Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago

By Annette LePique

The exhibition “All that Glows in the Dark of Democracy” is a collaboration between the ACLU of Illinois and Weinberg/Newton Gallery, a noncommercial art gallery that connects artists and nonprofit organizations to promote public education and discourse. The group show serves as a landing stage for the ACLU’s “Engagement Series on Democracy: We the People.” The ACLU describes the series’ programming (community storytelling nights, readings and podcasts, and public talks with activists and scholars, in addition to the exhibition) as a way in which to counter and heal the growing divisions in America’s political climate. The exhibition asks of viewers, “Do not tell us what you are against; tell us what you are for.”

If America shares any collective experience, it is the uneasy and often inexpressible sensation of the slippages between money, culture, race, and sex under “democratic” capitalism. The links between these matters are neither easy nor solid. Under the logic of the market, they are imbued with an uncanny power to become stand-ins for one’s humanity. This is a power to turn people into things to be bought, sold, and commodified. It is difficult then to understand what it means to talk about democracy and America’s democratic institutions in an era of rapacious neoliberalism, as there are major dissonances between those doing the buying and those forced to sell in the American market.

Why, then, are we here? What are the stakes for an exhibition of art that positions itself as a necessity to the public good, a democratic space? The answer here will dismay some but hearten others: this art will not save you. This art will not save America. No art will save this country. The road to an American society that is just and caring will be paved through painful, incremental progress won through collective organizing and action. This is a progress born of strike lines and protests, not a River West gallery. However, this is art that at its best cultivates a free exchange of knowledge and ideas. These elements are integral to the formation of connection and community, building blocks of material progress. While some work within “Glows” succeeds at this endeavor, the exhibition’s frustrating failures are unfortunate distractions—a fitting reflection of the conditions America’s institutions have wrought. There is value, then, in understanding how and why such failures occur in the exhibition, as it allows viewers to better glean Glows’ moments of inspiration.

Ariana Jacob’s The American Society for Personally Questioning Political Issues, staged in 2012 and 2022 as a series of public conversations, archived in newsprint and the project’s blog, is built upon an uninformed strain of liberal politics. Though Jacob categorizes herself as liberal in the project’s framing, she does little to either define the term or situate it within any concrete leftist framework (fitting oversights for this brand of liberalism). The project’s primary goal seems to ask the open-ended, unhelpful, and out of touch “can’t we all just get along?” For both iterations of American Society, Jacob traveled through towns in red states to find people who identify as conservative or libertarian to speak with her about their politics. While Jacob purposefully did not prepare for these conversations in the name of tolerance and neutrality, the project suffers from that lack of foresight. Jacob’s conversations routinely lose their focus, with both the artist and her conversation partner struggling to speak to one another. Even the project’s ephemera (lawn signs, banners, and fliers designed in the style of political adverts) suffer from vague and contradictory language.

Throughout Jacob’s records of each conversation, she states a wish to know more, to have a better grasp of the economics routinely cited by project participants. I wish that Jacob, currently the Chair of Bargaining for her institution’s part time faculty union, would have heeded her own advice and entered the project’s conversations in both 2012 and 2022 with greater preparation. Jacob is doing vital work for her university community and could have continued that work in American Society, especially when the conversations turned to economic conditions. This is the key takeaway of American Society: a conception of broad-mindedness built upon platitudes serving no one. Rather, it is much more useful to think of broad-mindedness as an openness to learning and discomfort in equal measure.

In contrast, Aram Han Sifuentes’ The Official Unofficial Voting Station: Voting for All Who Legally Can’t provides the opportunity for gallery visitors to share, learn, and grow from one another’s ideas. Voting Station makes space for the comfortable and painful in equal turn, all while providing concrete resources for visitors to contribute to the work of protecting collective voting rights. Han Sifuentes’s work is activated and enlivened by this democratic exchange; it sparks with hope and possibility. Their artistic practice as a whole is built upon social engagement and active community organizing; their past pieces include work on behalf of those impacted by police brutality and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Created in collaboration with Bun Stout, Jon Satrom, and studiothread, Voting Station consists of multiple voting booths constructed by the artist, where gallery visitors can cast their ballots. Ballots are available in both English and Spanish and ask visitors the issues they wish they could vote on within the local, national, and global levels. The ballots are collected with responses projected in the gallery and available to view at http://officialunofficial.vote. The resources Han Sifuentes’ provides on the work to protect state and national voting rights are both insightful and useful. Voting Station gives concrete steps to visitors to contribute time, money, and labor to safeguard rights that are regularly under attack by conservative and moderate forces.

A common analogy found throughout democratic political theory is the image of the human body; democracy is imagined as a system of organization built from breath, blood, and electricity. Fragility also finds home in this body. Democracy is delicate: it ages and degrades; it must be cared for and rebuilt anew. Democracy is not a guarantee. Kandis Friesen’s 2017 Monuments/Monumental is a testament to such frailty through the frames of shared memory and public architecture. Shot in HD video across Ukraine in 2016, the fifteen-minute silent film installation features landscapes of empty Leninist monuments across the Ukrainian countryside. These monuments were abandoned after the fall of the Soviet Union and the country’s vote for independence. Prior to Russia’s invasion, these monuments stood as ghostly sites of public memory. In the 2022 essay Monumental Memory, published as a newsprint takeaway with Friesen’s project, artist Dmytro Soloviov writes of the monuments’ connection to a specific Ukrainian tradition of craft and how the Russian invasion works to erase that shared history.

The toll of democracy is high: it is paid in blood and toil, work, and good trouble. The cost of living and the making of an America that reflects the country’s highest ideals will not be paid by a visit to Weinberg/Newton Gallery. Yet perhaps the conversations born of the exhibition and the time and work of artists like Han Sifuentes constitute the sweat and grit of those agonizingly hard first steps of change.

Annette LePique is an arts writer. Her interests include the moving image and psychoanalysis. She has written for Newcity, ArtReview, Chicago Reader, Stillpoint Magazine, Spectator Film Journal, and others.