Political Art in a Fractious Election Year

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In 2008, when the artist Shepard Fairey created the graphically striking “Hope” portrait to support Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, it seemed as if a rich tradition of American political imagery reaching back at least to the middle of the 20th century — on posters, buttons, bumper stickers — was still very much alive. The art critic Peter Schjeldahl called the “Hope” poster “epic poetry in an everyday tongue.”

But as the 2016 campaign season enters the nominating stage — the Republican National Convention opens on Monday in Cleveland; the Democratic National Convention follows the next week in Philadelphia — no image even approaching the power or reach of Mr. Fairey’s poster has emerged. (The wordless silhouette of Bernie Sanders’s sensible glasses hovering beneath his rebellious white hair might have been the punchiest attempt.)

In just eight years, the very idea of an everyday visual language has fractured in the ephemeral, fast-moving worlds of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And the idea that epic poetry remains possible in American political discourse has fared even worse, made almost farcical by entrenched congressional deadlock and two presidential candidates seen as dishonest and untrustworthy by large majorities of voters.

“The power of the iconic image is that it stood for one thing,” said Eric Gottesman, a photographer and political activist based in Massachusetts. “And as images circulate in more complex and widely distributed ways, the use of icons in political campaigns is going away, I think. 

“People distrust them more than they used to do,” he added, maybe because of cynicism “or maybe in a positive way.”

But the shift has not kept artists and visually minded activists from trying to say something meaningful during a fractious campaign season. In Cleveland and Philadelphia, art installations and performances — taking the form of neutral civic forums, partisan provocations and everything in between — will be cropping up all around the convention centers.

The “Truth Booth,” a roving, inflatable creation by a group of artists calling itself the Cause Collective, will appear at the Transformer Station, an alternative art space, and other places in that city after traveling to Afghanistan and across the United States. The booth, in the shape of a cartoon word bubble with “TRUTH” in bold letters on its side, serves as a video confessional. Visitors are asked to sit inside and finish the politically and metaphysically loaded sentence that begins, “The truth is …” (The collective has compiled more than 6,000 recorded responses and hopes to gather hundreds more at the conventions.)

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