Marx on Earth

The SPACE Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, unveiled its two-hundredth anniversary celebration of Karl Marx’s birth this past spring at a timely moment. Indeed, from all reports the word socialism no longer raises the sort of McCarthyite hackles it once did, most especially among politically energized millennials too young to know or care what the Red Scare was all about anyway. Curated by Professors Kathy M. Newman and Susanne Slavick of Carnegie Mellon University, Marx@200 was part of a larger and ambitious framework of discussions, performances, lectures, and events sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University’s Humanities Center. The overall aim was to explore Marx and the legacy of socialism. At SPACE attention focused on how artists the world over have made use of that legacy in responding to the predations of global capital and, most vividly, to continuing fallout from the Great Recession of 2008.

Included in this wide-ranging show were many well-known names like Coco Fusco, Mel Chin, Pedro Reyes, and Dread Scott, along with a refreshingly diverse array (in terms of gender, ethnicity, and national origin) of some thirty-three other artists and artist groups. Through paintings, videos, billboards, photos, and other media, Marx@200 skewered a rogues’ gallery of seismic epicenters for the world financial crisis, including Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, while also taking up pressing themes including labor exploitation, gentrification, and the prison-industrial complex. At a time when populist rage against neoliberalism and the 1 percent careens frighteningly to the right, Marx@200 tilted left with varying degrees of admonition, satire, hopefulness, and humor. Taken as a whole, the show makes plain the need for Marxist cultural critique, perhaps now more than ever.

Figure 1.

Cao Fei, My Future Is Not a Dream 05, 2006. Inkjet print, 120 × 150 cm. Video still from Whose Utopia, 2006. Projected color video with stereo sound, 20 min. Courtesy of the artist.

Two mural-sized canvasses served as bold visual anchors for the SPACE installation of Marx@200. Matt Bollinger’s spray-painted and collaged The Lot (2013) covered one wall of the gallery, immersing viewers in the ravages of neoliberal dystopia. Used cars and broken fencing share a depopulated construction site with battered cameras, ladders, and plywood props that simultaneously mark the area as an abandoned stage set. Perversely bounded off by a “Private Property, No Trespassing” sign in the foreground (who would want this junk anyway?), the work literally and metaphorically brings down the curtain on a drama all too familiar from Bollinger’s Missouri roots and the blight of so many rust-belt towns where jobs dried up long ago.

The second large-scale frame for Marx@200, Andrew Ellis Johnson’s Futures (2005–9), responds to this neo-liberal dystopia with the sort of caustic humor that made a bygone generation of Marxist Left artists (George Grosz, John Heartfield, etc.) pariahs of capitalism’s early twentieth-century industrial phase. In place of their jowly, porcine depictions of fat, cigar-smoking capitalists, Johnson gives us the pig itself—a lumbering, sanguine (as in red-hued) colossus of overstuffed flesh. Slicing across its bloated form is a wildly jagged stock market graph. Its vertiginous zigzag tracks the corporate mendacities that prepared the ground for the infamous crash of 2008, while the image overall reminds us of a swinishness that has yet to be held to account.

This sort of deadly earnest humor resonated elsewhere in the show, as could be seen in Mel Chin’s woodblock print, Revised Post Soviet Tools to Be Used against the Unslakeable Thirst of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (2010). With crisply incised white lines on a red ground, Chin’s work gives us a graphically powerful and Gothically backdated version of the Soviet Union’s symbol of revolutionary solidarity between workers and peasants. Instead of the emblematic hammer and sickle, Chin depicts a hammer crossed with a wooden stake. They serve as an altogether more suitable duo of...