Darryl Lauster’s “Of Thee I Sing” shows U.S. history, for all its rumbustious, carnivalesque quality, to be a deadly serious affair. What we might know as the old, weird America is a matter not of antiquarian curiosity, but of urgent political concern. Emphasizing the conflicts over labor, immigration, and national identity that inevitably turn violent, the story here owes more to Howard Zinn than to Ken Burns. The tone can be humorous, as in Scalp (2011) and Periwig (2010), little jade pieces in the form of native and colonial hairstyles, or Diorama (2012), with a tricorner-wearing, musket-wielding patriot trading volleys with a pack of British redcoats as they rise and fall on a motorized teeter-totter. But as these examples make clear, allusions to deadly violence are never far from the surface.

Darryl Lauster, 'A Brief History of Labor' (detail), photo © Allison V. Smith

Other works frame political conflicts as dramas enacted by people through the means of images. Ornament (2011) repurposes Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 anti-slavery medallion as a steel hood ornament. Perhaps protesting fossil-fuel pollution and climate change, the fluorescent cast-silicone giant squid in The New World (2012) hangs jauntily onto one leg of a brass oil rig installed in a cylindrical fish tank, bouncing around in a stream of bubbles from the aerator. In Code, part of the video installation Places With No Names (2011), the straight-faced artist, like Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” peels off a stack of cue cards for the camera, each bearing a keyword straight from the Fox News id: “immigrants,” “socialism,” etc.

To adapt Nietzsche’s three-part categorization of historical interpretation: however much the work here from time to time echoes the forms of the countless curios produced to satisfy the public need for monumental and antiquarian versions of history, it in fact belongs entirely to the critical interpretation thereof. It arrests American icons at the point where they threaten to descend into cliché, and reconfigure them as weapons for the struggle.

Ed note: The author of this article is a teaching colleague of the artist’s, but he has no involvement with this exhibition or the gallery.

Photos by Allison V. Smith (Courtesy of Barry Whistler)