The Art against war exhibition brings together recent activist video and poster art, displaying the vitality of the oppositional stance that many artists energetically took, before, during and after the recent shameful events surrounding the invasion of Iraq. The exhibition consists of printed and handmade posters, video and sound works. It was initially shown at two Manhattan galleries, NY Arts 450 Broadway Gallery, Teachers College Macy Gallery, later at Presbyterian College’s Stone Gallery in South Carolina. It was also concurrent with three independent but connected exhibitions on three separate websites.

www.thedigitalmuseum.org , www.drinkink.org , http://retiform.ath.cx/index.php

The show now combines into an art form that is anchored both in the virtual and real worlds. The idea of the exhibition is that the net has the power to connect artists organizers, and the public in a new way. Art is created with traditional materials or directly on the computer. The image is transferred to a high resolution digital file that rests in the memory of computers and can be sent to any part of the world. The work can be printed on paper, canvas, projected and displayed within a gallery or museum. Images in high resolution and color can be printed easily. Such a show is like a rhizome, spread like a root system and able to take root almost anywhere. Once on display the large pictures of these works have power of scale, the ambition to grapple with great events in a public forum. They can have both political and high aesthetic value.

Sept 11th 2001 was a watershed event: The Bush reaction was the "War on Terrorism.” of which the Iraqi war is a part. It has opened the door to a new era in modern history. The Iraq War is a fait accompli in the minds of many Americans, already over and done with. It is not over to the Iraqis, the soldiers fighting on the ground, and to those of us opposed to it. The energy and concern that ignited a maelstrom of questions, reflection and protest, is still active in many people throughout the world. The war is not over. Many of us believe the grief that was our response to September 11th was manipulated and diverted into a jingoistic fable. Artists and activists joined together to respond to this war-mongering with actions like " Not in our name" and performances of "Our grief is not a cry for war.”

This is an embattled period, with world views clashing. Possibly through the settling dust of these conflicts will emerge a new postmodern era.

This exhibition is important on several levels. Aesthetically, it is important as an examination of a neglected form of art. Historically, the oldest printed works are posters, combinations of image and text. This show revives, reexamines and celebrates the poster as art. The earliest dated pieces of Gutenberg’s typography (1454) were little posters selling indulgences to finance the rescue of Constantinople, captured by the Turks the year before. Interestingly, the first posters prefigured our own conflicts in the present time. The poster has been implicated with war from its inception.

The poster as we know it appeared in Paris in the 1830s, when book illustrators made large black and white lithographs to advertise their publications. Color lithography appeared in the 1860's. Bonnard, Vuillard, Lautrec and other talented artists were commissioned to create advertising campaigns that were more daring than the works they exhibited in the Salon des Independents. These painters altered the way the poster was seen and contributed to its acceptance as an art form. The color poster became a fixture of urban environments, seen whenever people traveled or gathered.

In today’s' world, with the internet and digitization, large files can be sent and received almost instantaneously, making shows like the one at World Social Forum possible. The posters in this exhibition were sent from various parts of the world to me in New York, I sent them to my colleague Jason Murphy, who operates the Retiform site in South Korea, and they were downloaded by the WSF staff in Mumbai and printed.

The posters have become a part of a world wide dialogue, a conversation. Shows like this can respond critically to recent events and their implications. Providing moral balance and penetrating visualizations.
Although some artists contributed handmade art, most of the art was created on the computer, sent online or via a CD. The original exhibition limited the size for printing at 24X36 inches, seen as a good size for gallery display, a size that has presence in relation to human scale and commands attention within the space of the exhibition for the World Forum, the size is increased for the greater scale of the Great Hall where they will be hung.

A major challenge encountered was presenting the relationship between the content of the work and its outward form within the theme. The problem often occurs because "theme exhibitions" are easier to mount when the work is not ambiguous or abstract. Literal or narrative works are less challenging to the viewer and can be "served-up in a tidy package.” Nevertheless, in my opinion, some of the best art is often rich with ambiguity. I hope those who do not agree with me will accept my penchant for work that is complex and not easily categorized. My premise is that political poster art can mirror the complexity of political thought and does not have to reduce itself to dualistic thinking or half-digested cartoons. It is a complex form of art and should not be easily categorized. Art does not have to act as a didactic form of communication.

It appears bizarre to me that many of us felt like strangers in our own country in the past two years. We saw the rage and vitriol focused on nations who did not subscribe to the Bush Administrations view of uncritical support for their war. France was severely rebuked, as were celebrities who stood up, and dissented. Few voices in the mass media had the courage to stand apart from lockstep support for this unjust war. The demonstrations in February and April that I witnessed in New York were full of abuses of the civil rights of protestors. We were only asking that America stand by its principles and constitution. These violations underscored how fragile the balance of our system can be, and the importance of dissent. America has become a more suspicious, less open society since Sept 11th 2001, and in that regard, the terrorists won.

