she's a mission irresistible.

IN A SPOOF OF Jon Gnagy's "How To Draw" television program from the 1950s, two Montreal artists, Donald Goodes and A.M. Leger, made a how-to video entitled Each and Every One of You. This instructional, step-by-step program demonstrates the process of creating "political" installation art. The host, dressed in the sartorial uniform of "serious" artists everywhere in black t-shirt and overalls, chooses coffee beans as his raw material to link Western domestic comfort with Third World exploitation. National Geographic is cited as a "treasured resource," offering photographs of Third World people which might both "say exploitation" and "give a face" to the masses who provide the manual labor for this morning pick-up. An outline of a large hand is drawn on the floor to make visible the "invisible hand" of free market capitalism but also the hand of labor and of authority. The coffee beans fill the insides of the hand and the photograph is placed among them as a stern reminder. An arts magazine reports that the disturbing accuracy of Each and Every One of You prompts a video art distributor to joke that the tape should be banned to prevent developing artists from taking its lessons to heart.

Ghost World features a young woman in a remedial art class producing "political" art from twisted coat hangers ("It's about a woman's right to choose") and tampons in tea cups ("It's about repressed femininity"), much to the delight of the loopy art teacher and to Enid's apparent disgust. Looking away, she continues to doodle in her notebook, drawing cartoons and caricatures.

Haven't I seen that before? I think. Coat hangers and coffee beans, I wonder what it is that has made "political" art so formulaic that even its parody feels achingly familiar; and because familiarity infers history, what is this history and its meaning (then and now)? And whose art practices were/are these? How do we simultaneously account for the historicity of innovation and institutionalization, and how then might we rearticulate this feeling of familiarity, with all its attendent valences of disappointment and desire, with the pushes and pulls of movements and markets?

Does the instructural video serve to interrogate the limited vocabulary of "political"art, and to query its representational shorthand? And if we recognize that this video is a critique by political artists about other political artists, what do we make of its similarity to Ghost World's art class scenarios? And because Enid is made to be the spokesperson, the avatar of two, middle-aged white men, and what does it mean when it is specifically these two men who produce this second parody? And how is it that my investments as an audience member --in querying the "effectiveness" of "political" art practices, the distinction between "critical" and "political," in the repetition of potentially limited tropes and methods-- which are presumedly much different than those of the filmmakers, can nevertheless mistranslate however briefly, fleetingly, through their problematic parody? As Kat asks, "Isn't [this scene], in some way, directed at those who aspire to be political through art, to advocate and confront through artistic practice?"

Of course, the shape of this desire --to advocate and confront-- bears interrogation, as does its parody. Alana notes, "I wonder who's served by certain kinds of 'political' art--the artist more than the audience? Some 'other' for whom the artist presumes to represent through art?" The hope to "speak for" or to be witness to an Other's suffering --e.g., the kind of work parodied for just that in the coffee beans installation-- complicates the desire to advocate and confront through artistic practice (as does the mirror suggestion that we only "speak" from our specific locations, but for another set of reasons), and how do we map the distance between intent and function?

And, a confession: As a high school senior I was allowed to enroll in college courses at the university (because of my "academic excellence"). Unfortunately the "contemporary American art" class I took bored me to tears. Did I care that the professor was Allan Kaprow, the innovator behind "happenings"? Hardly. (Which is funny since I ended up doing so much work in performance studies). In my freshman year I enrolled in an art history course which was taught by a lecturer bearing a striking resemblance to Enid's art teacher. It was positively Pavlovian -- we were shown slides for five seconds each and expected to enumerate artist, period, style, and importance. You could not pay me to care. Thus, my empathy for Enid.

THIS LAST WEEKEND I WATCHED a video titled "revolutionary love," about six Asian American female-bodied, gender-variant queer youth. In a fantasy sequence, one young butch dyke assaults an Asian American woman and her white boyfriend. "Sell out!" she yells, and whips out a switchblade to cut off the other woman's hair. This hank of hair falls to the ground, the signifier torn from its roots to suggest betrayal, and/or the violent act of expulsion. In the following reality sequence, the dyke tells the couple that they are ignorant and stupid, and brushes past them, clearly superior. I rolled my eyes in the dark, and wondered if she'd never read Kobena Mercer's "Black Hair/Style Politics," even as the audience broke into ragged cheers.

In the privacy of my hotel room I explore my scalp. My fingers search under hanks of wet hair for the block-shaped depression I feel certain is there somewhere, worn into my skull from repeated exposure to blunt objects.

I've never participated in "feel good" political work; though it's often been said to me that this sort of work (intellectually and politically) is necessary work for disenfranchised, marginalized populations, as a must-have first step toward "validation," empowerment," "self-affirmation," et cetera. But is it really? What is the nature of these qualities for our pedadgogical or political work? Fertile ground or false hope? What are their possibilities and problematics?

