We the People and our American Flag

A few months ago a video that Saber created was chosen as a finalist in Organizing for America’s Health Care Video Challenge. You can see the original video entry over on Arrested Motion (as well as some great production shots of the new Flag print which you can buy here). Needless to say, the video had a few critics (see the full Fox News response), but I doubt any of them understood what is means when an American graffiti artist turns his talent toward such a powerful (and art historically significant) symbol.

Saber, Tarnished Flag, 2009
mixed media on canvas, 19.3 X 25 in • 49 X 63.5 cm
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

When I saw the first flag he painted last year, I was surprised. It was overtly political in a way that had been uncharacteristic of Saber’s art thus far. Compelling in its raw emotion, the dingy gray of the white stripes was created by words like oil, Katrina and Blackwater. Scratched into the textured surface, those words seem to further stain the flag with the dripping of red American blood. And in the square, he wrote the names of people, a real source of American power. This Tarnished Flag spoke to me of the anger, sorrow and silent shame of things done in the name of all Americans in the first decade of the 21st century.

With the impasto technique Saber was using, I could not help thinking about Jasper Johns (born in 1930), one of most significant and influential American painters of the twentieth century. In the mid- to late 1950s, Johns became known for painting, as he put it, “things the mind already knows,” familiar icons like the American flag. The detail below of Flag illustrates an early technique of his, painting with thick, dripping encaustic over a collage made from found materials such as newspaper. Yet, even though it is literally made up of the news of the day, Johns’ America of 1955 still retains it’s tidy rows of red and white stripes and pattern of stars.

I wondered last year if the symbol of the flag would be as strong a draw on Saber as it was on Johns, now I feel certain of it. In Saber’s recently released Flag 2010, the tidy order of mid-century America has been shattered. The states represented by stars in 1955 are now gone, replaced by the words: “We the people.” Like much of our civil discourse, few barriers are respected and paint drips and juts aggressively over the lines. In this series of prints, the “white stripes” seem to recede back, forming a wall on which the issues of our time are being hotly debated.

Saber, Flag 2010 (in Red/White/Blue), 2010
11 color Serigraph on hand-made Nepalese Cannabina Fiber, 21″ x 30″ (54cm x 77cm)
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

Saber, Flag 2010 (Black), 2010
11 color Serigraph on hand-made Nepalese Cannabina Fiber, 21″ x 30″ (54cm x 77cm)
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com

You can see the same ambiguity of meaning in Jasper John’s work on paper, Flag, from 1958. While still clearly legible as the flag, the active pencil scribbles and gray graphite wash that form the symbol appear to dissolve much of its meaning and power.

Jasper Johns, Flag, 1958
Pencil and Graphite Wash on Paper, 8 7/8 x 12 in.
Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Saber, Mini Flag, 2010
Linoleum print on Fabriano mediovalis card, 2″ x 3″ in.
art/ photo © 2010 saberone.com