by “For me, the work is about asking questions about the complexity of the world we all share,” Canadian artist David Hartt told me, while discussing the work he will exhibit at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. “The way I inhabit a political position is through an oblique set of questions that I try to open up in the same way a prism does, to break down a really complex situation into its component parts so we can better understand how it works. “
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Hartt was sharing his perspective on the notion of “protest art,” which is something of a theme at Art Basel this year. Perhaps more than in other years, artists are showing works that speak to politics, causes and long-standing issues surrounding human rights. While much of this year’s art is based on such notions, artists had varying reactions to interpreting their work as an act of protest, often expressing disquiet at viewing their art as a political gesture.
The work Hartt was showing, an elaborate and intriguing tapestry titled The Histories (after Church), xenoformed atmosphere/Rayleigh scattering spectral shift version, is a fitting example of how politics and history can overlap in a piece that ultimately Ultimately, it is sophisticated and open to interpretation. Examining ideas about slavery, colonialism, terraforming, alien species, and the biosphere, The Histories is a work that wears its heady intellectual pedigree lightly.
The Histories is partially inspired by the work of Frederic Edwin Church, an important voice in the Hudson River School of landscape painting and also an abolitionist. For Hartt, Church was a gateway to the complicated discourses around history, politics, and economics that he seeks to implicate in his art. “The Church, for me, is a synthetic figure, someone who is in the process of trying to work and expand the limits of the historical narrative and the social categories operative in the 19th century. “I see it as a really beautiful figure.” Hartt aims to make The Histories a seductive and sensual work that draws the viewer in and ultimately catalyzes conversations around a set of very important ideas.
Another tapestry that strikes a quite different note is Because, by Egyptian artist Ghada Amer, a beautiful piece done in a maroon palette. The work uses a textile process that, according to Amer, has ancient roots, dating back to the time of the pharaohs, and which today is associated with the production of tents for special events such as funerals, weddings and political rallies. The creation of these textiles is in decline due to cheaper modern alternatives, and Amer was asked to work with them on the art of it as a way to revitalize the dying industry. “At first I wasn’t interested at all,” he said. “But then I said, ‘Okay, I’ll try it,’ and once I did it I thought, ‘Oh wow,’ I felt really inspired. “I was surprised by what I could do with it.”
Amer’s square tapestry is filled with English words of different shapes and sizes taken from a 1975 Australian feminist statement that Amer came across. Although written decades ago, the criticism contained in Amer’s text still seems contemporary. “Everything has been said and very little has been done,” Amer said. “Sometimes very old quotes seem very modern.”
Part of what makes the work seem so compelling and original is how Amer draws on calligraphic traditions to create a form of written English that is at once beautiful, mysterious, and somewhat indecipherable. “We designed something on the same principle as Arabic calligraphy: you can stretch the words, you can put them anywhere. In that way, the words become the form itself, they become like a figure.” This highly stylized English defies the viewer’s attempt to read it, forcing the audience to interact with the text of Because less as a political message and more as a work of art that each will interpret in their own way. “It was a risk for me,” Amer said. “I wanted to do something new and I worked for three years on this series.”
Donald Moffett offers much more abstract work: A veteran LGBTQ+ rights crusader with ACT UP, his most recent art is not about civil rights but rather the degradation of the Earth’s biosphere. At the fair he will show Lot110123, a striking addition to his current Nature Cult series, through which the artist has addressed the climate crisis through a wide range of surprising and mysterious works. “Nature Cult is a general category of work in progress. The whole use of the word “cult” tends to make people’s hair stand on end. But the way I talk about this is: let’s all join the cult, all seven billion of us.”
Moffett created lot 110123 from several pieces of driftwood that regularly washes up on the beaches of Staten Island, where he lives. “I love Staten Island,” he told me, he is the ugly stepchild of the five boroughs. “There’s all this driftwood coming in like manna.”
To construct his piece, Moffett used carpentry to integrate the driftwood until it appeared as a single, beautifully tangled mass, likely sprouting birdhouses. The most striking thing about Lot110123 is the intricate textures found in the driftwood that Moffett has selected for this piece and the unmistakable ultramarine color. “It seemed to be the perfect color because this wood comes from the sea,” he said. “This grocery store just insisted. It expresses itself so beautifully in this wood with all its texture.”
Moffett connected his transition from protest to a more abstract body of work to his transition from political action to the privacy of the art studio. “Things were calming down and it was time to retreat to the studio and devote more time to private art practice. This is what happens in the studio when you have experienced all that street work.”
Artist Chakaia Booker’s Flip technique and weighted scales are gloriously tactile works that the artist created from repurposed rubber. “I see rubber as a raw material like stone, wood or steel,” he explained. “It can be used in a modular way, creating an experience that is both intimate and monumental for the viewer and me. I see rubber as capable of opening dialogues about consumerism, mobility, environmentalism, materialism, class, race, culture and socioeconomic disparities.” Beautiful, intricate and somewhat premonitory, Booker’s rubber works impress with their size and the strange shapes that the artist was able to extract from her materials. “Making sculpture in this way is a physically and intellectually demanding process. It takes my whole body to work the material and all my attention to fit the details into the whole.”
Ultimately, each of these four artists had different perspectives on the degree to which politics and protest should be part of their work as artists. For Hartt, “it was a question that every artist should confront,” as he believed that “the act of occupying space is a political act.” However, Hartt also recognized that art will not be reduced to a single message or action, as he believes that art is fundamentally about inquiry and complexity. Booker was in a similar place and told me that protest was not part of his artistic practice. “I don’t see my work as a protest, I see it as a promotion or an encouragement to look at the world in a different way. The best art should help us see the world as something capable of change, capable of evolving into something better by showing us who we are and who we can be.”
For Amer, art was above all about having an experience that starts out compelling and over time develops layers and layers of meaning. He considered this to be clearly different from protest, which seeks to communicate a message directly and immediately. “I want to do something that is beautiful, that is enjoyable, but I am not here to make a demonstration. To protest is to have something dragged in your face. My art makes a statement, yes, but it is very abstract, it is not to teach you something. You have to live with something and little by little come to understand it.”
