Whether they’re making warnings about the non-grabbability of certain parts of the anatomy, or cracking jokes about the size of two others, it’s fair to say there’s been a renewed interest in protest signs of late. This, no doubt, will be great news for American artist Sam Durant, who’s spent the last 20 years collecting slogans from rallies, protests and demonstrations throughout history. In this show, he’s taken a selection and translated them into a series of luridly coloured lightboxes.
Stripped of context, their messages are all open-ended and vague: things like ‘No Justice No Peace’, ‘Open Your Eyes’ and ‘Forwards Not Backwards’. They might have been written in 1968. They might have been written in 2017. It’s impossible to tell. So you end up wondering what exactly Durant is trying to do here. There’s something astonishingly perverse about taking such earnest calls for political change and refashioning them into slick artworks that fetch (as I overheard a member of staff tell a visitor) ‘50 or 60,000 dollars, depending on the size’.
Maybe, maybe he’s trying to make a statement about the insidious relationship between activism and corporatism. We live in a disorienting shadow-world where seemingly like-minded messages are blasted at us from all sorts of contradictory sources; where campaigners can call for equal rights on Instagram while multinational companies sponsor farmers in South America and put gay marriage in their advertising as it makes for great PR. But that’s all a bit of leap, since Durant seems so unwilling to nail his colours to any particular mast. Left to wither in the white neutrality of a gallery space, these bright boxes come off as mute, weak and banal. If today's sign-writers are busy upping their game, perhaps it's time for Durant to follow suit.