over another.
Rather, the sense you get when looking at Farrow's ghoulish yet powerful art is that its cold, bony fingers -- if they're pointing at anyone -- are pointing at you.
