The brochure for this exhibit is bilingual. The Museum offers a brochure for each of its other several exhibits, but those brochures are not bilingual. Is it that the museum administrators think that Spanish speakers who still cannot read English travel all the way from, say, Brooklyn, only to learn the history of El Barrio? Wouldn't those Latinos also want to learn about Glamour: New York Style, on high fashion dress? Those questions are, of course, facetious. The Museum was obviously deviating from its anglophonic norm to accommodate symbolism important to the exhibit's curator

A WOMAN NAILED TO A CROSS. CONTRARY TO POPULAR OPINION, SHE IS NOT BLEEDING.

Make your bed because it will be inspected.

In sum, we can say that the show as a whole is successful on two planes: as the presentation of three distinctive, coherent vistas; and as providing some idea of how the newly emergent individual of our times may look. This individual, folding in all the qualities we have detected, will be able to maintain more than one perspective, but only because his/her sensibility is engaged in a collective action to alter the negativity of many social practices and institutions (this allowing a view that both sees the present in its depth and its potential alternative), doing so, not in order to be liberated from history, but (as Walter Benjamin would have it) to tease out something from its fund of extinguished hopes

Reading good writing is like opening a box of paradoxes. Let's use that criterion to study the two books under review here: Tsaurah Litzky's Baby on the Water and Anyssa Kim's ovarian twists.

There is a dominant notion alive in the art world today that in our over-educated visual artists inevitably simply repeat (with minor changes) work that has already been done. Whatever credibility this idea may have as a blanket assertion, it certainly misses the mark in many individual cases, such as that of the artists, Emily Bicht and Fay Ku, whose work appeared in the recent “Good Housekeeping" show at Tribes Gallery. Both of them consciously echo themes from earlier art but add a new .level of consciousness to their creations, necessarily so, since part of their practice is to reflect on how this earlier work was received, which, naturally, would have been impossible for its creators.

I want to look back for a moment at the "Downtown Show" that took place earlier this year and which focused on the New York hipster art scene from 1974 to 1984. The accompanying material and the organization of the show made a big point of the fact that the artists of the time played fast and loose with the boundaries between the styles of high and popular art. However, something of much greater importance was another type of violation of this border to which the show alluded. .

It is fashionable in art criticism to take the most bland, inoffensive work and, by means of tortured reasoning, prove that it is politically charged and provocative. Take, for example, premier critic Robert Morgan's description of Kim MacConnel's work. To the uninformed viewer, his paintings resemble beautifully decorated, rhythmic wallpaper. According to Morgan, in his The End of the Art World, as MacConnel's "approach to patterned ornamentation developed into the seventies, it became more ideological, specifically in its allusion to arts and crafts. The history of the Arts and Crafts movement in England... was a history of the defiance of standardization."

Think about what this interpretation presupposes. 1) That the viewer, seeing MacConnel's work, which has no allusions to the British movement in it, will, nonetheless, immediately relate these designs to that different time and place. And even if that connection were invariably made, which seems hardly plausible, then, 2) the mere allusion to a previous, outdated political movement makes the current work itself political.

This is not meant as a jibe against Morgan, a fine critic in many ways, but as a representative example of how mainstream critics often desperately try to promote decorative fancies as cutting political statements. It may well be that this is done because any kind of really politically engaged work is barred from the galleries and museums that are these critics' beat.

Things are different, of course, in the more iconoclastic, fringe galleries, such as that of Gathering of the Tribes, where the show Communiqué exhibits art that take no spelunker to finds its political depths.

This is not to say that what is on display is work of the agit-prop variety in which a particular person or policy is lambasted. Such art tends to quickly pale as its specific allusions are forgotten. Rather, this art is political in viewing the world as a fraught public concern in which the answer to our prayers and problems will arise through a firm collective address to social issues. In other terms, from this perspective the artist's job is simply to focalize the most demanding current issues in a hard-hitting way, whether with wry irony (as in the work of David Sandlin and Tim Slowinski), puckish cartooning (as in the work of Shalom), or with a more allusive but still demonstrative style (as seen in a photo work by Toyo).

To give you a whirlwind tour of what I mean, we'll begin with Sandlin. In his untitled triptych, there is a sad historical succession, moving from a grotesque Garden of Eden where a baby looks on as two lions copulate in the lap of a lumpy elephant to a last picture where the baby and his fellows, maintaining the same lighthearted innocence, stand at the edge of a swampy battlefield, which has a burning city on the horizon and a squadron of marching babes in arms in the near distance. Given the centrality of infants in these depictions, the suggestive moral would seem to be that children will gleefully adapt to whatever world we provide and will, with equal fervor, observe animals' lovemaking, make mudpies or trash foreign countries.

