This review was originally published as part of a now abandoned journal project under the title Volume (II)
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This month, the exhibit that resonated the most for me was The Road Through “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” which was presented by the (City of Raleighwood’s) Pullen Arts Center. It closed this chapter of its physical existence on 4/26, I hope most of you saw it. And if you didn’t please consider that, while the Center may not have the best or biggest gallery in our City, I don’t ever find myself disappointed in the exhibits there even if I’m not always blown away as I was with this outing. Plus it’s right next door to the Gregg Museum.
“DADT” was a Clinton-era policy in the US Armed Forces that most readers are probably familiar with; many are also familiar with the campaign during the Obama administration to overturn this policy which resulted in the discharge of 13,000+ service members. The ongoing project by documentary artist Theresa Scott takes its name from the same as it also takes a hard look at the real impacts of this policy when it was the law of the land. And I do mean dead-in-the-eyes here. Some of this work was serious and direct to the point of moving this writer to tears, (trigger warning) especially several of the stories which describe horrible incidents of assault and self-harm which took the lives of veterans.
The exhibition component of the project is a collection of images of printed photographs (cell phones were not yet ubiquitous in the early days of the policy), infographics created by the artist, and the stories of the individual service men and women whose lives were turned awry by the jeopardy of living authentically while offering their service to all of us, without judgement that they were not free from.
There’s a deft choice to materials at work. The certificate paper for the “official” reports of events, combined with font choices, layout and graphics, look like the type of government-issued document which might have been issued on the many incidents of unfairness and injustice. For the exhibit, they were simply pinned to the wall, just like reports or commendations might be in a service members office or home. The vinyl informational graphics/posters look like they might hang on the wall of a recruitment office. The Target “Home Goods” section-quality frames used to present the images are identical, no doubt, to those that would have held the photographs in the images on the walls of homes or offices belonging to the service members or their family.
I’ll be the first to admit that the work doesn’t carry a lot of the expectations and conventions of Fine Art baggage to the viewer- in fact, it looks and I assume is intended to be educational. The “Art” of the project has stepped out of the way and privileged utility over nuance and poetry. Let’s be frank- the typical foot-traffic in Pullen Art Center, a municipally-operated project intended to provide arts and craft education, is, almost definitely, not a “high Art” crowd. Combine that with the fact that most people know someone who is queer and, although decreasingly so, someone who is or has served in the US military, and it’s hard to imagine a much more impactful location to stage this exhibit- where it’s needed, to touch hearts and, hopefully, minds. I, and no doubt many other Art writers, could make a case that a valuable lesson would be taught to the those using the building to learn about Art by sacrificing immediate legibility to illustrate the topic with more subtlety, and perhaps in the future that would be a fine use for a, frankly, less serious topic. I mostly just want to congratulate the City staff that had the courage to put this work into the public in the current climate.
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