Julie Ault and Martin Beck have collaborated over the last decade on a series of art projects that pitch an acute awareness of critical culture, methods of visualization, and counter-practices in the arts into a cogent rethinking of the politics of representation. For me, their work rings with a sensation of rediscovering the space and the ideas of an art practice that is both engaged and resistant at a time when culture feels wholly bound to a market. Their practice(s) as artists, their writing and their work as designers, are reinterpreted through historical understandings of the subject at hand, linking their own reflective experiments in authorship and institutional presentation with earlier intellectual kin. In collaborations such as Outdoor Systems, Indoor Distribution (2000), the book project Critical Condition (2003), designs for large-scale exhibitions at the International Center of Photography and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, and their individual output such as Ault’s Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking (1997 & 2000) and Beck’s an Exhibit: viewed played populated (2003) respectively, they give both a history and a model for the alternative (indeed, one of Ault’s projects is the book Alternative Art New York 1965-1985).
The Social Landscape installation in the exhibition Borne of Necessity is an enormous graphic covering some one-hundred feet of interior wall space that serves as both the introduction and boundary for an exhibition of contemporary art on the subject of poverty. At either end of the graphic wall are two informational alcoves devoted to, on one side, The War on Poverty program begun in 1963 by then president Lyndon Johnson, and, on the other side, the current Bush administration tax cuts, as well as a film series titled Economies of Poverty that Ault and Beck programmed to accompany the show. These alcoves serve as the entrance and exit to the exhibition of artists whose works »challenge mainstream depictions of poverty«, in the words of curator Ron Platt. Between these points and along the wall, but outside the exhibition, is the vibrant colored graph showing three data sets rendered chronologically. These are: the absolute, or official poverty scale, the relative poverty scale, and, beginning in roughly the middle of the time frame, the proportional benefit of tax cuts across the American economic spectrum. Because of its location outside the Borne of Necessity show but inside the museum, the views from the Weatherspoon’s permanent collection galleries found the bright, multicolored graph of inequity as the background for comparatively standard museum holdings.
In a legend for the graph included on the wall, Ault & Beck describe how the definition of poverty, rather than the experience of poverty or the practical response to poverty, has driven a policy contradicted by life considered beyond subsistence: »The poverty line divides those who are considered poor from those who are not. It is a concrete and symbolic parameter used for judging financial eligibility for certain federal programs, and … the number of Americans in poverty each year. … A fundamental issue in the ongoing debate about measuring poverty is whether poverty lines should be updated in >absolute< or >relative< fashion… Implicit in the relative poverty measure is the assumption that people need more than basic nutrition … As of 2000, 11.3 percent of the population was poor, according to the official >absolute< measure. When using a >relative< measure, 21.1 percent of the U.S. population was estimated to live in poverty in 2000.«
In this dire context of official neglect, Ault and Beck offer a mural evocative of more optimistic methods (and color schemes) of informing the public, and it is in this spirit that the piece also concludes with the annotated schedule of films ranging from De Sica to Michael Moore. Indeed, the graphic genius of the mural combined with the films speaks to empowerment in the face of deprivation. The striking accomplishment of the piece is its double engagement with the audience, first for the compelling function of scale to force one’s self-identification within the data, and second, for the audience’s realization that the stakes involved in representing the poor are very high indeed. Walking along the timeline, we cannot avoid the awareness of how devices such as the official poverty line, unchanged since its devising, are very much in the business of the production of poverty, the systemic institutionalizing of poverty as an undifferentiated instrument of economic policy and its professionals.
On the other hand, we also become aware, perhaps in anticipation of seeing the rest of the show, of the absence of images of the poor in this work. Erasing poverty from public consciousness is characteristic of contemporary conservatism. Social welfare as a philosophy gained official credence in American policy not so much in order to represent its neediest citizens, but more to save capitalism from itself: from the realities wrought by the depression of the 1930s, the war of the 1940s, and the abuses of the market system that those catastrophes exposed. By softening the system, the logic of the New Deal went, capitalism can be maintained. But by the time of George Bush’s second term, the goals have shifted to securing the future for globalization’s corporate and military winners and to ensure the demise of liberal safety nets for the rest of us. Within current conservative politics, there are no poor — there are only the faithful, the potential entrepreneurs, the over-taxed, etc. Earlier policies at least borrowed the rhetoric of equity and progressive fiscal responsibility in order to appear to be confronting reality. Today’s policies refute even those fundamentals in favor of the plutocratic logic of wealth. In this sense, another take on Ault & Beck’s Social Landscape is to see the timeline as the era between the first Texan to take the Oval Office without being elected (Johnson) and the last (Bush); the era begun by the assassination of a social progressive from the Northeast (JFK) and concluded by the attempted (or perhaps successful, time will tell) assassination of progressive government. Between these moments is a painted desert that is the stark foundation of American capitalism.