Even as pollsters and pundits put their
daily spin on the obvious fact that Dole's
chances against Clinton are fast
approaching statistical impossibility,
national politics remains a potent cultural
metaphor for faith and disillusion,
persuasion and dread. The impending
collision of these forces in an election
that shall determine who will close out the
millennium as the leader of these United
States cannot help but rear its ugly head
in the arts. Among the most provocative and
appealing in the current spate of visual
politics of this pre-election season is a
low-key show of the young iconographic
perverter Harry Druzd's new paintings at
the downtown coffee shop and theater, the
Pink Pony.
Rather than present tokens of the human
candidates themselves, Druzd prefers the
more generalized and playful possibilities
of their surrogate symbols, the Republican
elephant and Democratic donkey. In omitting
the specific, his paintings romp along the
bizarre and childish fringes of allegory.
Druzd's donkey and elephant are friendly,
dim-witted and non-threatening in the way
we like our leaders to be. Innocence here
is a strategy of diversion and non-
accountability, a deliberate ambivalence of
intent--these may or may not be political
paintings--echoed in the creepy CIA-speak
"Plausible Deniability" of the show's
title.
The elephant and donkey are rendered in an
effusive cutesiness. Their darker personae
were first used in the acerbic caricature
of Thomas Nast, who invented them as
lampooning cartoon figures for the two-
party system (Nast's other legacy, derived
from the cruelty of his drawings of corrupt
politicians in the American humor magazine
of yore, Puck, is the word "nasty"). In
Druzd's work the nastiness is confined to
the absurdity of gesture. An elephant
defecating (dirty politics?), a double-
headed donkey (Clinton's two-faced
waffling?), elephants balancing on a ball
(the different agendas trying to fit into
the Republican platform?). Like all things
at election time, what you see in Harry
Druzd's paintings depends a great deal on
your perspective.
Harry Druzd at the Pink Pony, 176 Ludlow
Street, New York, NY 10002, Oct 23-Dec. 20,
1996.
CARLO McCORMICK is associate editor of
Paper.
