Even paranoids have real enemies, as the old saw goes, so it’s reasonable to suppose that a grain of truth lurks behind the conviction that, say, the illuminati are pulling all the strings. Not an empirical truth to be sure, but rather an emotional one: a sense that we exist at the mercy of forces beyond our control. It’s only natural to want to ascribe agency to what is often happenstance—something artists understand well, as this Met Breuer show attests.
“Everything Is Connected: Art and Conspiracy” sets out to parse various plots, real and imagined, involving everything from the JFK assassination to alien abductions. Works by 30 contributors range from the serious to the satirical, and many are engaging, though much of the show requires heavy sledding, thanks to the wall labels you have to plow through to understand anything.
In one of the show’s better pieces, the late Mark Lombardi (1951–2000) tracks the associations of specific higher-ups to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, notorious during the 1990s for laundering drug money and other ill-gotten gains. Using meticulous research, Lombardi renders a constellation of circles and curving arrows to detail the degrees of separation between myriad powerful individuals (officials, oligarchs, financiers) and criminal enterprises. Less convincing is Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s attempt to link sculptor Alexander Calder to, of all things, the West meddling in Middle Eastern affairs over oil. His reasoning? The coincidence that Iraq was founded the same year—1931—that Marcel Duchamp bestowed the name mobile to Calder’s work. Somehow, this line of thinking translates into a facsimile Calder sculpture, casting shadows that correspond to Iraqi oil fields marked on an accompanying map.
More often than not, enjoyment of the show depends upon a tolerance for reading on your feet and a knowledge of distant events. A room of text-heavy works, for example, includes a piece on Henry Kissinger’s involvement in the CIA-backed overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected leader Salvador Allende in 1973. Another work focuses on the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian prime minister Aldo Moro by the radical left-wing Red Brigades, supposedly at the behest of a secret arm of NATO. Neither piece is particularly compelling. Some works, however, succeed in offering a visual payoff, including a War on Terror–themed LED installation by Jenny Holzer, a gonzo anti-Reagan painting by Peter Saul and Jim Shaw’s before-and-after portraits of friends who turned into Martians.
Ultimately, “Everything Is Connected” is a bloodless affair, which is odd, given the feverish state of the conspiratorial mind-set: It’s a show about paranoia that isn’t paranoid enough.