– is surprisingly able to focus attention on the backstory that is missing: the broken
promise of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’, and its replacement with the more immovable
conservatism of ‘identity, tradition and sovereignty’.
You might label these approaches ‘poetic conceptualism’ or ‘political poetry’. Some
of these works are more direct than others, but all rely on a process of poetic infiltration
rather than a simple denunciation of the reality they criticise. That these artists work
across media is significant: it indicates how artists are now entirely multidisciplinary, just
as it reveals how even big commercial galleries are now confident to work with artists
whose messages might not always be the easiest to take on. What’s important is that
those messages come across in and through ambiguities within these works – they’re
visual events loaded with cross-references between what one recognises from the outside
world and what is peculiarly artistic about them. Whether they do more than stand in for
an absent politics that we’d like to find elsewhere, but don’t, is a more difficult question.
Visual poetry is never politics, yet sometimes it can clarify and give shape to themes that
are so big we struggle to make sense of them.
ART TRENDS 2.indd 73 6/12/07 15:36:03
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