Frank Shifreen, visual artist in New York city and a curator of Ground Zero, interviewed by David Walsh for the World Socialist Web Site.

Frank Shifreen: I’ve been doing this kind of show for a long, long time, maybe 21, 22 years. All my shows have been about politics. I really believe you cannot separate art and politics. Everyone puts me down for thinking that politics has any role in art, especially in the art world in New York, which has become very conservative. Art there is not about critiques any more. It’s about mimicking sensationalist culture.

I strongly believe that the community of artists must be in the vanguard to change society by having shows, exhibitions, by creating art that gives us a sense of beauty—understanding also, but beauty is critical—because that’s how we show how we’re different. That’s how we show that we stand for something, that we’re different than the people we’re opposing. We’re opposed to these people who are controlling, oppressive and are trying to defend this unjust social order. This elite class of people: We don’t believe in that.

David Walsh: What were the origins of this show?

FS: I was creating a show called Witness. We started it and then September 11 happened. So as soon as that happened, things turned into almost a martial law situation. There were cops, soldiers everywhere. You couldn’t cross the street; it was amazing, you never saw that here in the US. It was like that for a week or so. And we heard of all the firemen killed, from all the fire stations here, policemen, innocent people, including artists. We changed the name to From the Ashes.

We had a wonderful show. There were other works in it. Some of the artists are the same. We got some press from that, we had an article in the Los Angeles Times, the television people came. We had a performance series. At that time, everyone was saying, “We’re all in this together.” Even [New York Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani looked good. Then things started to change. I wondered about the issues, what they were saying to us, Bush, Ashcroft, etc. What were the issues that were being played out? So it started to evolve, from a memorial show to more of a show that explored where we were going, what was going on.

DW: What you’re saying is that it began to become more critical?

FS: Yes, for sure. Exactly, it had to become more critical. We all began to see that we had been had. We were had by these political leaders, especially when we began to see the violations of rights, innocent Arab men being held in jail for months, and even now, 10 months later. People being held in jail without rights, even though they are known to be innocent.

I thought we had the power to break through it. The old Situationists had something, that art has the power to change the structure of communication in some way, and that by creating its own models and images we are able to halt the power of the Hollywood images.

Your web site is one of the only web sites that is really in opposition to it. There are very few. There’s little critical press in the mainstream.

DW: Were the artists changing as you were changing?

FS: I think the artists began to change as well. As a curator, I was a bit of a leader. I said, “I wanted to do the show, and this is what I‘m thinking. I’ll share my thoughts.” I received a sympathetic reaction. They would say, “My work is changing also.” I was impressed with Douglas Fishbone’s piece, this young Arab guy in a cage. I didn’t prompt him. It was beautiful. You see this vulnerable Arab young man inside the fence.

They talk about drawing from life in art, but why can’t drawing from life be drawing from the entire social and political life? And every other part of life. We can’t separate the political from the artistic. Every piece I do, whether it’s outwardly political or not, is very political. I believe very strongly in that.

DW: What has been the response of intellectuals and mainstream artists in general to September 11 and the Bush administration?

FS: I think there’s a lot of silence. I invited a number of more famous artists to be a part of the show, and they were not too interested. They might have been more interested if there were more money involved. Perhaps people were intimidated. They’re frightened of what is going to happen. They’re afraid that the country is going to turn on those who are not seen as patriotic, loyal. They didn’t give me any reasons. I was doing the Counting Coup show before, about Bush stealing the election. There was thunderous silence. I mounted the show wherever I could, there were a couple of well-known names, Leon Golub, Barbara Kruger, but a lot of artists just were not interested and didn’t want to hear from us, and there was this mood, they didn’t want to touch this, things were too good for them. Or perhaps they felt connected to this administration.

DW: Some of them do.

FS: Some of them do, I think the arch-conservatism of the Bush administration has almost become the mainstream for some of these people. It’s a very conservative strain. I’m a very stuck kind of guy. I get immersed in this, I can’t get out of it, I want to keep doing it. With Counting Coup, we had small crowds in some places. We were going against the tide. But I believe it. I think we should have this kind of activist art. Artists have the responsibility to help each other, to form networks.

DW: You mentioned something before about feeling constrained yourself in what you could say about September 11.

FS: I did feel that way. I felt that I had to ... I was apologizing, talking about “fair and balanced.” It was almost like the media got to me too.

DW: There has been an enormous campaign mounted to try and intimidate people.

FS: I felt that way. I had to explain myself, to defend myself. Like the comment from the New York curator who said that the show was a very exploitative idea. Someone said that to me. It’s not exploitative for the Bush administration to mount this whole operation, but it’s exploitative for an artist who has no chance of selling the work, to explore the event!

DW: If you think that the entire US media has been consumed since September 11 with doing nothing but exploiting and sensationalizing the event, to criticize this show is obscene.

FS: I think so.

DW: I did think you were being timid and defensive. You’re not going to attract people today unless you say this is protest, this is opposition.

FS: After doing this show, I acknowledge this much more. In future shows, in the catalogues, there will be more critical material.

When I speak to people, they are beginning to see the situation for what it is, this whole media campaign that is defending all these incursions by the Bush administration. This proposed war with Iraq is crazy. They’re going to be punished for it. And the whole business with the companies, the corruption. So many people have lost so much money, in their 401k plans, their retirement. What percentage has lost money? Twenty percent, forty, fifty, sixty percent? It goes beyond that. These funds have lost trillions of dollars in these shenanigans, and it’s all connected. Bush was trying to push his program, but they are caught.

I’ve been thinking about a show called Corporate Crime. It’s a fair game for art to deal with.

For a while I became sort of an art careerist. Then the art market fell. I realized that I’ve always been a political artist. I started out as a painter. I’ve been doing these large computer prints that I have in the show. They are image-based. What I use is images from different sources, often television images. I go up to different facilities in upstate New York and I layer many images all together, Hollywood, science fiction, war dramas, it comes together in this soup of imagery and it also becomes abstract, but not through reducing, but through addition of images. I’m also doing sculpture, painting. As well, I think the creation of a show is a work of art.