Lisa Oppenheim

Political Art, Love It or Leave It

By JOHN GOODRICH | August 28, 2008 Political art is a polymorphous genre. An instrument of both independent protest and totalitarian control, it embraces everything between gentle social commentary and strident advocacy. The sense of outrage that motivated much art of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s can be traced to Goya's "Disasters of War," but today's artists have long since discarded Goya's pictorial acumen for a variety of confrontational tactics: Barbara Kruger's tabloid-style admonitions ("Your Body is a Battleground"), for instance, or Hans Haacke's planting of a corporate logo atop an old East Berlin observation tower.

But in recent decades, political art has tended to be more nuanced. Zwirner & Wirth's "Quiet Politics" demonstrates the trend with a selection of works by 10 artists spanning the last 22 years. The intimate but airy installation sprinkles pieces by younger artists among some familiar efforts by veterans, and while a number of the works have a subtle bite, nowhere is there a full-scale call to arms.

David Hammons is represented by a signature piece from 1990, an American flag redone in colors associated with the black-power movement. The simple elegance of its conceit makes this work celebratory rather than truculent — though it's also a sly rejoinder to a "love-it-or-leave-it" intolerance of dissent. Rosemarie Trockel's five ski masks (1986), each nestled in an open cardboard box as if ready for sale, seem at first nothing more than colorful headgear with vaguely menacing eye slits. A closer look, however, suggests something far more sinister: a merchandising of abuse, signaled by multiple swastikas and Playboy bunnies incorporated into the knitting — an activity traditionally labeled "women's work." In Roni Horn's paired photographs, dated 1998/2007, wildfowl are reduced to svelte but faceless phenomena. The two prints highlight the blue-green iridescence of the backs of the bird's heads while ensuring they remain anonymous.

If these pieces speak largely for themselves, others benefit from information supplied by the exhibition's press release, which is posted on the gallery's Web site. Visitors unfamiliar with the work of the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres — an artist who brought an intimate and interactive element to minimalist installations — can read how he instructed curators to decide for themselves how to arrange his piece from 1992, which consists of a single string of 42 light bulbs. This fact adds an elegiac dimension to the chain of glowing bulbs soaring to the ceiling. Robert Gober's untitled 1991 work looks for all the world like a page from a 1960 issue of the New York Times, until one notices subtle discrepancies, such as a reference to "Beijing" (known in the '60s, of course, as Peking) — and, stranger still, the inclusion of a story of parental torture among several wedding announcements. The gallery's checklist discloses that this work is actually a lithograph with hand-torn edges, painstakingly stained with coffee by the artist.

With oddly delicate self-absorption, the artist made one other alteration: He has inserted a small, businesslike article describing his own childhood death, and his mother being held on suspicion of murder.

Additional reading, some of it supplied by the press release, is required to fully appreciate the works of Lisa Oppenheim and Christopher Williams. Ms. Oppenheim's four crisply geometric abstractions from 2008, all titled "Multicultural Crayon Displacement," are in fact Cibachrome prints with colors based upon an assortment produced by Crayola. (The company touts the crayons as "an assortment of skin hues that give a child a realistic palette for coloring their world.") Mr. Williams's handsome, if not