Art, politics entwine in photo exhibit

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Written by Debra Brehmer, Contributing writer
Mar 24, 2011

Pictures of the recent protests in Madison by Milwaukee photographer Kevin Miyazaki are at the Marshall Building, 207 E. Buffalo St., April 15-16. – Photo: Courtesy

Art and politics are not strange bedfellows. They’ve been holding hands since our ancestors carved the first stone into a tiny goddess called the Venus of Willendorf, giving initial form to a hierarchy of power between earth and the cosmos. Art and power structures entwine as part of larger cultural forces.

Gov. Scott Walker seeks to eliminate the Wisconsin Arts Board and cut the $3.7 million in state arts funding to zero. This reflects Walker’s zero understanding of the role of the arts in making Wisconsin a place where people want to live.

But maybe Walker does understand the subversive power of art to express points of view, translate sentiments, provide discourse and expand modes of thinking – all of which make it a powerful force against his ideology. Perhaps that’s why he needs to abolish the infrastructure of the arts. The expository nature of art stands in opposition to the heavy-handed, overly simplified, forced and singular point of view promoted by tea party Republicans. Art requires multifaceted and layered thinking. Art is less a bulldozer than a gentle rain, more democratic in its reach.

With or without state support, art allows us to connect with and reflect on history. The 4-inch Venus of Willendorf, left behind 30,000 years ago, holds the germ of human spiritual thinking, as it would progress. Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs provide tangible connection to the dust of battlefields. The Depression comes to us via Works Progress Administration photographers such as Walker Evans, Bernice Abbott and Dorothea Lange. The early industrial age and its abuses linger in our minds through Lewis Hine’s pictures.

Local photographer Kevin Miyazaki went to Madison recently to document the protests in the way he knows best, through portraits. While Walker would like the enormous public opposition to his governance to fade, Miyazaki felt he could contribute to not letting that happen.

He titled his project “This is What Democracy Looks Like,” and in its current state it is an online slide show with music and brief text that can be accessed at http://vimeo.com/21141080. Miyazaki is making prints of the images to include in a group show called “Clampdown: Labor, Management and the Recession” at the Zaller Gallery in Cleveland beginning April 30. A second set of prints will be on view at the Marshall Building, 207 E. Buffalo Street, in Milwaukee’s Third Ward on gallery night and day,  April 15-16.

Miyazaki orchestrated two different shoots outside the Capitol building. He erected a portable studio on the sidewalk, with a black velvet backdrop and a large umbrella with flash. Photo assistant Michelle Nolan and his sister, Cherlyn Lund, helped line up the sitters and gather their information. They photographed about 150 people and distilled those portraits into the online project.

Because of the studio set-up, the images are pristine, slick and commercial looking. People of all ages and groupings stand and directly address the camera, all of them wearing or holding the regalia of their opinions – signs, hats, buttons, uniforms and T-shirts with slogans.

Teachers, firefighters, kids, ironworkers, police officers, prison guards and concerned individuals are presented with prideful expressions in the language of advertising and propaganda photographs – bright, art-directed, perfectly lit. Without the insignias and protest signs, these could be faces in a hospital’s annual report.

The professional studio finesse paradoxically frames the homemade vernacular beauty of the protest and gives these pictures their power. Miyazaki applies the shiny visual language of the spin experts to extol the “other side” or the common cause. And it’s touching and beautiful in its stark truth.

The black backdrop takes the images out of place and time, allowing us to focus not so much on the specific documentary details of the protests, the budget or the robot-like governor but more selectively on something that is broadly felt and more elusive to contain: the enactment of freedom of expression. The photographs do show us what democracy looks like within our freedom to assemble. It’s all the more poignant against the backdrop of Libya.

Clarity and simplicity as formal tools contain a stubborn undertow of truth. The great photographer August Sander made stark indexical pictures of people from all walks of life, in order to better see them. The small town Southern studio photographer Richard Samuel Roberts in the 1920s and 1930s used the standardized language of the work-a-day studio portrait to record African-American life in a segregated city. His work remains an assertion of who these people were rather than how the majority saw them.

Miyazaki steps into the historic stream of the studio photographer as a blunt record keeper of the people, and he helps perpetuate what is too easy to forget but is most important to remember.