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September 22, 2006
The Oregonian

An opposing view of war
D.K. ROW

Despite their galvanizing effect on communities and the ability to enthrall people who might not otherwise think about art, Harrell Fletcher's acclaimed projects have always created a paradox.

Sure, they managed to get complete strangers and others to participate in all manner of minutiae and intimate activity. But that wizardry also hinted at a curiously detached artist watching from the sidelines while his ingenious organizational experiments evolved into wondrous public gestures.

That's why Fletcher's new show of photographs of the War Remnants Museums in Vietnam, "The American War," is a pleasant surprise. It's a piercing, involving, even moving counterpoint to his previous work, and one that retains the artist's nonchalance, an almost anti-artistic approach.

The show, which opened during the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival, continues its run at the Corberry Press complex until Oct. 7, even though the festival closed Sept. 17.

It's a not-to-miss opportunity to see this anticipated show, perhaps the most nationally recognized exhibit by a Portland artist this year.

Before arriving in Portland, Fletcher's "War" exhibited at San Antonio's Artpace, the New York gallery White Columns, and M.I.T's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. During this tour of desirable contemporary art venues, the show garnered exuberant reviews by Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times and Jerry Saltz of The Village Voice, punctuating a several-year run up the artistic heap by Fletcher. In 2004 he was selected for the Whitney Biennial, an honor that more fully revealed the stature and talent of the 39-year-old artist.

In his previous projects, Fletcher has operated as a kind of artistic social director of everyday activity. Reveling in common delights, his participatory works have assembled Connecticut residents to stitch together a sofa out of used materials and gathered a group of Houston residents to conduct a symphony of body movement.

Despite the projects' brilliance and often touching moments, the artist's ability to strip away the pretense of "art" seemed to linger too heavily: Fletcher conjured something out of nothing, but with the self-awareness of a magician.

He still tinkers with artistic paradigms in this new show. Technically, these are photographs of photographs. And like Fletcher's other projects, the piece evolved from an everyday occurrence, but this time the artist's own.

Last year Fletcher visited Ho Chi Minh City and the War Remnants Museum. He saw photographs taken by Vietnamese and American media sources of what happened during the Vietnam War -- villages turned to rubble and dust by bombs, bodies blown to bits or disfigured by Agent Orange, Nick Ut's famous photo of a child screaming after a napalm attack, even a few images of anti-war demonstrations in America.

Those photographs moved Fletcher so much that he began photographing the pictures along with their captions, using his digital camera. The Corberry show is thus a re-creation of most of the War Remnants photographic exhibit. Seeing the shattered bodies and desecrated land, it's natural to think about the conflict in Iraq. Making that connection is certainly Fletcher's intention, but he does so without fanfare because he doesn't need to. The horror the pictures capture and the outrage they inspire possess an evidentiary quality that requires little additional comment.

Moreover, making too direct a connection to Iraq would have resulted in an awkward left turn. The futility of war is a peripheral issue in this exhibit. What viewers see at the Corberry complex is the Vietnamese narrative of the war that ravaged their country, albeit through the lens of Fletcher's digital camera. The Vietnamese people call that war "The American War." Americans, of course, refer to it as the Vietnam War.

Changing a single word crystallizes the larger implication that Fletcher wants his American viewers to understand, but above all, to see: History is about perception. Who is telling the story.

Those perceptions, Fletcher writes, were bound to change upon his arrival in Vietnam. In his statement for the show, he says, "One of the reasons I was interested in going on the trip was to have a chance to compare my conception of Vietnam, which had been mostly derived from watching Hollywood war movies, to the reality of actually being there and meeting local people. I was particularly eager to hear perceptions of the Vietnam War from Vietnamese people who lived through it.