The Politics of Feeling

In the 1930s, social protest was second nature to the politically conscious artist. In the 1960s, instead of editorializing in melodramatic imagery, the artist is apt to employ the more oblique weapons of abstract parody and wit. His sentiments are no less angry on that account--as could be seen last week in Chicago. At the Feigen Gallery, 47 artists displayed acid valentines to Mayor Richard J. Daley, 21 of them composed especially for the show.

Two angry men were responsible for the exhibit: Chicago Art Dealer Richard Feigen, a Democrat who found himself shoved into the aisle during the convention by Daley's sanitation workers, and Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, who was visiting the city at the time and, as he recounts it, got "tossed to the ground by six swearing troopers who kicked me and choked me and called me a Communist." In such a context, Oldenburg told Feigen, "a gentle one-man show about pleasure" that he had originally promised the gallery for November seemed "a bit obscene." Still, he was willing to help Feigen persuade his fellow artists, who in September had signed a petition vowing that they would not show in Chicago for two years, to change their minds for this occasion.

The resulting exhibit is not, strictly speaking, obscene, but many of the artists in it use phallic and fecal images to express their feelings about the mayor. William Copley sent in a 1965 painting in which a woman exposes her plump backside. Oldenburg did a series of 48 indefinably nasty plaster versions of Chicago's distinctive red fireplugs, which for diverse reasons remind him of the plug-ugly Chicago cops. He also made a drawing of a "proposed colossal monument" for Chicago showing

Mayor Daley's head on a platter. Iowa University Sculptor Hans Breder, who makes delicate, dicelike constructions, had one of his students blast holes in a pair with a rifle, then put the violated work in a glass case and presented it as his offering.

Barnett Newman created a "Lace Cur tain for Mayor Daley" made of the barbed wire used for police barricades in August and spattered with red paint. Robert Motherwell decided to send two already completed abstract expressionist canvases. "The significance is to participate," he said. "This show represents the politics of feeling, not the politics of ideology." Sculptor Robert Morris settled for a telegram. His suggestion: redo the Chicago fire of 1871.

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