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The field of politics has been referred to as “the art of the possible,” but what place does art truly hold in politics (or vice versa)? While many artists would say that art should transcend - or at least be divorced from - politics, photographer Jill Greenberg seems to think otherwise. Greenberg, who exhibits her work on her webpage manipulator.com, made a very strong and very public statement about her latest subject, Republican presidential nominee John McCain, through her photography. Greenberg’s work has come under fire since one of her photos served as the cover for the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine. Greenberg was contracted to photograph McCain for the publication, but her website displays further photographs of McCain which are edited to literally look like something out of a horror movie. Perhaps even more provocative than the visual editing are the photograph captions, which read, consecutively:

Darkness is only driven out with light, not more darkness.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.*

*mccain voted against mlk day

It was really fun to cheat on my car-injury-disabled first wife.

and

I called my wife a cunt in front of reporters.

While the shock value of the photos is obvious, their place in contemporary American politics, not to mention the art world, is unclear. While politically motivated blue-state activists might consider the photographs to be visionary, one cannot help but wonder what Greenberg hopes to accomplish by displaying them. At the same time, although media-minded red-state activists have decried the photographs as “sarcastic” at best, Greenberg certainly cannot be accused of dishonesty when it comes to her political assessments. The Canadian born artist makes no bones about her liberal political tendencies, nor is this the first time her professionalism has been questioned. Slate notes that her series of photographs entitled “End Times,” which showed toddlers in the midst of tantrums, gained international notoriety as her methods were questioned and labeled abusive by some critics. Greenberg did not hesitate to answer the criticism with contextual remarks which, in retrospect, may have provided a preview of the current controversy:

They’re not meant to be read as mere baby pictures; they’re meant to be a statement. As Greenberg herself explains in the gallery’s press release, “The first little boy I shot, Liam, suddenly became hysterically upset. It reminded me of helplessness and anger I feel about our current political and social situation.” “As a parent,” she continues, “I have to reckon with the knowledge that our children will suffer for the mistakes our government is making. Their pain is a precursor of what is to come.”

The controversy over the McCain photographs will likely spin further out of control before it settles; Greenberg has already been dropped by her agent in retribution for the series, and re-signed with a previous agency. This is despite the fact that her photographs have graced the covers of national periodicals such as Time Magazine, Newsweek, and TV Guide. And since controversy is hardly a detractor when it comes to media coverage, it seems likely that her career will not suffer from the series in the long run. But it remains to be seen whether Greenberg’s honesty is really her best policy; the Atlantic has stated publicly that it may file charges against her despite using one of the photographs from the series on its cover. Her journalistic integrity, if she had any, is likely now permanently kaput. On the other hand enthusiasts note that art is not journalism, and as super-activist and singer Bono says, “It is the artist’s job to define the problem.” Clearly Greenberg feels that right-wing politics are the problem; but her work may ultimately backfire on her. It engenders a certain amount of sympathy for McCain and illustrates nothing so well as the divisiveness and single-mindedness of the blue state/red state controversy… and in the end we may decide that’s the real enemy.

Read more of our series on ‘expanding the concept of art’

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In keeping with the conviction that art can be created from nearly anything so long as it speaks to its audience, I’m happy today to be able to feature… a pile of trash. Specifically trash arranged to form a shadow which appeals directly to the human brain’s imagery recognition center, despite the fact that the trash itself is reminiscent of nothing more than a back alley during a waste removal company’s union strike. Most beloved Basement dwellers, I give you Shadow Art.

Dirty White Trash (With Gulls)

English artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster are the artists most widely credited with mastering the genre of shadow art, and you can plainly see why. At least, you can if there’s a cleverly placed industrial light bulb in the vicinity. The two artists, who work as a team, create shadow art scenes which have captured the imagination of the art world and resulted in widely critically acclaimed exhibitions at renowned galleries including New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The unlikely selection of refuse as a medium doubtless boosted their sculptures’ artistic (if not olfactory) appeal. The dichotomy created by the use of materials which society has deemed useless and thus thrown away to create images filled with the beauty and fluidity of daily life speaks to the inherent wastefulness of a society obsessed with immediacy and superficiality.

Real Life Rubbish

He/She

Although metal is a more conventional medium for sculpture, Japanese artist Shigeo Fukuda channels his unusual shadow imagery through common flatware. He created his shadow art piece Lunch With A Helmet On, a detailed depiction of an upright motorcycle, with the help of exactly 848 forks, knives, and spoons.

Lunch With A Helmet On

Now that you’ve seen a little of what can be done with a lot of imagination and a few well placed lights, put your inner art critic to the test. The following piece is uncredited. What imagery or emotion does the shadow elicit in you? What materials do you see in the sculpture, and how do you think the selection of materials reflects the artist’s intentions for the piece?

Uncredited

If you would like to see more shadow art and live in the Northern United States, check out the 2007 Shadow Art Fair on December 1 in Ypsilanti, Michigan. With the tagline “One Day, 40+ Artists, 9000 Gallons of Beer,” how far wrong could you go?

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Fine jewelry is often considered a great luxury but rarely thought of as an artform, despite jewelers throughout history having had audience with and joined the retinues of some of the most powerful people ever to run a city, rule a country, or commanded an empire. As politics and fashion fads have risen and fallen, some of the best-loved sparklies have made their ways into the realm of icons, as appreciated for their histories and associations as they are for their aesthetic appeal. Names like Cartier and Tiffany evoke images of wealth, luxury, and power. Crown jewels such as the Hope Diamond and the Orlov have come to represent the rise and fall of entire dynasties.

Besides making us feel a lot poorer than we actually are, famous gems and jewelry also serve a historical purpose. They tie us to some of the most fascinating names in history, like Marie Antoinette, Queen Victoria, Emperor Babur, Napoleon and Josephine, Catherine the Great, and Eleanor of Aquitaine. They carry curses, inspire literature, witness murders, solve crimes (maybe not so much), and tell time, if perhaps with a bit more pomp and circumstance than strictly necessary.

One the most well-known names among jewelry history buffs (a small but wildly eccentric clan of overly-wealthy intermarried socialites and minor royalty - or so I like to imagine when secretly reading dimestore romances…er, historical novels) is Peter Carl Faberge. Most commonly know for the Faberge eggs, Faberge was the jeweler to the last of the Russian Czars, who commissioned the precious statuettes as Easter presents before being overthrown in a bloody revolution. But we’re sure it was nice for a while. At any rate, some of the treasured eggs have gone missing, others have been sold privately, and a very few are occasionally displayed in museums and exhibitions around the world. Having had the good fortune to be in St. Petersburg, FL during the same time in which one egg was shown in the traveling exhibit “Treasures of the Czars,” while across the street another egg was being loaned to the local museum, I can strongly recommend that any artist who has the opportunity to examine the work of the Faberge jewelers in person should take it without hesitation.

So if you, like us, are bored tearless by history lessons but easily distracted by something shiny, this just might be a way for you to delve into the intriguing realm of the human past. Or at least pass a few minutes without actively losing brain cells.

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