Into the Fray, but Not Without Protection

On Day 1 of the “Friendly Fire” project, the door was open, the fan was blowing, and a pseudo-sweatshop-cum-retail store in the heart of downtown San Diego was ready for customers, any kind of customers--sympathetic, enraged or just curious. Anything but apathetic.

In the back of the small shop, just a few blocks from where the Republican National Convention would erupt in a week, two seamstresses sat at their machines, turning out a line of vests designed to blur the boundary between political statement and fashion statement.

According to the creators of “Friendly Fire,” a consortium of San Diego artists-activists, wearing a “Friendly Fire” vest should make you feel empowered, not just embellished. The project has been set up under the sponsorship of L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, where a related installation opens today.

The mock bulletproof garments, with shooting-range targets on the back and 14 thematic fronts, have nothing to do with fall fashions’ trumpeted colors and everything to do with this election season’s hot issues--affirmative action, abortion rights, gun control, immigration and more. The vests are for sale, but the artists--Louis Hock, Scott Kessler, Cheryl Lindley, Elizabeth Sisco and Deborah Small--are not simply lusting after convention-time profits. They want to compete in “the free market of ideas.”

But how to enter into a political debate that is already choked with rhetoric, in a city with more elephants underfoot than pigeons?

“With wicked humor, with absurdity to match the absurdity of what’s going on,” Small said.

“Friendly Fire’s” fashion arsenal includes a “Democracy Vest,” shimmering with gold lame, a tie-dyed “1972 Vest,” a “Millennium Vest” with a print of glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeletons, and, playing off of San Diego’s motto, an “America’s Finest City Vest,” in south-of-the-border and north-of-the-border versions. Buttons down the front join a barbed-wire print with either striped Mexican serape fabric or a print of the American flag.

“Election politics offers the spectacle of protection,” reads the coy brochure the artists mailed to 3,800 convention delegates and 500 members of the media in early August. “Friendly Fire offers the cloth of hope.”

The ad hoc group, whose members range in age from 38 to 48 and who also work individually in video, photography, installation, costume design and community organizing, opted for a tone of savvy, satirical ad-speak for the project. Head-on confrontation just wouldn’t work, Hock said.

“You really can’t use a strategy like that because then you’re just tossed in the street with everyone else. You have to use a strategy that causes people to rethink an association between the issues and the political parties. You can’t use the same line of rhetoric, the same views, the same angle of approach. The issues would get lost in the crowd.”

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Three days after the “Friendly Fire” store-factory opened, the project made its first appearance in the press. The group also received a fan letter , via e-mail, thanking it for adding “truth and light to an otherwise very dark public discourse.” Delegates were beginning to receive their brochures in small, unmarked envelopes, padded to protect the marketing grabber inside, a solid brass sculpted bullet.

Is it art or is it commerce? These days, with demands that culture pay its own way, art, like so much else, has embraced the mantle of spectacle, and the line is harder and harder to draw. Wanting to be heard, but not “marginalized and controlled” in the designated, fenced-in protest zone across the street from the convention center, the artists came to an age-old conclusion: Money talks.

“What we’re talking about is who has access to politicians,” Sisco explained. “Because of the hideous amount of money politicians have to spend to get elected, it’s the people who bankroll them, the business concerns, the corporations. So by setting ourselves up as that type of voice, we, in a sense, model who it is you have to be in order to gain access.”

“Instead of Big Oil or Big Tobacco,” Small added with a laugh, “we’re Big Art.”

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By Day 4, a hate letter had arrived at the store, addressed to “UN-Friendly Fire.” A delegate sent his mailing back with the message, “Keep your puerile trash!” The fake bullets, the group heard from police in Sacramento, were setting off metal detectors in the capitol building. A delegate in Connecticut threw his packet on his front lawn and called the bomb squad.

Outside the “Friendly Fire” store, San Diego was presenting a fairly unified front for the Republicans, except for the sprinkling of Clinton/Gore signs in downtown windows and the activities at the official protest site. The transit board had recently adopted an “interim policy,” in effect during the convention, prohibiting advertisements that might be deemed offensive to any religious, ethnic, racial or political group. The policy may have had the “Friendly Fire” artists in mind--more than once they had used transit advertising as the medium for their messages.

