Making Art Out of November\'s Election

By RANDY KENNEDY

If you walked into almost any contemporary art museum in the country at the moment, you would have a hard time telling that a bitterly fought presidential election was entering its final months. And while it's not exactly the job of such museums to be vigilantly topical, the New York artist Jonathan Horowitz thinks that contemporary art should be more engaged with the issues being raised by the election.

So beginning early next month, Mr. Horowitz will debut “Your Land/My Land: Election '12,” a kind of high-Minimalist electoral forum that will be installed at art institutions in bright red, bright blue and less-decided states around the country. The sites include the Contemporary Art Museum in St Louis (Sept. 7 to Nov. 11); the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, N.C. (Sept. 22 to Nov. 13); the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (Sept. 30 to Nov. 18); the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (late September to Nov. 11); the Uta h Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City (Oct. 5 to Nov. 24 ); Telfair Museums in Savannah, Ga. (Oct. 5 to Nov. 18) and the New Museum in Lower Manhattan (Oct. 10 to Nov. 18).

At each museum,a nearly empty area will be set off using only red and blue area rugs, which will divide the exhibition space into what the artist describes as opposing zones, “reflecting America's color-coded political and cultural divide.” Back-to-back monitors will be suspended between the carpets, one showing a live feed of Fox News, the other of CNN, and portraits of President Obama and Mitt Romney will take up residence within their respective end zones.

The idea is for visitors to the museums to gather on the carpets to watch the news coverage, sit, rest, talk, argue, and, in the process, compose a kind of living artwork-as-debate, in which the subject will be politics, art and maybe museums themselves.

“To some, museums are decidedly blue-elitist bastions of liberal ism,”
Mr. Horowitz wrote in a statement to announce the project. “To others, they are lynchpins of a capitalist art market, analogous to other capitalist markets that have been collapsing around us.”