Political Art

Last week I went to an exhibition at Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem's coexistence museum. Entitled "Bare Life," it is a collection of contemporary art focusing on human rights and the times and ways that governments choose to infringe on those. It was an interesting exhibit with all the strange quirkiness to be expected from any display of contemporary art. Bruce Nauman's piece, which consisted of a spinning head on a bunch of screens screeching, "feeeeeeed me, eeeeeeeeat me, anthropologeeeee" was particularly difficult to get out of my head, as the soundtrack (which became exceedingly irritating) was audible throughout the museum. I was surprised to find that the exhibition wasn't overly saturated with finger-pointing or extreme liberal sentiment. It did, however, bring up some interesting questions in my mind about the place of political art, especially journalistic type photography.

There was a fairly wide range of pieces there, including installations, collages, paintings and photography, and I suppose such an exhibition begins to force us to ask some basic questions about what is considered to be art. When does a photograph or video of a peace rally move out of the realm of photo-journalism and become art? Is photo-journalism itself an art, or a method of documenting events, or both? Is a video of a man discussing some interesting insights about the nature of language and possession a piece of art or a piece of philosophy? This in turn brings up some questions about the place of the artist in this type of art. For instance, suppose that the artist taking a picture of a riot has the choice to photoshop the photograph so that the violence of the police or the rioters is more or less extreme. Even without photoshop, things can be cropped out or focused on. I suppose these things are the choice of the artist, but what gets sticky with these types of photos, is that they're often considered factual rather than a single artist's interpretation. And when such a photo appears in a newspaper or news program in addition to the gallery or museum, the significance of these choices is further magnified.

Clearly I don't expect there to be an answer to these questions. There's no distinct line between art and history or science. No exact way to define the difference between objective documentation (which doesn't really seem to exist) and subjective interpretation. I just found myself thinking about this as I walked through Museum on the Seam, trying to categorize what I saw and to find a way to place the artist in the creation of these documentary pieces of art.