Political art is criticized (by those who absorbed the esthetic biases of the 1950s for formalism and abstraction) for its tendentiousness and lack of visual sophistication: it's mere propaganda, goes the line, too easy, and evanescent. Conceptual art is criticized for exactly the opposite reasons: it's abstruse and cerebral and not visually compelling; it's in effect, if not in intent, elitist. There's some truth to both charges, of course (though there are certainly exceptions), but in the current political and cultural moment, perhaps an art addressing our real-world challenges might be a good idea. The notion of combining the complementary art forms in order to address their individual weaknesses while also joining their strengths would seem one solution.

Ex Ungue Leonem, 2008-9 (detail). Seventy-two inkjet prints, each 4.5" x 9.5"

Jordan Essoe's ambitious multimedia installation work, Semaphores, at Ampersand International Arts, tackles the timely themes of globalism, cultural/economic displacement and exile, and a future, kinder and gentler (really!) Newer World Order designed not by macho blowhard corporatists, but by intelligent and worldly realists-- good-faith secularists, not bad-faith millennials. Add source works by Edward Hopper and Jorge Luis Borges, as Essoe does in this collaborative project, and photo contributions from a hundred or so academic heavy hitters from around the country, and the project seems to have something for everyone. As in politics, however, such apparent universality is difficult to achieve and sustain. With works in collage, projected video, photography, and installation, there is plenty of intellectual nutrition to be had here, if you can break it down, but it is conceptual art mavens rather than civilians like Joe Sixpack or Joe the Plumber who will find sustenance here. The sociopolitical content, to be fair to the esthetic camp, is a far cry from the protest placards of the 1960s; the art asks us to think hard about issues instead of proffering dunderheaded slogans: yes we can do the hard work.

So what are semaphores? Well, not WWII sailors waving flags on carrier decks! Thus saith Wikipedia: In computer science, a semaphore is a protected variable or abstract data type which constitutes the classic method for restricting access to shared resources such as shared memory in a multiprogramming environment. Applications include solving problems with smokers granted infinite supplies of tobacco, paper or matches; starving philosophers trying to eat spaghetti with half the forks they need; and a barber who sleeps in his chair when no customers are present; these are facetious oversimplifications, of course, but let's say (in order to spare ourselves further embarrassment) that a semaphore is a protocol or device for restricting access to data. The relevance to the world economy, even for us blinking techno-hayseeds, is obvious. Less obvious are the connections that the show asks us to make, namely, "the dividing relationship between the privileged communities of the Global North and the subordinated communities of the Global South (to quote the press release). The project is titled Semaphores because...of the inadequacy of the communication lines between the Global North and the Global South." Government and corporate interests in the developed North ignore the misery and abet the exploitation of the South: one third of the world population benefits from oppressing the other two thirds. These are crucial facts culled from the press release, but not evident from the work itself. The artist, who enjoys explaining the work to the mystified (including yours truly), accepts his role as de-facto docent with good grace.

Some information viewers should know about the work:

Ukbar, Uqbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr, 2008 (detail). Archival paper, archival glue, five X-ray illuminators, 20" x 14"

--A series of elegant collaged aerial maps affixed to small, wall-mounted light boxes refers to government-supported evictions and massacres on behalf of the development of the high-profit palm oil industry. The series is entitled Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr, after the variant spellings of an imaginary planet in Borges' famously erudite and ironic story, "Tlon Uqbar, Orbus Teritus."

Hotel Window, 2008 (detail). Archival paper, archival glue, archival ink, acrylic paint, 12" x12"

--The placid woman sitting in hotel lobby in Hopper's 1955 painting, Hotel Window, is remade here in collaged bits of text. Here she serves as "an inert and distant observer to ... horrific but obscured events" like the Colombian massacres. Essoe associates this images of privileged "isolation and anomie" with the narrator's retreat into scholarship at the conclusion of the story, as the imagined world of Tlon. The creation of a secret society of intellectuals, Tlon, "with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy" takes over the esthetically inferior real world.

--The two framed mirrors resting head to head on the floor, shattered and obscured--neutered. They allude to the Tlonian/gnostic proverb that mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the numbers of men. (Of course the encyclopedia of Tlon is another false mirror.)

Those Code Systems in Which Not All the Symbols Have Meaning, 2008. Oil on canvas, 16" x 20"

--A painting of children playing soccer in a Colombian refugee camp is entitled Those Code Systems in Which Not All the Symbols Have Meaning, clearly referring to the nothingness with which such southerners are considered in northern board rooms.

--The sugar in the video projects is meant as a stand-in for cocaine. The videos depict folding; it is seen as a kind or mirroring or mapping: our cultural values from the past are imposed on an unseen future, or third world Other.

Ex Ungue Leonem, 2008-9 (detail). Seventy-two inkjet prints, each 4.5" x 9.5"

--The 72 small photographs, mounted on yellow (associated with alarms and caution), were contributed by a small army of thinkers solicited by the artist. Examples: Ariel Dorfman, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, author Derrick Jensen, economist Michael Greenstone, ecologist David Wilcove, anthropologist Laura Rival, artist Ken Friedman, poet Bill Berkson, activist Sarah Anderson. They illustrate various visions of a New World Order, some seriously (mother watching daughter, recycled plastics, Indian PediCab driver, twin icebergs all ten tenths of them), some ironically (satirical bumper sticker, Sino-American dollar, Brueghelian apocalypse scene). A list of the participants is available, but which photograph each donated is not specified. The title of this array of images is Ex Ungue Leonem, from the tongue of the lion; in Borges' story, enthusiastic students of the Eleventh Volume of the Encyclopedia of Tlon propose writing the other ten volumes, the rest of the lion, based on extrapolation.

Semaphores, despite my proletarian quibbles, raises some very important questions for us mirror- and window-gazers (who are not quite so comfortable these days). The collaborative, imaginative creation of our future world begins now.

Jordan Essoe: Semaphores will be on view at Ampersand International Arts
through February 28th.