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Fighting the Good Fight
John Haberin New York City
Jonathan Horowitz: We Fight to Build a Free World
Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson
"I think about being Jewish now, too." Guest curating for a museum has to be a learning experience. For Jonathan Horowitz, the lesson was personal.
It becomes the starting point for self-recognition—and for "We Fight to Build a Free World" at Jewish Museum. Just how close, though, are we to freedom, and just who are "we"? The show proposes a broad definition, but not everyone in it is playing along. Downtown, Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson are asking much the same questions about American politics. Their answers are not pretty. They might even point to a crime, and you may be among the bodies. 
Tired of galleries demanding appointments to an otherwise empty room? Still angry at the last one that turned you away? Shelley and Paulson may not welcome you in person, but they are definitely more accommodating. As a sign facing the window announces, "We Serve." Only whom do they serve? Their biting installation would like to know before it is too late—but first back to the fight and that now.
Why we fight
Anti-Semitic violence has reached an alarming high—the most since the Anti-Defamation League began its records in 1979. Is it anything but obvious why "we fight"? It must seem obvious enough at the Jewish Museum, but wait: there is more. For Jonathan Horowitz, there is also that "too." The opening wall text shares a double journey, his own and that of an exhibition after the onset of Covid-19.
Set to open just as the museum had to close, it could not have planned for the deaths of George Floyd and so many more. They left Horowitz that much more aware of his white skin and the privileges and protections that it brings. Besides, his opening wall text explains, he was never religious. Born in 1966, he was far more aware of himself as gay. Could he as a Jew do more to face questions of immigration, assimilation, and identity—the "underlying causes" that "unite"? He could, but the results seem less about a fashionable "intersectionality" among causes than all over the map.
One expects to learn something from a curator, too—from an artist's or scholar's expertise and experience. Did you know that Andy Warhol numbered among his most colorful silkscreens Ten Portraits of Jews, right up there with the ultimate WASP in Jackie? Horowitz has papered the walls with those and eighty more faces, enough to unsettle the grand old Warburg mansion. An eighteenth-century portrait of a Jew hangs there as well, dignified by one of those preposterous white wigs and the room's fancy molding. As for the point of intersection, Adrian Piper announces that henceforth she will be neither black nor white but gray, thanks to her one-sixteenth white ancestry. Robert Colescott turns her precision into laughter, with his 1975 George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware, where Carver must have sewn at least a few seeds of agriculture and rebellion.
The show has other twists as well and other memories of Judaism. Did you know that early Soviet art depicted the burning of a ghetto in Kiev? Abraham Manievich subordinated Cubist fragments to a busy expressionism before escaping to America. A daughter of Russian immigrants, Rebecca Lepkoff photographed the tenements of the Lower East Side. Her record of street gangs and shadows would do another Jewish photographer of the time, Robert Frank, proud. Bernard Berlin painted Jewish boys in a nearby subway station in 1948.
When the Jewish Museum subtitles this an exhibition by Horowitz, does it mean him as artist or curator? To his credit, he juggles both without slighting his own work or upstaging his betters. He adds Jasper and Bob to Tennyson by Jasper Johns—for Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He sticks to ink and embroidery, as if not to compete with Johns in encaustic or their love. Some rooms later, he simulates a statue of Robert E. Lee under shiny black tarp, to honor the toppling of Confederate monuments. Framed by an alternative exhibition entrance, it has all the impact of an enormous black power salute.
Horowitz remains a highlight, especially when he remembers his "Inheritance." A damaged replica of the twisted message on the gates of Auschwitz lies on the floor. Two facing mirrors mark the slim passage between rooms with Your Land and My Land. Whose land is it anyway? Another mirror contains the Hebrew for "what am I and who are we?" In Jewish teaching and in the show, the question of identity becomes an ethical imperative.
Too many protests?
Can it, and can it apply that teaching to a greater diversity? It applies for sure to an African American artist, Glenn Ligon. His stencil repeats over and over I Do Not Always Feel Colored, even as its black type fades into white. Too often, though, the choices feel pat and arbitrary. The show risks falling of its own weight as it sets out to protest everything under the sun.
Horowitz reproduces a mural by Thomas Hart Benton as a backdrop for other nightmares and other protests. They include the photo by Gordon Parks of a cleaning woman in the nation's capital, posed after the severity of Grant Wood. Where the farmer in American Gothic holds a pitchfork, she holds her mop and broom, her hair pulled back much like the farmer's wife. To the implicit juxtaposition of a black photographer and an emblem of white America, Benton makes three and Horowitz makes four. Even here, though, the crowded wall comes off as a mess. Max Weber and Kara Walker nearby, with her Middle Passage, are each powerful enough, but I must have missed the connection.
Huma Bhaba pays off her debt to both African totems and Greek statuary, but what does it have to do with anything around her? The connection can feel forced within a work, too. How much does the brief affair between Johns and Rauschenberg say about either one? What does it say about Alfred, Lord Tennyson? What does the sheer density of graffiti in the Canal Street subway stop say about those Orthodox Jewish boys? One is left with a vague unease and a minor artist.
