/ARTS WEEKLY/US: Exhibit Holds Mirror to Follies of U.S. ‘Empire’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Katherine Stapp

NEW YORK, Jul 29 2003 (IPS) - The U.S. public may be happily impervious to world opinion – only about 14 percent even hold passports – but a new museum exhibit here forcefully brings home the good, bad and ugly perceptions that define the last "superpower" for the other six billion people on the planet.

The theory behind the ‘The American Effect’, now at the Whitney museum of contemporary art in Midtown Manhattan, is to illuminate the psychological impacts of U.S. influence on trade, culture, politics and human rights.

"Since the end of the Cold War, America has become more and more explicit about its right to act unilaterally – and even preemptively – to maintain its security and economic interests through military action," according to curator Lawrence Rinder. "The recent invasion of Iraq in the absence of United Nations support exemplifies this emerging doctrine."

"Reflected here are some of the direct consequences of America’s ubiquitous military presence, de facto economic control and pervasive cultural influence. In this age of American Empire, the image of the United States has taken on almost mythic dimensions, symbolising, consciously or unconsciously, deeply held personal fantasies and fears," he says.

Globe-trotting for a year, Rinder amassed works from 47 artists and filmmakers, and three collaborative groups, from 30 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, South and North America. Some had traveled to and even lived in the United States; others had never been here personally, but formed strong opinions nonetheless.

All the works were composed in the period following the end of Cold War and the rise of U.S. supremacy in the 1990s.

"The timing of ‘The American Effect’ is very much related to a renewed urgency about this subject, with America now increasingly coming to terms with how it is perceived abroad," says Maxwell Anderson, the Whitney’s director.

Works run the gamut from the slyly mocking to the openly scathing.

One of the funniest pieces, by French artist Gilles Barbier, stars life-sized wax dummies of beloved U.S. comic book icons like Superman, Wonder Woman and the Incredible Hulk, now elderly and decrepit, reduced to staring at the black-and-white television in a nursing home.

Very few of the show’s works are so light-hearted, however. Most refer, directly or indirectly, to the United States’ imperialistic ambitions and military meddling around the globe.

Take Filipino artist Alfredo Esquillo Jr.’s oil portrait of what at first appears to be a loving mother holding a toddler on her knee. A closer inspection reveals that the face peeking through the mother’s bonnet is actually that of U.S. President William McKinley, who annexed the Philippines in a bloody assault from 1899-1901. McKinley’s grasping fingers are tipped with razor-sharp eagle talons, and a gun pokes out of his sleeve.

Not surprisingly, many of the works refer to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and their (ongoing) aftermath.

Chilean artist Cristobal Lehyt contrasts slides of the viewing platform at Ground Zero and a Chilean military school, an allusion to the fact that the World Trade Centre bombing and the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of democratically-elected president Salvatore Allende in 1973 both took place on Sep. 11.

"Take It or Leave It", by Muhammad Imran Qureshi of Hyderabad, Pakistan, uses gold leaf and a thick pigment called gouache to depict boxlike forms, one decorated in camouflage and the other in leaves, to symbolise the bombs and food aid packages that the U.S. Air Force dropped on Afghan villages.

Other works, like a pair of scissors looming over a landscape identified by the artist as Iraq, also reflect this sense of outrage that "America is trying to make policies for the whole world (with) military actions everywhere, trying to resolve everything by force or by certain power," Qureshi says.

Zhou Tiehai’s painting "Libertas, Dei Te Servent!" ("Long Live Liberty!") takes ‘Time’ magazine’s cover picture of New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and recasts it in the style of an idealised "great leader" portrait, with a wash of garish reds, purples and pinks.

The punch line is that concealed beneath the paint, Tiehai has added two balls of elephant dung – a cheeky reference to another museum exhibit four years ago that was nearly shut down by the city’s devoutly Catholic and authoritarian mayor because it depicted the Virgin Mary painted using elephant dung.

Other works look to earlier episodes of U.S. history for inspiration. Olu Oguibe, who was born in Nigeria and now lives in New York, contributed 22 ink sketches of various "types" found in the 19th century United States and how they might have been perceived by a British traveler.

Titled ‘Arawak Indian’, one reads: "The Indians are to be found in offices and colleges these days, although they naturally cannot compete with our kind on account of their natural defects and poor mental capabilities."

Another, ‘Negro Lady With Hat’, condescendingly proclaims: "Though far from the affluence and sophistication for which our ladies are known, occasionally there is to be found a dark lady of dignity among many across America."

The list of archetypes includes ‘Missionary’s Wife’, ‘Black Fellow Playing Harmonica’, ‘Asiatic Man From Indo-China’ and ‘Musulman in Carolina’.

In one of the most visually arresting compositions, Ouseman Sow, a Senegalese, constructed looming, muscular figures of wire, mud and cloth to dramatically recreate the last stand of Lt. Col George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn – a rare victory for indigenous Native Americans.

"Ironically, despite the pervasive global reach of the United States, many of its citizens know exceedingly little about the rest of the world, let alone what the rest of the world thinks of them," Rinder writes in a long preface to the exhibit’s catalogue.

"Sometimes, difficult images are precisely what are needed to remind us of our vulnerabilities and shock us into greater awareness of the world around us," he says.