In 1988, as the city was gearing up to host the Super Bowl, Hock, Sisco and artist David Avalos paid to mount 6-foot-wide posters on the back of 100 city buses. Mocking San Diego’s slogan, the poster was headed, “Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation.” It featured images of undocumented workers’ hands--the same ones that facilitate the local tourist economy--being handcuffed by a Border Patrol agent. The buses circulated throughout the city for a month.

Almost every year since then, the group (whose members vary from project to project) has staged a highly visible public intervention. In 1989, it was a theatrical re-creation of Russian-born anarchist Emma Goldman’s 1912 visit to San Diego on behalf of a campaign for free speech. “Welcome Back, Emma” took place during the city’s much promoted Russian Arts Festival. The next year brought “America’s Finest?,” a series of bus bench posters questioning whether the local Police Department used excessive force in a rash of recent shootings. The billboards and storefront exhibition of “NHI” in 1992 called attention to the police designation of “No Humans Involved” in the investigation of the murders of more than 40 San Diego women on the fringes of society.

Not all of their work used advertising, however. In 1993, Hock, Sisco and Avalos handed out signed $10 bills to workers gathered at pickup spots for day laborers. As the bills circulated through the local economy, “Art Rebate” was supposed to demonstrate how much the undocumented workers, as consumers and taxpayers, were contributing, the artists said.

The project became highly controversial because the artists were working under the auspices of a larger program funded by the NEA. “ ‘Art Rebate’ was a response to this call for giving taxpayers the right to decide how their tax dollars were being spent,” Sisco said. “So we were taking those tax dollars for art’s sake and returning them to taxpayers. It was an absurd response to the call for how arts funding should be distributed.”

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As the Republican convention began, “Friendly Fire” vests were selling at a rate of 12 to 15 a day, and delegates were starting to trickle into the store. Several, informally polled on the streets of downtown, remembered the mailing but dismissed it as just another piece of junk mail, “just someone trying to make a buck.” Others called it distasteful, sophomoric, fringe. Most thought the pitch was for real bulletproof vests--perhaps, said one, “with a comedic twist.” None recognized the project as public art.

Then, on the second day of the convention, Michael McCroskey, head of the Tennessee delegation, visited the shop and purchased the burlap-faced “Bottom Line Vest.” “What America needs is a sense of humor,” he told the artists.

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It’s still too early to gauge the impact of the “Friendly Fire” project, which, like all of the group’s work, evolves over time as the media and the public get involved. The injection of overt humor is a new ingredient for the artists. Unlike their other projects, “Friendly Fire” could be dismissed as simply funny.

“The Dadaists were also trivialized, yet we’re still grappling with their issues today,” noted MOCA curator Julie Lazar, who has coordinated the project for the museum. “The same with Fluxus and the people who created Happenings. All of that could be seen as buffoonery, but it wasn’t, either. As soon as you scratch the surface--if you do scratch the surface--the work begins to effect a change in your perception.”

Once “Friendly Fire” enters the museum--as an installation of vest- and text-laden dressmaker’s forms--the “cognitive dissonance” that Kessler hoped for in the minds of delegates and San Diegans will probably give museum-goers pause as well.

Putting the vests into a formal gallery and selling them there, Lazar said, “plays into questions of authorship, ownership and the value of art. This context deepens those questions.”

Even though Lazar credits the San Diego artists as “leaders in the field of public art,” she knows that such a project, with its flagrant marriage of art, politics and money, could cost the museum support. But to be true to MOCA’s mandate to present thought-provoking work, “Friendly Fire” is a risk--and a responsibility--worth taking, she said.

“What if we were in the age of Picasso,” Lazar asked, “and didn’t show ‘Guernica’?”

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“Friendly Fire,” Museum of Contemporary Art at California Plaza, through Nov. 3. The “Friendly Fire” storefront in downtown San Diego, 519 Island Ave., remains open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily through Wednesday. (619) 696-FIRE. The group’s Web site address is https://www.FriendlyFire.com