Larry Fink, Women’s Liberation, March, 1970

Collection of the artist

Visitors to the Whitney Museum who are turned off by the relentless grooviness of “The Summer of Love” are encouraged to seek out “Resistance Is…,” a compact show providing a much-needed corrective to the blockbuster’s flowery vision of late-’60s counterculture. Presenting documentary photographs and contemporary artworks on the theme of political activism, “Resistance Is…” examines the representation of protest and the complicated relationship between art and engagement.

The show is anchored by a compelling selection of photographs: from Danny Lyon’s documentation of the arrest of SNCC workers in Selma, Alabama, in 1963 to Gilles Peress’s picture of a pro-Khomeini demonstration in Iran in 1979. The catalog of gestures and attitudes in these images makes up an iconography of dissent that the contemporary works in the show adopt, unpack and occasionally challenge. Josephine Meckseper’s psychedelic video of a New York antiwar march in 2006 presents the demonstration as an overly coded ritual, while Wayne Gonzales’s painting of an anonymous cheering crowd evokes the uncertain fate of mass movements. In a drawing presented alongside a 1981 newspaper article whose photograph serves as its source, Andrea Bowers depicts participants in a nonviolent-protest training workshop isolated against an expanse of blank white paper. As much as the piece embraces the need for critical distance in understanding recent events, it also seems to warn against the institutionalization of the counterculture. Luckily, this show avoids that, preferring instead to keep resistance, and the art that articulates it, vital.