The show ridiculed the war on terror, depicted the death of civil liberties - and featured the image of a cocked pistol pointed at the head of President Bush in a work entitled, "Patriot Act."
Chicago artist Al Brandtner's "Patriot Act" featured 42 mock postage stamps with Bush's image - and a 9-mm. handgun leveled at his head. When exhibited in Chicago in April, Secret Service agents photographed it and launched a probe of the artist.
"It was a show of intimidation," Brandtner told the Daily News yesterday. "The work was done tongue and cheek. The idea was for people who didn't like George Bush to look at it and laugh."
Hanging at the Seaport will be his "Flag: Study in White No. 1," an upside-down and whitewashed U.S. flag. "The colors have been washed out," he said. "It shows the eroding of civil liberties in America."
• North Carolina artist Lisa Charde echoes that theme in "The (un)Patriotic(ic) Act," in which a straitjacket patterned after the flag portrays the supposed shackles on America's freedoms.
• New Jersey artist Grace Graupe-Pillard's "Interventions" takes images from the war in Iraq - car bombings, erupting flames, puddles of blood - and puts them on the streets of Manhattan to portray the "politics of fear" in "our own backyard."
After displaying a painting of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, a San Francisco gallery owner bears a painful reminder of the nation's unresolved anguish over the incidents at Abu Ghraib -- a black eye and bloodied brow delivered by an unknown assailant who apparently objected to the art work.
The assault outside the Capobianco gallery in the city's North Beach district Thursday night was the worst, but only the latest in a string of verbal and physical attacks that have been directed at owner Lori Haigh since the painting, titled "Abuse," was installed there on May 16.
Last Wednesday, concerned for the safety of her two children, ages 14 and 4, who often accompanied her to work, Haigh decided to close the gallery indefinitely.
Painted by Berkeley artist Guy Colwell, "Abuse," the painting at the center of the controversy, depicts three U.S. soldiers leering at a group of naked men in hoods with wires connected to their bodies. The one in the foreground has a blood-spattered American flag patch on his uniform. In the background, a soldier in sunglasses guards a blindfolded woman.
Thanks To "John Doffing " www.startsoma.com
Resources:
San Francisco Gate :LISA LEFF, Associated Press Writer | May 29, 2004
NY Daily: DOUGLAS FEIDEN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER | August 31, 2005
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