I fundamentally disagree with this approach to teaching, writing, art-making, whatever. And I understand how they got there but I wish we could pose other routes and perhaps arrive at other destinations.

BUT THEN I THINK ABOUT my aversion to spoken word and that goddamn cadence which should be patented before another person rips it off, and guiltily I wonder if I'm being reactionary, because is it the delivery or the words that matter most? After all, spoken word has become the artistic medium for so many young white women, young people of color, communicating their personal struggles and political concerns. Should I be more open, more forgiving? Haven't I also contributed to the critical mass of "bad" art? What is the relationship between the medium and the message, and if I see a bad drag king act, clumsily performed, does it still do the work?

What it means to be "effective" as art, as critique, and as politics, seem to be all very different things which can converge or co-articulate but very often, well, don't. And I wonder if my discomfort with "political art" has to do with its prescriptive streak, and my annoyance with the oft-cited imperative in ethnic studies and some women's studies circles that our intellectual endeavors be circumscribed by their "use value" and political instrumentality. Does this apply to art, and that then begs the question, is art ever not political, even in the absence of an agenda?

QUESTIONS BECAUSE I REALLY DON"T KNOW THE ANSWERS: Is there a difference between "political" and "critical" art? What works or doesn't work for you? Why? What counts as "effective" for politicized or critical art practices anyway? What is the value of "accusation" or guilt in "political" art? Can "political" art approach complexity and contradiction? If not, can "critical" art?

The following are some of the responses I received to the original entry, which inspired me to rearticulate my thoughts above. All four are art practicioners and theorists who approach the questions I posed ealier in different but illuminating ways, bringing up issues of corporate sponsorship, audience, environments in which "art" circulates, et cetera. I'm glad I know all these people because they make me think hard.

1. This week's New Yorker carries a review of "We Were Soldiers"--I'll send it to you separately. It seems to me that if ever there was a piece of unqualifiedly political art--always keeping in mind the subsidiary questions raised by the term "art"--that's it. And I think that when we think about political art, too often we focus on "our" political art without connecting it to a larger matrix. I'm not making (not here anyway) the case that "all art is political"--that's yet another sticky business involving the meanings of "ideology" etc. My point is that explicitly political art stretches all the way from Left to Right and from big-budget studio product to relentlessly marginal, indie, outsider material, and a theory that seeks to address your questions needs to take account of the whole range.

2. In the 1960's, Georg Lukacs wrote a short book, "Studies in European Realism," in which he tried to resolve some of the problems you raise. He drew a distinction between "critical realism" (which incorporates a radical challenge to bourgeois society but without proposing a revolutionary way beyond it) and "socialist realism" which goes on to endorse... well, the USSR, essentially, which is why Adorno attacked the book as a piece of Stalinist apologetics. Still this way of framing the question has an interesting intellectual history that might be worth further examination.

3. Ultimately I think the problem of "effectiveness" that you mention is the most important of all, because the argument in favor of revolutionary political art is always founded, one way or another, on the claim that it serves to advance the practical mission of the revolutionary movement. And that's where that argument generally comes to grief, because as far as I can see there isn't a shred of evidence that things work that way, or ever have. Woody Guthrie's guitar case bore the proud legend "This Machine Fights Fascism," but it didn't, not really; what fought fascism was guns and tanks and planes and sabotage, etc.. Revolutionary movements take up (and lay aside) "artistic" expression of various kinds, but the "art" isn't the movement--even (if you don't mind my saying so) punk rock, which from my perspective looks more like a consolation for the absence of a revolutionary movement than it does like a movement itself.

I think the whole notion of "political" is so problematic to begin with in the context of artmaking and art institutions. Parodies of "political" art seem familiar because there is a lot of bad art out there that uses this symbolic algebra (i.e., coat hanger = abortion!). That is, let's face it, unnuanced and simplistic in a bad way. There's also this market- and commodity-logic where art has to be this overdramatic gesture, because that's what gets news, gets grants, gets publicity, gets money (It's like the "soundbite syndrome" but applied to stuff in galleries.) And after all, the institutional art world is intensely and almost purely capitalistic, so a lot of that free-market logic drives art practices and such, whether people want to admit it or not.

