San Francisco Bay Guardian October 25, 2000 http://www.sfbayguardian.com/AandE/Art/index.html

'Democracy – The Last Campaign' Through Nov. 18, S.F. Camerawork In the early '90s I got into a heated argument with the Catwoman of Controversy, Camille Paglia, at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. My young idealist mind wanted to believe that the word democracy still had meaning to it. The previous year I had sat in the school's Larko Forum among the crowd of young future policy wonks, throwing popcorn and singing "don't stop thinking about tomorrow" as we watched the votes roll in on election night '92. After 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations we were giddy with hope for a better anything. Eight years later, after two consecutive terms of the Clinton administration and less than a month away from the election, I viewed "Democracy – The Last Campaign," by the collaborative artist team of Margaret Crane and Jon Winet, at S.F. Camerawork and thought, "This would be a perfect installation at Kenneth Cole." Crane and Winet have spent the past year observing and documenting the psychosocial dynamics of American public life in connection with the political activity surrounding the 2000 presidential election. The result is a brilliant blurring of the boundaries between art and politics, fact and fiction, and social and corporate agendas. The show combines the visual aesthetics and graphic design of the news media with incongruent combinations of photography, graphics, sound, and video. Stock images of candidates are unexpectedly paired with snippets of sophisticated, poetic text, while bright orange, pink, green, and yellow banners display ambiguous bites such as "Economic Justice," "End Class Warfare," and "Collective Prosperity." In an adjoining room a video projection features interviews with campaign supporters mixed with "behind the scenes" moments that become increasingly uncomfortable yet impossible to turn away from. The project also includes a Web site (dtlc.walkerart.org) that features thought-provoking essays by Crane, David Levi Strauss, Kevin Killian, Roberto Tejada, Glen Helfand (a Bay Guardian contributor), Laura Hartwick, and Dodie Bellamy, as well as links to a number of campaign sites. Tues.-Sat., noon-5 p.m., 115 Natoma, S.F. (415) 764-1001. (Megan Wilson)