Artists of the World, Unite!

That red “BLAME YALE” t-shirt with Bush emblazoned on it that your roommate bought from the Harvard Dems last year? It won’t just be on display at the game—it’s already up in “DISSENT!,” the new exhibit that opened on Veterans’ Day and will run through Feb. 25 at the Fogg Art Museum. The shirt is a sardonic contemporary comment among a plethora of protest prints in an exhibit that spans six centuries and features works from playing cards and t-shirts to images by Goya, Picasso and Warhol.

For its scale, the show is incredibly comprehensive in its scope. Representative pieces from movements as dissimilar as AIDS awareness and backlash against Louis Philippe’s constitutional monarchy share the gallery’s walls, united in inky rebellion.

Opening on the heels of this year’s midterm elections, the exhibit makes no bones about its desire to provoke discussion. It states its ambition to be a “site of public discourse” in its accompanying introductory statement. And just in case you think Susan Dackerman, Weyerhaeuser curator of prints at the Fogg, is kidding, the show backs up its point by beginning with a bang. In the Fogg’s Italian Renaissance courtyard, Richard Serra’s black-and-white image of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner, whose peaked head is flanked by the words “STOP B S” (a modification of what originally read “STOP BUSH”), jumps out from the bright orange of the wall facing the entrance. The large, emphatic letters of “DISSENT!,” printed on the wall, approximate all the smeared grainy glory of a woodblock print. Clearly this message is not meant to be subtle.

Prints evolved as the medium of choice for dissenters the world over not only due to their low cost and high quantity production rates, but also because “they enable the free flow of images and ideas to a wide-ranging public,” according to the show’s text. Or, in the slightly more crude language of the 1960s underground student newspaper the Old Mole—several issues of which are included in the show—because you can print protest on media including a “t-shirt, jacket, poster, your ass.” For the record, of the four examples cited, only t-shirts and posters make an appearance in the exhibit.

By juxtaposing protest pieces of the past with those of the present, the show stresses the universality of dissent even while attesting to the wide variety of ways in which people try to challenge, and change, the status quo. Enrique Chagoya’s simple modification of Goya’s 1799 etchings against the censorship and suppression of Enlightenment ideas, “Los Caprichos,” fashion them to fit issues of import 200 years later. A tiny Tinky Winky Teletubby doll stands witness to continued relevance of protest art like Goya’s.

Though the inclusion of such disparate works may initially seem to belie the show’s profession of a unified theme, viewers should eventually find a method to the madness. Even in the seemingly chaotic first gallery, the installation of the exhibit encourages comparison, pairing items alternately by theme, method, and subject: two posters about AIDS take different tacks alongside one another in one room, while two interpretations of the American flag hang in another, and two very disparate cartoons share a wall. Both of the cartoons demonstrate different interpretations of the medium. Picasso’s “Dream and Lie of Franco” series, a near textless free-form fantasy from the 1930s, is a far cry from the word-based, highly stylized cartoons of David Rees’ “Get Your War On.” Regardless, they both serve the same purpose, demonstrating the grotesqueness and absurdity of war.

The exhibit’s stress on the importance of the show in a university setting is illustrated especially well by the collection from the 1969 protests at Harvard. Imperatives scrawled on top of the image of a clenched red fist on a t-shirt from the time represent a call to arms on campus: the words “strike because your roommate was clubbed” were based in events as real as “strike because there’s no poetry in your lectures” and “strike to smash the corporation.” The physical manifestation of student fervor, the shirt’s message is as clear and emphatic as when it was printed.

Though the show at times touches on the question of the role of museums in presenting such works, the issue is never fully explored. One has to wonder what the Guerrilla Girls would have thought of their manifesto attacking the corruption of museum practices hanging in one of the institutions they were protesting. And Glenn Ligon’s “Condition Report,” modified reproductions of a protest poster made by African-Americans stating “I AM A MAN,” itself comments on what its description calls the “commodification of oppression by the art world.” Such pieces raise questions as to the prints’ place—art, protest, or both—that the show never really answers or addresses further.

Although some of the efforts to achieve radicalism may be questionable—the neon green and orange walls may hurt your eyes more than help the exhibit—the show works hard to earn its exclamation point, and earn it it does. Whether it will engender new sources of dissent—or even DISSENT!—we’ll have to wait and see.