Better Get a Shovel, 1996 For Every Quid There is a Quo, 1996 Nom de Guerre, 1996 Pyramid of Pachyderms, 1996 Pachydumb, 1996

harry druzd at the pink pony by Carlo McCormick 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.