Equally grotesque, if more allegorically clear, is Slowinksi's "Uncle Frank's War Dance." Here an overweight, sweaty and salivating Uncle Frank, decked out in red, white, and blue togs and holding a small missile as if it were an all-day sucker, shuffles woefully along to a patriotic band containing such mismatched minstrels as an American Indian, a cat, and Abe Lincoln on zither. If there is some caricature of our current leaders' tendencies to beat war drums on the slightest pretext, the oil also contains another edge in how it exposes the pitiable side of this spectacle. While nasty, Uncle Frank is also pathetic, a middle-aged, out-of-shape slimeball trying to replicate a macho posture appropriate to a young hunk.

When I asked Okoshi about the inspiration for her basic building blocks, the ovoids, she said she thought of them as raindrops, adding, "Rain is the most important thing in heaven, because it connects earth and sky." It seemed the rain was forming shapes in its falling sheets.

African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth. And we started it in 2003. But actually the discussion comes back to the day that Marco and I met, when, in a conversation, we started talking about Afro-Mexico. I had studied race relation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and that's where I learned about the African presence in Mexico, and the fact that there were still communities.

Yes. She made photographic plates of images with chocolate as the medium because of how much chocolate resembles dried blood. And also very young is Nida Sinnokrot, the creator of the rubber coated stones, and also Emily Jacir, all in their 20s, early 30s...

The peripatetic 'Glory' of the title story of this volume of cyclical stories is Gloria Bronsky, a young HIV positive woman who has contracted this condition through intravenous drug use. Signaling that she is in over her head from the start, Gloria poignantly describes herself in magnificently metaphorical language in the opening story as someone who is "honked" at, "barked" at, "squealed" at and "hissed" at while heading east on Houston Street....

I had an experience just recently where I ran into a woman who'd been stalking one of the musicians mentioned in your book for fourteen years. I'm not kissing and telling, but I can tell you the case you just made is pure conjecture. Music has always been part of the mating game. Not necessarily from the musician's point of view, but music has always been part of it. Grapes too. That's just part of the social construct. It's the same with birds when they sing, so I don't know what you mean.

Since its humble beginnings in New Orleans at the turn of the last century, Jazz music had always implied certain release--the abandon of unfettered expression free of the constraints of a social construct that strictly controlled the movement of the black people with whom it originated. Prohibited from the drawing room couture of the white population, it would wind its raucous, syncopated way from the burial plots of the recently deceased to the brothels and blind pigs of the red light district known as Storyville. Taking with it the infectious appeal of the forbidden, the cachet of the demimonde, a smoky, boozy, and ribald license that promised itself to all who would go this route.

"A war rages against me, a war rages inside me. Stranger, hang your weapons in our palm tree and let me plant my wheat in Canaan's sacred soil. take wine from my jars ..."

Our country is some kind of a mongrel that is spiritually a chameleon but always remains a bastard. And you can be sure that starting as an American bastard in a world where former European bastards have family lines long enough to make them arrogant is another reason why being authentic might be something of a recurring problem." He goes on: "The elite version of authenticity used to begin above but now has been discredited. Nothing has survived the holocaust of close, close scrutiny, not government, not business, not religion, not ethnicity, not the upper class, not the family, not parenting, not adolescence, not childhood, nothing at all."

"Why did so many Chinese women over a thousand-year period bind their feet, enduring rotting flesh, throbbing pain and hampered mobility throughout their lives? What compelled mothers to bind the feet of their young daughters, forcing the girls to walk about on their doubled-over limbs to achieve the breakage of bones requisite for three-inch feet? Why did Chinese men find women's "golden lotuses"--stench and all--so arousing, inspiring beauty contests for feet, thousands of poems, and erotica in which bound, silk-slippered feet were fetishized and lusted after?"

Why did so many Chinese women over a thousand-year period bind their feet, enduring rotting flesh, throbbing pain and hampered mobility throughout their lives? What compelled mothers to bind the feet of their young daughters, forcing the girls to walk about on their doubled-over limbs to achieve the breakage of bones requisite for three-inch feet? Why did Chinese men find women's "golden lotuses"--stench and all--so arousing, inspiring beauty contests for feet, thousands of poems, and erotica in which bound, silk-slippered feet were fetishized and lusted after?