Spotlight Reviews

CONNECTICUT

Housatonic Museum of Art/Bridgeport
www.hcc.commnet.edu/artmuseum/
MATT ERNST & ROB ROY: ICONS FOR A NEW CENTURY
PHILIP JONES GRIFFITHS: AGENT ORANGE: COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN VIET NAM

The startling Ernst/Roy prints and paintings comprising Icons for a New Century depict a unique and devastating view of the peril of a technological age built on the assumption of unlimited cheap energy sources. Stark phallic graphics-bombs dropping from the womb of airplanes like toxic scrotum, machine guns with a gas tank as the trigger, missiles, microphones, oil rigs and scuba divers-overwhelm the feminine icons-the crescent moon, coiling serpent and oil tanks-that bring hope for transcendence and/or containment of destructive forces. Ernst creates the geometry of destruction with oil on canvas undergoing a process of pigment build-up and breakdown, giving a foreboding of the chaotic breakdown of surfaces.
The Roy prints contain dark nightmarish silhouettes of soldiers and their machinery in aggressive movement across monochromatic, atmospheric space reflecting the bright hues of radioactivity. This contamination nightmare brings us across the barrier separating the split galleries. Philip Jones Griffiths's black-and-white photographic images, most of them of children, are painful to look at. The grotesque beauty of the lingering effects of the toxic chemical Dioxin used in Agent Orange is an essential reminder; despite the genetic mutation of the civilians contaminated by the water and soil that serve as sustenance, life goes on. As we sit on the bench and absorb the terrible mistake of U.S. penetration into Viet Nam, a handsome boy's face with a terribly deformed body looks down at us, asking innocently, "Why?"

Rob Roy, Oil Storage Tank #11, iris print.

Curator Robbin Zella goes a long distance in balancing the human appetite for destruction imbedded in the iconography of war with an even deeper longing for transformation. The bleak view of these two exhibitions is mitigated by a poignant documentary film, The Friendship Village, shown on a video monitor placed against the wall separating the two galleries. The film presents the story of founder George Mizo (who died after filming), a decorated American war hero who survived an enemy assault and went on to become a prominent anti-war activist. Mizo-who was permanently disabled by Agent Orange-lived to see his dream become a reality.
In Friendship Village-a community of reconciliation and healing for victims of Agent Orange built on a former rice paddy-he joined hands with the military commander responsible for the death of his platoon. This mythical narrative of reconciliation, healing, and resurrection leaves us with more than hope: It leaves us with a responsibility to take immediate action. Lisa Paul Streitfeld