This is the first exhibition that I know of
about artists interested in conspiracy as
a subject, and it's as much of a live wire
as you would think it is.
One talks a lot these days about conspiracy.
We realized in the making of this show that
it's something that's been around for quite
a long time. The exhibition covers about fifty
years of artists' practice.
The show is really an archaeology of these
tropes from the sixties to the present. So
it's paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints,
video, installation. The show begins with
the sort of platonic ideal of conspiracy art—
Artists whose main concern is fact-finding, research.
We have the work of the late Mark Lombardi,
these extraordinarily beautiful, flow-chart-like
drawings, infinitely complex webs of deceit and intrigue.
We have Trevor Paglen revealing black sites,
the places where people are taken by the US
government for torture; Jenny Holzer, who
is using text from real government documents
in outrage; Hans Haacke, who used New York
City real-estate records in the 1970s to uncover
the practices of slumlords.
These artists were working as citizen-journalists,
a kind of on-the-ground, alternative news.
We have illustrations from the Black Panther
newspaper by Emory Douglas.
The Panthers, at that moment, were under siege
from the U.S. government.
Another moment we look at is the AIDS crisis.
Silence=Death Project created this poster
about how tens of thousands of Americans had
died by the year 1987, and the president hadn't
even said the word "AIDS" yet.
The second half of the show is when we go
down the rabbit hole, and we look at a group
of artists. We have Mike Kelly, Jim Shaw,
Tony Oursler, Sue Williams—all friends from
California Institute of the Arts—and they
display a more phantasmagoric response to
the ways in which facts maybe don't line up.
They are plumbing the depths of the darkest
aspects of American culture. You get these
amazing, dreamlike works that are uncovering
the complicated truths about life in a democracy.
All of the artists in the show are outsiders.
They're operating on the margins, and that
mirrors the topic, which is all about exploring
the parts of our culture that are hidden or
underground.
Looking at works by these fantastic artists,
we gain some more knowledge and some more
power in confronting past history.
I would like to bring back the idea of art
as a way of jolting people to get rid of their
preconceived notions and to hopefully question more.
