Video Art

Coco Fusco's 'Operation Atropos':
Fantasy Interrogation, Real Tension (Published 2006)

Author: Holland Cotter

To some people political art means protest art: slogan-slinging, name-calling, didacticism, an unaesthetic thing. But in the trauma-riddled early 21st century, after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, with a continuing war in Iraq, political art can be something else: a mirror.

At White Columns in Chelsea, the artist Harrell Fletcher has photographically reconstituted a museum display he saw on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City last year. The pictures in the original display documented the Vietnam War — known in Vietnam as the American War — as seen from a Vietnamese perspective. Mr. Fletcher presents the images as he found them. They are beyond horrific. more