But for me the question is, who's making the parody of political art? And isn't it, in some way, directed at those who aspire to be political through art, to advocate and confront through artistic practice? Isn't some of this passive-aggressive anger the same impulse that caused such an uproar when black artist Kara Walker won the MacArthur fellowship for her incredibly disturbing silhouettes/tableaus of slave masters making their female slaves finger their cocks and other images people would "rather forget"? (Whoever said silhouettes are politically neutral never saw this stuff.) Coat hangers, coffee beans and teacups are rendered in Ghost World and that "instructional video" as laughable material used in laughable ways, but then again, I know Ghost World was made by two middle-aged (I think) white guys, and if teacups are so laughable, there goes the careers of Louise Bourgeois and a million other great female installation artists who generally are still ignored in terms of collections and museum/gallery shows. And what if little old Asian girl me made a parody video called "How To Make Achingly Empty White Boy Architectural Photographs That Will Make Collectors Go Mad and Galleries Go Apeshit Over What is Essentially A Photo of a Supermarket?"

The point of any parody is a willful misreading and simplification, without giving the subject of parody an opportunity to respond. And of course, it doesn't help when marginalized people do make really bad work. There is a lot of oversimplistic, self-congratulatory art that is "political" but feels really crass and empty because it doesn't take risks, it doesn't question itself, it just makes people "feel good" about themselves in general. I think I've written before about how much I hate "feel good" art, which can also be a certain brand of "political" art (with its own superhero comic sense of "good" and "bad")--like "feel good" politics, it just makes me feel mistrustful towards the whole enterprise. I don't know why this uncritical-cheerleading-disguised-as-critique art gets made the way it does. Motives are often mixed, and somehow I think the problems of "learning art" have to do with how incredibly conceptual art has gotten, but how little critical thinking actually gets taught in art schools. (Or gets taught in general.) So you have a lot of conceptual sloppiness and therefore a lot of sloppy art, and an inability to critique your own practices outside of whether it works or not.

This whole question of critical art / political art was an issue that I really wrestled with in college, having created a lot of bad (?) political art (for example: a GIANT Victor mousetrap labeled "The Evictor," designed to be hidden under a staircase).

I finally came the conclusion that A: "All art is inherently political...and refusal to take a stand is a tacit endorsement of the status quo," (you can gag now) and B: the only important work being done right now is the stuff taking place outside the museums and art galleries (alternative comics, zines, graffiti, the Bread and Puppet theater, etc.).

I've always tended to believe that the context in which art is created or the way in which it is presented is as important as the actual art itself. (What does it really mean when someone who has never had to work in their life decides to mount an exhibition celebrating "traditional women's handicrafts such as weaving that have been denigrated by the male art establishment," and then hires a working-class person or artisan to do the actual weaving? Or when a man who does "political art" accepts a commission to do a piece on Wall Street?) In that sense, even something as benign as wildlife art or "mere" illustration can be far more political in actual effect than a lot of so-called "serious" issue art, especially when serious political art is compromised through corporate sponsorship, the innate classism of the art market, etc. (This gets back to that same old question: can a group like Rage Against the Machine really make a difference when they're singing about Che Guevara at the behest of a multi-national media conglomerate? Or, to put it another way, just how "radical" is it when millionaire art collectors like Charles Saatchi are asking you to "think outside the box"?)

I used to work as a security guard at the Walker Art Center, where I got to see a lot this pseudo-political stuff first-hand. As I was standing around in the galleries, I couldn't help but noticing that all of the major exhibitions were being underwritten by companies such as Honeywell, which was then a major manufacturer of landmines and cluster bombs, and the target of many local protests. So here were these major Fortune 500 companies funding artwork that -at least on the surface- appeared to be really "shocking" and "avant garde." The problem was none of the artwork ever really challenged any of the underlying institutions that were responsible for creating systems of oppression and social inequality in the first place. The art had become a kind of public relations campaign on behalf of the ruling power structure. So you'd have an entire gallery full of goat porn by Matthew Barney, or a cyclotron by Kara Walker, and all of the local media celebrities and Old Money would turn out to see it at exclusive "After Hours" parties, and the only thing that really changed was that companies Honeywell had a chance to "prove" to members of the liberal establishment just how "generous" they were in supporting local charities and museums.

I think there is a difference. I would say that I do drag performance that's critical, but I don't consider it political. It's critical of certain disciplines--e.g. of certain kinds of gender/sexuality regimes--but I don't consider it political action. I think audiences I perform for are often ready to accept critique, but maybe not so into getting politics dictated from the stage. I'm trying to think about intentionality (of the artist/performer) more, about what it means to make art with certain expectations. I don't necessarily believe that my intention should be to revolutionize an audience's worldview--because I'm not sure that's going to happen, and I don't think it's good to assume I can control that representation.

I wonder who's served by certain kinds of "political" art--the artist more than the audience? Some "other" for whom the artist presumes to represent through art? I used to have Big Ideas about the power of drag to make political statements, but I think I've moved away from that conviction. I think now I'm thinking it's more about satire, small critique, gestures that signify cultural neuroses.