A R T A N D AC T I V I S M
Activist Artist Josh MacPhee ’96 Knows How to Make an Impression BY DANIEL BURTON-ROSE ’98
the graphic artist josh macphee ’96 doesn’t usually work in gallery spaces. A Woody Guthrie of street art, he immerses himself in oppositional iconography so as to preserve its potency. He is a connoisseur of clenched fists, finely attuned to the emotional range of the human face rendered in spray paint through cardboard cutouts. Producing such images means collaborating with others occupying public space in ways both illicit and sanctioned. Around the time the English street artist Banksy was becoming a household name, MacPhee’s first book, Stencil Pirates: A Global Study of the Street Stencil (Soft Skull Press, 2004), offered a decentralized survey of the phenomenon of 16
low-tech cultural interventions in the cityscape. When offered a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA), he was initially dubious: The idea of an individual creator producing fixed works contravenes the gist of his work. Then he realized: “The gallery doesn’t have to be a gallery: It can be a print shop.” This insight prompted a novel exhibition dedicated to turning the viewer into a producer. MacPhee isolated recurring motifs in protest art dating back centuries, then offered them to exhibitiongoers as a grammar in which they could speak. The exhibition, which ran from April 1–June 10 at the Reinberger Gallery and was called We Want Everything, consisted of stations of
reproducible iconography that gradually escalated the engagement required. The first consisted of large cubes—“like giant children’s alphabet blocks,” MacPhee explains— emblazoned with stirring images. All the viewer needed to do was play with them; the juxtapositions that emerged would take care of the rest. Production began at the next station. Rubber stamps bearing simple icons demonstrated how the act of physical reproduction alters meaning and engenders creativity: The female symbol (♀) doubled (♀♀) becomes “lesbian”; the same icon combined with a fist becomes “pro-choice.” The culmination of audience engagement was a station centered on a risograph machine, which MacPhee describes as “a printer that is basically a photocopier/screenprinting hybrid” but “almost as easy to use as a copy machine.” Over the course of the exhibition, visitors produced hundreds of 11"x17" posters collaging elements from the show, each displaying their unique
L E A H T R ZN A D E L / CO U R T E S Y O F C L E V E L A N D I N S T I T U T E O F A R T
Thought Process