P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center

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2008 Summer

That Was Then...This Is Now: Flags

Anna Altman

William Prieto

Apolitico

2004

Installation view at VII Havana Biennial, Daros-Latinamerica Collection, Zurich

Photo courtesy the artist

In 2004, the Iraq Governing Council announced a new flag for post-Saddam Iraq. The flag was white with blue, yellow, and blue parallel bands across the bottom; above it, a light blue Islamic crescent was suspended in a white field. With its omission of green and black (colors associated with Islam) and red (representative of Arab nationalism), its blue crescent suspended against a white background, and its immediate recollection of Israel’s flag, the design was rejected.

Within the uniform nylon square allotted to each nation, colors, lines, and shapes construct a visual and symbolic manifestation of a nation and its identity. But what happens when these symbols, accrued over a long history, are displaced? Misread? Purposefully distorted? What if flags are employed to present a different, or non-national, identity all together?

The artists’ flags represented in That Was Then…This Is Now play with these semiotic distortions. Flags are employed and mobilized as loaded symbolic spaces and a site of protest, ranging from the assertion of alternative identities to a playful disregard for the flag’s symbolic importance to an erasure of nationalist symbols.

In his 1990 work, African-American Flag, David Hammons inserts the colors of Pan-Africanism within the United States flag. A clear convergence of symbols for Hammons, whose work often incorporates everyday objects with significant symbolic weight and references his experience as an African-American man, the flag was shown previously at P.S.1 as part of the artist’s retrospective in 1990. With its title and palette, the work thus evokes an identity that overwhelms the boundaries of any one nation while its title champions the United States’ under-represented minority.

Lovett/Codagnone’s Stripped (2006)—stretched out of proportion and with its black stripes of alternating cotton and satin—appears as a flag dressed to mourn, an apocalyptic image that acknowledges United States’ flag distortion following September 11th.

The gravity of these pieces is offset by the collective My Barbarian’s Burning Flag, a flag with fabric flames sewn into it—a cheeky and playful send-up of our earnest protection of a mere symbol.

The centerpiece of the flags section, arranged around P.S.1’s courtyard, Wilfredo Prieto’s Apolitico presents 30 national flags, reproduced at full size and presented grandly on flagpoles, but leeched of color and recreated in grayscale. Without color, the flags are bled of their political symbolism and rendered, as the title of the piece asserts, apolitical. The symbols and shapes of each flag become simple geometric arrangements, only vaguely recognizable. National colors, like the Tricolor of France, become indistinguishable. Contested political spaces—like those of East Timor, Palestine, and Cyprus—lack the political aggression they can otherwise connote. One can imagine the colors of Hammons’ African-American Flag freed from its mistaken correlation with Arab nationalism yet suddenly indistinguishable from America’s own flag, or the controversy over the proposed Iraqi flag’s resemblance to Israel’s heightened or abandoned. Prieto’s representation of the apolitical, with a gentle gesture of peaceful protest, mocks our rabid nationalism and heightens semiotic ambiguity even as it acknowledges its gravity.