Review: Sam Durant at Blum & Poe

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In all of American history, nothing has been more politically radical than the late 18th century ideas of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and their cohorts. Authors of the first great liberal documents — “Common Sense,” “The Rights of Man,” the Declaration of Independence — they saw their intellectual propositions, both brilliant and flawed, ignite social revolutions.

Starting around 2002, Sam Durant began making a provocative series of works that ruminate about seemingly radical political ideas that have in fact been institutionalized. His drawings, lighted signs and installations also participate in the process, shaking up the sediment and valorizing the result. Four recent drawings and five large-scale light boxes at Blum & Poe make up a powerful ensemble.

The graphite drawings replicate and enlarge newspaper photographs of civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, two in the U.S. and two in Australia. (Durant was invited to participate in the 2008 Sydney Biennale.) One shows a rally before a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., and another Australian aborigines protesting bicentennial celebrations; both record ongoing struggles for equality, centuries after the two nations’ establishment.

Durant’s drawings, probably made by copying projected images, insist on an inherently political dimension in appropriation art. Appropriation — taking over an existing image — is itself a once-radical, now thoroughly commonplace art form. Durant’s replicated photographs return appropriation to its modern source in the newspaper clippings smuggled into Cubist collages by Picasso and Braque. Surprisingly, in their new situation Durant’s images possess a ruminative quality — perhaps as a simple function of having been transformed from the timely urgency of photojournalism into the slow, deliberative process of drawing by hand.

What each of the four drawn photographs has in common is the prominent inclusion of a handmade protest sign, held by a person or, in one case, taped to a police barricade. The signs are oriented parallel to the picture plane. It’s as if their hand-rendering has leaked out into Durant’s pencil drawing, irradiating art’s often overlooked status as another kind of sign.

For theorist Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum takes precedence over the original. In Durant’s work, it’s more like the passing of a torch. The trick is to keep the flame alive.

The flame gets passed on one more time in the next room, which is ringed with large, brightly illuminated signs. Solid color vinyl sheets in red, blue, yellow, white and green, with all the lettering in black, are lighted from behind by fluorescent tubes. The largest — 8 feet high and nearly 9 and a half feet wide — replicates an aborigine sign that says “200 years of white lies.” (It’s a perfect double entendre.) The smallest — about 5 feet by 7 feet — comes from the Selma police barricade: “This is freedom?”

The light boxes replicate the handmade protest signs as large, imposing, even somewhat aggressive signage that is inescapably commercial in bearing. It’s as if the vivid street language of dissent has been absorbed into the language of the mini-mall as much as it has been into the art gallery. Collective social action, which is what the original protests were about, is shaken by its new context.

“200 years of white lies” takes on a different meaning when rendered in a commercial guise, coming across as a sly joke on the familiar deceptions of advertising. Suddenly, Durant’s slogans italicize an economic matrix. Racism has a familiar personal dimension, reflected in the faces of Durant’s hand-rendered drawings. But it has always been powered by a less visible economic engine, whether the colonial suppression of indigenous populations or the exploitation of slaves. Durant’s lighted signs illuminate that often obscured dimension.

-- Christopher Knight

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-2062, through May 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Above: ‘200 Years of White Lies’ (2008), electric sign with vinyl text. Credit: Sam Durant/Blum & Poe