Graphic art in the summer of discontent: the 2004 election has attracted artists in numbers not seen for a generation. Their designs give progressive politics a distinct visibility

Art in America, Oct, 2004 by Faye Hirsch

Artists Against the War (AAW), a collective formed just before the start of the Iraq war, coordinated its efforts with the umbrella organization United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which spent months unsuccessfully fighting the Bloomberg administration for the use of Central Park as a rally site on Aug. 29, after a march down Seventh Avenue past the convention site. (The march, variably estimated at 120,000 to half a million, was the largest protest gathering in the city since 1982.) The banner (and poster) devised by AAW, in which the legend "We the People Say No to the Bush Agenda" is printed against colored stripes, used the internationally recognizable rainbow flag design to carry its message. Its zing was in critical mass: 25,000 of the cloth banners were produced. As the project was underway, news came of artist-activist Leon Golub's death [see obit this issue]; in response, AAW printed a second banner with one of his "Mercenaries" images, which they paraded in his honor and afterward gave to his wife, the artist Nancy Spero.

The season's poster frenzy has engendered a wealth of visuals that bring together art, street culture and commercial design. The "iRaq" poster is an example. It was an idea that arose independently on both coasts, with compositions identical but for variant texts. In L.A., an anonymous artist duo called Forkscrew designed three other silhouettes besides the hooded figure: that of a man carrying a shoulder-to-air missile, another with a whip and a third with a rifle. Carol Wells, director of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in L.A., went on Air America Radio to discuss the Forkscrew posters. She soon received an e-mail from a New York-based artist using the pseudonym "Copper Greene," informing her that he/she, toe, had come up with the image, and was busy wheat-pasting it in Manhattan.

"That hooded figure," says Wells, "is now as iconic as the woman holding her dead child in Picasso's Guernica, or the protester with her arms outstretched at Kent State." Sure enough, it is now being appropriated in many contexts. Richard Serra, for example, has used it in two lithographs printed at Gemini G.E.L. in L.A. to benefit the voter-outreach group America Coming Together (ACT). Both versions show the hooded figure as a frightening black specter in a gritty-looking ground, the smaller print (20 by 14 1/2 inches) without text, and the larger (60 by 51 inches) with "STOP BS" scrawled around the figure's head in angry-looking script. (Serra's image was reproduced on placards carried in the Aug. 29 march.) The lithos are two in a series of 11 mostly less explicit prints by prominent artists (Susan Rothenberg, Jasper Johns, Cecily Brown, Ellsworth Kelly, Elizabeth Murray, Ed Ruscha and others) produced at Gemini to benefit ACT at $1,000 apiece. At Parlour Projects, a relatively new venue in Williamsburg staging an exhibition called "Republican Like Me" at its tiny gallery and at sites around the city, a diminutive sticker with the hooded figure and the legend "What would Jesus do? Don't vote Republican!" was anonymously adhered to an unrelated poster project by Viennese artist Ulrike Muller. It seemed the perfect complement to Muller's piece (conceived to be hung flexibly and graffitied by strangers), which reads, "The old woman said as she pissed into the sea / Every little bit helps."