Why these black or gay artists among so many others? Sometimes the show brings a blast from the relatively recent past, like Elizabeth Catlett with a poster for the Black Panthers. Elsewhere it has a habit of leaping from the Depression Era to the present. Two Native Americans, Fritz Scholder and Jaume Quick-to-See, and a Chicano view of Christopher Columbus, by Malaquias Montoya, appear in due course because, hey, the show needs them, too. Its rapid changes and sheer diversity can be exhilarating. Then again, tokenism can do a disservice to them all.
Near the end, the show turns almost exclusively to Hollywood. Horowitz, whose last Chelsea show appropriated the movies, assembles clips of the Oscars, Mel Gibson posters, and a compilation of action sequences as a shallow white parade. He recovers a film collective new to me as well, Asco, with a sinister but alluring Golden Cobra award. The ending raises a real issue—how culture perpetuate stereotypes and subordination. Yet it feels as if it has trailed off in an aside. What happened to the ever-present demand to assert an identity?
Horowitz cannot remake a show now, not after borrowing works and printing wall labels last winter. He can wrap the statue, but Black Lives Matter cannot appear at all. Still, identity for him must always have room and responsibility for others. He takes the show's title from a searing painting of wartime posters by Ben Shahn, We Fight for a Free World! Here it faces thirty-six posters from contemporary artists, with a flair and lighter touch all their own. If they, too, are all over the map, and if the show's title is wordier than Shahn's, the whole affair runs on, but its earnest efforts will have to do.
The scene of the crime
Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson are inviting enough, but you may still hesitate to enter. Just last fall, the Lower East Side gallery turned its season opener over to Andrew Ohanesian, who appeared to offer the space for rent. And here, too, you may wonder if it is still in business—a real enough fear for all of art after Covid-19 and Covid New York. Shelley and Paulson convert the gallery into what could pass for a fly-by-night law or consulting firm that could not be bothered to keep up with the times. That sign, in good old-fashioned script on cardboard passing for wood, shares the front desk with an old lamp, a coffee mug, and a bell—the kind that you push down to demand service. It might be right out of film noir, and The Room Where It Happened is the scene of the crime.
Only who are the culprits and what was the crime? This being political art during the Trump administration, there are way too many candidates, but the front of that desk presents some telling clues. For all its quaint furnishings, this firm is all too up to date. Its business is "reframing cultural objectives and norms." That can mean such trendy concerns as "public opinion," but is it surveying opinion or shaping it? Its less-innocent sounding objectives include "managing democratic outcomes" and "engineering consent."
The pretend office slopes upward behind the gallery window, in a pretence of linear perspective or a reality where it is hard to find your footing. Yet one can still enter the usual way for a look at the firm's business. Boxes for files pile up on all sides, but again the quaint appearance cannot mask contemporary reality. Here, too, there is room now and then for legitimate worries, like boxes devoted to "twisted narratives," "unfree associations," "news porn," and "human rights." They may claim to serve both parties at that, with a box for John Podesta, White House advisor under two Democratic presidents, and "Podesta's sausages." A box holds "maps of pain," and there is more than enough pain to go around.
On an uncrowded day, you can well imagine yourself at the crime scene, playing detective and nosing around. You can almost feel safely in the past. This is an Orwellian vision of politics after all, and George Orwell wrote some time ago. Still, Trump has done wonders for sales of 1984, and there is no getting around who here are the villains. It shows in files for such tactics as "killing the post office" and "the science of denying science"—and for such MEGA delusions as "racist utopias." As Ohanesian promised last year in terms of real estate, "Will Divide."
Further into the gallery, the installation comes to an end, along with any bipartisan veneer. It also grows more upbeat, in hopes that the November election may finally put an end to the mystery. Posters and prints speak out for Black Lives Matter, "Ridin' with Biden," and "Dump Trump." The right is consigned to playing cards, with Rupert Murdoch the ace and Trump himself a joker. Poor Susan Collins in reaching so hard for independence from Trump and party-line approval. The senator from Maine will just have to settle for a deuce, and deuces here are not wild.
The desk is still stacked, although in my and, I hope, your favor, but Shelley and Paulson lean more to satire than paranoia. Their dystopia's not so secret weapon is a sense of humor. It appears in the chaos of paper storage as much as in the text. Two drawings add to the mess, annotating still more piled boxes with still more words. Another looks back to diagrams of the art world by William Powhida and Mark Lombardi, whom the gallery championed from its pioneering days Brooklyn. The diagrams might almost be contact tracing, even if there was no one in sight to infect me or for me to infect.
"We Fight to Build a Free World" ran at the Jewish Museum through January 24, 2021. Ward Shelley and Douglas Paulson ran at Pierogi through October 11, 2020.