Photo By CAC

At the CAC, the State of Sabotage established an "embassy" with this entrance: Government officials and other gullible individuals are invited in

In recent years, the American government has blurred the line between art and threats to the state. On Feb. 8, 2005, when Robert Jelinek flew to Cincinnati from Vienna, via Amsterdam and Detroit, he was carrying art and literature for Incorporated: a recent (incomplete) history of infiltrations, actions and propositions utilizing contemporary art, an exhibition assembled at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC).

Jelinek is founder of Sabotage, an artists collective. Between Detroit and Cincinnati, the federal Department of Homeland Security confiscated from him 33 passport-works by artist Heimo Zobernig, educational leaflets and several personal items.

Officials left an incomplete receipt for items in one suitcase, later explaining that they seized the art because it was "produced by an anarchy group called Sabotage which does not believe in international borders." Authorities eventually returned the passports and literature to the CAC on March 2, several weeks after the exhibition opened.

CNN and other media compared the seizure to controversy over Robert Mapplethorpe's 1989 photo exhibition at the CAC. But the recent incident has new markings: Seizure of a foreign national's property fosters cultural isolationism. While hardly comparable to criminal actions in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, this action occurred on the world stage. Although 15 years have passed since Mapplethorpe, many authorities have not learned that crusades against art generally increase interest.

CAC Director Linda Shearer reports that "convincing people of Cincinnati that contemporary art is important" has been among the biggest challenges she and the CAC have faced. The success of Incorporated, organized by curator Matt Distel, suggests they are winning this battle. His insightful work and Shearer's vision are having their effect.

Incorporated includes works by several artists' collectives in addition to Sabotage -- Atlas Group, Newsense Enterprises, Institute for Applied Autonomy and Yes Men. The show is spirited and intelligent, sharing much with Nato Thompson's Interventionists exhibition at Massachusetts' Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in 2004. Distel highlights artists who mine the techniques of government to challenge its authority and free-rein policing. Viewers leave Incorporated knowing more about creative resistance and how to take up tools traditionally reserved for governments.

Sabotage's video installation tells us the group aims to create a deterritorialized, borderless, fictional nation, the "State of Sabotage." (The name comes from the French word "sabot," meaning a "wooden clog," alluding to how French farm workers threw their shoes into harvesting and processing machines which were replacing workers, rendering the machinery useless.) The State of Sabotage was to establish an "embassy" at the CAC and hand out passports and soup in a performance that was cancelled after the confiscation of the materials.

Another of the Incorporated participants, the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), uses current technologies to document state policing and reinforce counter-strategies. IAA employs text-messaging to summon activists on the fly; in a "critical cartography," it details paths of least surveillance in New York City. As viewers register a fingerprint to activate this work, it's clear that the information era affords new possibilities and imposes specific conditions on life.

Creative disinformation and "noise" inform practices in Incorporated. Chicago's Temporary Services intervenes in cityscapes and advertising. Their work makes us cognizant participants, rather than consumers absorbed in everyday life. Newsense Enterprises contributes a wooden frame to a lobby window where employees of the CAC contribute the trash that they generate daily.

The Yes Men are a trickster performance troupe. They infiltrate mainstream media and demonstrate that art can undermine public consensus behind corporate and governmental actions. In a widely televised report that played on BBC World News, one Yes Man impersonated a spokesperson for Dow Chemical, asserting that Dow had taken responsibility for chemical leaks in Bhopal, India, and announcing the liquidation of Union Carbide (assets of $12 billion) for restitution, healthcare for surviving victims and remediating the site.

While Incorporated is humorously subversive, its messages can be hard-hitting. Atlas Group's photographic archive of car bomb remains shows disturbing relics of a relentless civil war in Lebanon, a life about which most Americans know practically nothing. Atlas Group reports stories that haven't been told, such as that of Souheil Bachar who was kidnapped and held with four Americans in the "Western" hostage crisis of the 1980s and early 1990s. Such archival work begs questions about affect and narrative: Why haven't certain stories been told? Why do we privilege certain kinds of documents or testimony? What are the differences between what is lived and what has happened?

When Atlas Group's Walid Raad visited University of Cincinnati this month, the audience was preoccupied with the potential for confusing art with terrorism and fiction with fact. Raad described how his art was linked to an FBI investigation in May 2004, linking Steve Kurtz's art with terrorism. The morning his wife, Hope Kurtz, died, on-scene medics alerted the FBI to "suspicious" biotechnological art in the Kurtz home. The couple were co-founders of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), and officials found in their home Kurtz's invitation to the Interventionists exhibition, which included a car bomb photograph by Raad. This image, the FBI said, motivated charges.

As the CAE defense team reported, "American authorities leap all too easily from ideological criticism to terrorism. What's more, the CAE's legal battle reveals that the government has made thinking into a crime: A citizen can be arrested without having committed any act of terror, or without having done anything illegal at all." There is little doubt that Incorporated speaks pointedly about this era of volatile information and state-sponsored fear.