W.G.T. Mitchell points out in Picture Theory. (1994), That " The conviction that tensions between visual and verbal representations are inseparable from struggles in cultural politics and political culture. Most political issues converge on issues of representation and changing modes or representation is altering human experience . . . Posters often have word and image, or at least two types of representation." The dynamic between these two forms conveys impressions in an emotional as well as intellectual level.

Many of the pieces in the show do not have words. These posters are signs. Language is implied through substitution for those without words. Certain messages, impulses, perceptions, or narratives can be appreciated without the use of language. I hope the ambiguity of the work will be evocative as well as mysterious. Although we like to believe that we occupy the moral high ground and the other( the shadow) is devious, evil or debased, that kind of simplification will not work anymore. Morality and justification are a continuum, and though not relative, are vibrating scales that span octaves and many tones. There is no innocence anymore, there is no purity, we are all tarnished by what happens on the earth.

In a recently published essay entitled "La Procedure Silence" translated as "Art and Fear,” Paul Virillio questions the strains of modern art that have aligned themselves with dehumanized science and related forces that seem bent on destroying humanity. Virillio seems to believe that the distortion of the figure in modern art reflects the mind set of acquiescence that has allowed these events to happen time and time again. He refers to the Futurist Manifesto of 1909. The Manifesto, in an approving voice, calls war "the worlds only hygiene.” The history of modern art, as well as popular culture and literature is rife with images and language of casual violence and the worship of rampant power. Virillios treatise makes the connection between the psychic violence of modern art and the real violence that has permeated our history in great and small ways. He sums up his premise by writing "a brutal logic rules the shattering of representation: our ways of seeing are now fully shaped by an unprecedented "scientific mode of destruction" Members of the western art community might object to the implied conservatism of this view, but throughout the modern world, in many cultures, we have accepted the status quo of violence, of destruction, and not stood up and demand that it stop. We must state emphatically that we will not participate in it. Art stands opposed to war. The opposite of war is not peace, which seems to be a negation of activity, but creation, enterprise, building, or action within the realm of art.

It is an interesting exercise to view visual representation and images in our society and contemplate on which side they will reveal themselves to be. Life affirming or life destroying? Will they side with Eros or Thanatos? Be progressive or nihilistic? In both popular and high culture within western society there is a surprisingly prevalent cult of death worship. Tattoos and video games boast the dark imagery of weapons, bones and death. The plots of films and television are filled with grim and gratuitous cruelty. The language of violence permeates conversation.

Consequently the souls of sensitive and receptive individuals must be deadened, hardened, and hidden to accept the constant barrage of violence. Wilhelm Reich called it the “emotional plague.” We psychically disinhabit areas and close off parts of our bodies in order to accept the violence in everyday life. We learn to deaden ourselves and teach our children as well. Artist Andy Warhol said that " reason that I am painting is that I want to be a machine.” As children we are alarmed and appalled at violence. As adults we learn to find violence entertaining.

I agree with Virillio who scorns artists’ acceptance of the status quo, and that we have allowed these events to occur. We have collaborated with murderers and oppressors. However I disagree with his idea that the representation and breakdown of the body through abstraction reflects a causal relationship. If that were the case, an executive order for classical figures and harmonic compositions would be all that it would take to create a peaceful world.

Over half a century ago, cultural critic Walter Benjamin was preoccupied the problematic relationship between technology and culture. In his landmark essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), Benjamin explored the impact of modern technologies of reproduction on cultural and political life, and analyzed the role of the cultural Left in the struggle against fascism. Benjamin discerned that the only way to counter fascism's aestheticization of politics--whose inevitable culmination is war-- was the conscious politicization of art. To Benjamin, the question was not one of binarism--a choice between "political art" or "non-political art.” He understood all art to be political, the creation of social actors. The choice was whether to continue to produce aesthetic products which concealed their political nature allowing them to fit smoothly into the functioning of the dominant order; or whether to render apparent the interrelationships which made up that order, and thus, to oppose it.

Marshall McLuhan saw that the media shapes us, extends our senses, and is creating a new world of shared community and a vastly different sensory experience for us as we move into the new electronic age. We are moving from the age of the book to the new age of multi sensory reality. Pierre Levy, a French theorist, believes that we are inhabiting a new geographical space, creating new identities that will supplant the old. Previous identities, according to Levy, are our name ( the tribal identity) our address ( the geophysical identity), the commodity space ( our profession and economic roles) and now the “knowledge space”, a product of our interaction with the internet and occupation of that space ( emails, websites, IMs, avatars). If this new space gives us tools to deal with anachronistic vestiges of power, feudalism and violence, then we are moving to the right track.