In a new exhibition, the importance of studying the messaging we receive from both the government and the media is highlighted

'Lessons in visual literacy': how art can help us look more carefully at language

In the 1980s, the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn created what he calls “airmail paintings”: folded-up paper artworks he popped in the mail to art galleries abroad.

He would paint toys, beds and bodies as a way of critiquing the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, which ran from 1973 to 1990, without the government ever knowing. Dittborn says the lone objects in his artworks were left empty and unoccupied for a reason. “The work portrays deaths in the present, while indirectly alluding to deaths and disappearances from political reasons,” he said.

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Some of these paintings will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago as part of Direct Message: Art, Language and Power. With more than 70 artworks, from the 1980s to the present, the exhibition looks at how artists add, remove or play with language in relation to the government and the media.

“Most of the artists are trying to make us think and look more carefully at the words the media and the government uses,” said Michael Darling, the museum’s chief curator. “I would sum it up as lessons in visual literacy.”

The exhibition also details how an artist manages to carefully sidestep trouble. In the case of Dittborn’s work, Darling said it came down to visual coding.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eugenio Dittborn – Dust Clouds, Airmail Painting No 99, 1992. Photograph: Nathan Keay

“The language he used to critique the Chilean government had to be quite coded to avoid persecution,” said Darling. “This is an example of somebody who doesn’t have the protection of the first amendment to make critical comments about his government; he had to find other ways to get his message out there.”

There are also artworks that are what Darling called “artists who are casting a skeptical eye towards the media in their work”.

This includes the works of Stan Douglas, whose video piece Evening, from 1994, takes archival news footage from the 1960s and hires actors to re-enact the same broadcasts to highlight the breaking news that led to America experiencing a time of unrest.

“It’s an old-fashioned Walter Cronkite-style of news reporting with three different news anchors whose words are in conflict with one another,” said Darling. “You get a different sense of these types of deliveries, and different emphases come into play.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Stan Douglas – Evening, 1994. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Another work in the exhibition includes Jamal Cyrus’s artwork Cultr-Ops, where he has layered and removed information from Malcolm X’s FBI file. “The work is about the surveillance and repression of American popular culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also prompts the viewer to ask the question how this cultural form is policed and controlled in the present,” said Cyrus.

Darling said: “Even with the Freedom of Information Act, there have been certain things that still are not legible and visible to us, which describes the activity of the government. These documents have been circulated in the public eye, and he has redacted them, but has also found ones that have been redacted, too.”

Another artist who blocks out paragraphs of text is Alexandra Bell, who uses articles from the New York Times to criticize how the media has covered certain key tragedies, from the Charlottesville riots in 2017 to the killing of Ferguson teen Michael Brown in 2014.

“It looks into current day news coverage; how we read the New York Times versus the Washington Post, even CNN versus Fox, and how news items are covered by different media outlets and what their biases bring to their stories,” said Darling. “Many artists use that technique of covering up language, censoring in various ways, to make their messages clear.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alexandra Bell’s Michael Brown artwork. Photograph: Alexandra Bell

Famed text-based artist Barbara Kruger is showing Untitled (We construct the chorus of missing persons) from 1983, which shows the title alongside an image of an anonymous person with hair covering their face.

Jenny Holzer’s LED piece For Chicago from 2007 will also be on view, reading phrases the artist refers to as “truisms”, such as: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “Action causes more trouble than thought” alongside the more debatable “A lot of professionals are crackpots”.

“A lot of artists here take newspapers and highlight words and excise others to show there is bias in the language the media uses,” said Darling. “Racial bias, political bias; so much of the work is to make us aware of how we’re all being manipulated by the news we read. That’s a theme throughout the exhibition.”

Other artworks in the exhibition include works by Paul Thek, William Kentridge and Gary Simmons, many of which don’t directly criticize propaganda directly, but rather make soft (and arguably safe) suggestions.

“We’ve painted a broader picture of those ideas, media manipulation, without pinning it all on one politician or news outlet or news network,” said Darling. “I think visitors would draw their own conclusions of that and make those connections.”

But in an ever-increasing self-critical media landscape, can viewers and readers think entirely for themselves?

“The show is quite timely because it hopefully will make us think more carefully about how we are being led to certain conclusions by newspapers and TV news, and that they aren’t as neutral as we’d hope they would be,” said Darling. “There are angles that they’re pushing.”