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"We Must Indeed All Hang Together"
“If this comes out on YouTube, I will have to kill you,” warns Jesse Jagtiani’s friend while preparing Thanksgiving dinner in Jagtiani’s video How Dare You Call Me Un-American! Recorded in 2008, the casual-seeming piece ably tackles this exhibition’s focus: political art at a time when social media and other forces have thrown our notions of “community” into confusion.
Jagtiani’s friends’ dialogue about their immigrant families’ struggles to celebrate an “authentic” Thanksgiving taps into ongoing anxieties about American identity and assimilation. The video conveys the ways geographical distance compels Americans to cobble together families out of friends and the way the Internet prevents us from isolating ourselves completely. In the final shot, as the women share their meal in the background, a laptop in the foreground plays news footage of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks.
“We Must Indeed All Hang Together” is the best of the four shows in Sullivan Galleries’ “New Approaches.” Its weak spots are offset by treats like Rachel Mason’s The Ambassadors (2004–08), dozens of porcelain busts the artist made of world leaders from the past three decades. Her kitschy medium renders even Margaret Thatcher endearing; by inserting porcelain models of herself into the dictators’ and presidents’ ranks, Mason enhances the impression that she wants to understand them. We’re a long way from empathizing with Kim Jong Il, but Mason’s accompanying artist’s book and videos of herself dressed as these politicians, performing songs from their perspectives, evoke more fellow feeling than you’d expect.
