The Voting Machine
- Kelly Klaasmeyer -
I don’t think the following statement will come as too much of a shock to the ARTLIES readership: most artists are not Republicans. Most are Democrats or Independents, Greens, Libertarians or Anarchists—anything but Republicans. But before anybody starts writing a complaint letter, yes, I’m sure there are probably some Republican artists out there, like the people who design duck postage stamps, illustrate the cover of Guns & Ammo or paint George Bush’s portrait. But, hell, some of them might be liberals who just do these things for the money. I guess there might be some Republican artists out there who are just masochists—or, they’re so freaking rich, they’re actually voting alongside their socioeconomic peers.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of talk—and a lot of art—about voting in the months leading up to the election. You can sum up the situation like this: the vast majority of artists didn’t vote for Bush. We know we got screwed in Florida last round. We don’t like what he’s doing to the country and we’re pissed off. In Houston, like a lot of other places, feelings of anger and frustration have translated into action—we sure didn’t have this kind of activism in 2000.
The Houston art community responded with The Voting Machine: a collaborative, multimedia, multi-venue series of lectures, essays, videos, installations and performances. As always, some things worked better than others, and not everything—like Project Row Houses’ Post it Up: Political Posters from the Margins—opened before ARTLIES’ press deadline which, incidentally, was also before election day.
Among the works already on view were projects that probably sounded really good on paper, like Karen Guisti’s Rolling White House Review at DiverseWorks. Guisti’s vehicle, powered by recycled vegetable oil, is a scale model of the White House in which the artist is touring around the country to “encourage citizen engagement in the democratic process.” The reality, however, was pretty lame—a pseudo White House/greenhouse/shed on wheels, filled with half dead rose bushes and stacks of brochures from various organizations.
In DiverseWorks’ main gallery, Margaret Crane and Jon Winet’s 2004—America & The Globe fared considerably better. It, too, had stacks of brochures at its entrance, but the installation created a compelling enough environment, with provocative imagery and multifaceted content, to justify these external support materials.
Dietmar Polk, video still from “Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping”
Bill Talen performed as part of Voting Machine, co-presented by Lawndale Art Center and Aurora Picture Show, Friday, October 1, 8:00pm @ First Unitarian Church in Houston, TX.
Crane and Winet shot video at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Their installation was set up as a kind of convention hall aftermath, complete with deflating balloons and a makeshift television studio. A red carpet led into the gallery and ran up to a wall where a flat screen presented a video of abstract forms—red, white and blue streamers raining down from above.
Saturated color images from the conventions—including stills of the freestanding presidential podium built for Dubya and the shiny, happy, upturned faces of young women at a convention—were presented as light boxes. Snippets of interviews were projected on a large screen near the makeshift broadcast studio but contained no editorial comment. Nor could you hear the questions being asked of the subjects. Sometimes the screen went black, leaving the viewer to imagine the people that match the disembodied voices. Crane and Winet let these people, liberals and conservatives alike, speak for themselves. The environment was stark yet theatrical. While the drama could have been ratcheted up a bit, it still worked.
Lawndale, which is currently being renovated, produced Sprawl—a decidedly eclectic ’zine designed to encourage activism—distributed in a clear plastic bag. Contributing artists certainly hit on a lot of issues. Really great pieces included a set of cut-and-assemble Bush and Kerry finger puppets riding an elephant and a donkey respectively and absolutely perfect, luminous, official orange SUV tickets. The tickets report the average mileage of the worst, most consumptive offenders on the road—”the Hummer H2 gets 6.8 mpg” and the “Ford Excursion gets 10.8 mpg”—and encourage you to place them on these gas-guzzling behemoths.
A shocking work—a grid of fake stamps with a full-color, postmortem photo of Rachel Cory—was particularly effective. Cory, a young American activist, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to protect a Palestinian doctor’s home from demolition in March of 2003. The words “stop terrorism” are pointedly printed across the bottom. There were also mediocre and convoluted inclusions, like the mini-comic Where to begin… and super idealistic hard-sells like a flyer encouraging everyone to dumpster dive and recycle food.
As for the film contingent, Voting in America, produced by Laura Harrison and Charlotte Lagarde, was screened by the Aurora Picture Show at Dean’s Credit Clothing. From over one hundred proposals, Harrison and Lagarde selected nine short films, each addressing specific issues and points of view concerning America’s huge block of non-voters. Some of the films dealt with prisoner voter registration, the disenfranchised District of Columbia, working-class apathy and Native American voting activists. Another gave a brief, animated history of voting, but together, they presented a just partial picture.
Overall, The Voting Machine strove to be high-minded, objective, empowering and encouraging—kind of like the platform of the 2004 Democratic Convention—which is a mature, reasonable and tolerant stance to take these days. I myself wouldn’t have minded a couple of sucker punches. I know I should be above it, but I find myself wanting some goddamned liberal propaganda—hey! Propaganda doesn’t have to be false.
But there is a message behind The Voting Machine—the real reason so many artists and institutions went through all this trouble. It can be summed up in the words Houston artist Karen “Bert” Bertonaschi stenciled on her hot pink shoulder bag: “Fuck Bush Vote.” Individual artists, unlike nonprofit organizations, can still be as partisan as they want to be.