"Politics on Paper: Global Tragedies/Personal Perils"

Eric Avery, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 2004.

Didactic art can be a real downer. Either the message overrides the medium or the eye appeal of the work obscures the intended lesson. It’s like watching Fox News or attending a gala banquet benefiting starving children. You walk away feeling browbeaten or uncomfortably sated. As this powerful—if not entirely successful—show makes clear, it’s difficult to make work that effectively addresses real issues (as opposed to the self-reflexive concerns of most art). Take text. Unless it’s pithy and deployed in graphically engaging ways, it’s a lot of words. John Risseeuw’s pieces—shardlike shapes that form a sustained condemnation of land mines—rely on the printed word, both wall text and across the pieces themselves. It would be one thing to sit down and handle this stuff like a book; it’s another to assume the usual artgoing gaze and then force our eyes into a reading mode when what we expect to do in a gallery is look.

Robbin Ami Silverberg relies on words, too, but the surreal cast of her objects is often more compelling than the role language plays in the works. With Text-iles, though, she achieves a happy medium. Large wooden spools are wound with various papers in which adages regarding women (“A woman is the house,” “Let women spin and not speak”) are printed in various ways. These things really speak.

Eric Avery, M.D., assaults AIDS. His images—vaguely medieval, or Pop-like—are tough stuff, as critical of the afflicted as they are of the indifferent.—Thomas Connors