Description
Art. "For 26 years the FBI watched the artist Arnold Mesches. Federal agents took note of his illustrations for political journals and magazines. They watched him march for peace and disarmament and demonstrate against Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were also, during this time, compiling an 800-page dossier on him.
"Among its documents were reports by informers on his movements in Los Angeles during the 1950s and 60s. Three years ago, when he obtained the files under the Freedom of Information Act, he discovered that some of the informants had been people he considered friends, colleagues and, in one case, a lover.
"Today he has turned these files into art and put them on view at P.S. 1 in the exhibition 'The F.B.I. Files.' The art consists of colorful collages of news clippings, personal photographs, 50s era images and hand-written and typed script, all surrounded by decorative painted borders. Mr. Mesches said the works were inspired by the mix of image and sacred text found in illuminated medieval manuscripts.
"When Mr. Mesches began his F.B.I. collages in December 2000, he saw them as the culmination of a series of works on his personal history. The climate of distrust they evoked seemed a historical curiousity, relics of an era long past when government succumbed to a paranoia and ran roughshod over citizen's rights.
"After September 11, 2001, however, the mentality evoked by Mesches' F.B.I. FILES no longer seems comfortably distant."—Eleanor Heartney, The New York Times