"Street Signs & Solar Ovens".

Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles CA October 22 * December 31, 2006

Like a toolbox for proactive political living, "Street Signs and Solar Ovens: Socialcraft in Los Angeles" presents diverse forms of protest art as models for a socially conscious lifestyle. The curators, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest editors Marc and Robby Herbst, coined "socialcraft" to frame the exhibition, a term encompassing "the crafting of society as much as it describes the making of objects." The astonishing breadth of work on view runs the gamut from well-regarded gallery fare to actual demonstration relics. There are political posters, graffiti, knitwear, a pizza box solar oven, a whisky distiller, a pirate radio station, and a bamboo bicycle trailer. Projects promote community and individual self-sufficiency, with the majority tending toward collaborative identities and tactics.

"Street Signs" seems to offer three approaches to political art making. Corresponding to their different ideas of "socialcraft," the first roughly relates to media interventions associated with the anti-Vietnam War movement. The second approximates "illegal" activities like street tagging, copyright infringement, and other such anarchic resorts (one example is Evan Holloway's Free Space Meter Boot [2000], a steel box that closes tightly over a parking meter and is impossible to remove without uprooting it). A third, almost neo-productivist method prioritizes sustainability over economic expansion, reminiscent of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's recent directive to "push through Empire to come out on the other side." In this category can be included Fritz Haeg's ongoing Edible Estates project where he transforms suburban lawns into vegetable gardens, Gaian Mind's biodegradable paper toys that sow seeds in their wake, and Edith Abeyta's journey across the country to bake apple pies in strangers' homes.

According to the curators, a rather inflammatory essay by Gregory Sholette titled "Dark Matter: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere" (published in JOAAP 3) guided the conceptualization of the show. Sholette highlights the work of successful activist art, posing it in opposition to the realm of "institutional, elite art," which remains oblivious to the fact that the majority of creative production "includes makeshift, amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices." Yet while the resulting "Street Signs" dutifully addresses recent protest art by artists and non-artists alike, the works themselves could have been better contextualized. To encounter such objects in a museum is to risk cataloguing them as art history, an outcome clearly antithetical to the curators' desire to foment socialcraft as a living art (but perhaps an appropriate fate for the odd tactical blooper included in the show).

An astute essay by Nato Thompson, who organized an exhibition of activist art at MassMOCA in 2004, appears in JOAAP 4. Thompson signals the competitive and cliquish nature of the activist scene, whose members often lose sight of the need for large-scale organization in their attempt to "out-radicalize" each other. "Operating in the radical aesthetics terrain, we must constantly be on the watch for our own predatory capitalist tendencies and the methods by which ideological posturing is only a veneer for new identity cul-de-sacs." Seeing three such legacies of protest art side by side, it seems that hippie-generation party protest and elitist anarchy have now taken the place of old-school leftism, from whose turmoil new forms of activist art are beginning to emerge.