Jack Romig is poetry contributor and poetry editor of CS2.

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Ask Marilyn Fox if she’s a political artist, and you’ll get an answer that’s not especially straightforward. Politics of different sorts influence many aspects of our lives, she says. There may be less-than-obvious political subtexts in some of her work.

So when she fashions a small sculptural ladder too interrupted with intervening forms to be climbable, she’ll explain that it’s in part a comment on corporate culture. Though she’s addressing office politics in this case, Fox says that thinking about different sorts of political interaction recurs in her work.

(Fox can be direct or more circumspect in discussing her art, and she can be reticent in describing her life. She’ll tell you, for instance, that she manages an arts program and a gallery for a university in southeastern Pennsylvania, but she prefers not to say which university that might be.)

In a body of work developed over many years, it’s plain enough that much of what she does has more to do with painterly concerns around color and design, or with a sculptor’s view of form and texture.

But Fox also produces some works in which national and world politics supply a plainspoken theme. For instance, an untitled series of four canvas wall hangings developed with angry directness out of her outrage at the Bush administration’s mangling of habeas corpus and with that administration’s willingness to resort to torture.

For these intense graphic presentations, she appropriated familiar national symbols - the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, the Great Seal of the United States, and Uncle Sam as rendered in the famous James Montgomery Flagg recruiting poster. These she painted in bold monochrome, one at the center of each of the canvases. Then she surrounded (and subverted) them with repeated silkscreened images of cruelty, humiliation and loss: a hooded detainee in Abu Ghraib, an Iraqi father carrying the corpse of his child, lynchings in 20^th century America, a Japanese-American family en route to a detention camp, even some woodcuts depicting medieval torture. These framing areas are filled out with other stock woodcut devices, such as words, pointing hands, stars, flags and printers’ story-ending cuts.

The effect is potent and disturbing. At first glance, the multiplied images around the edges of the canvases have a kind of filigreed prettiness set off powerfully against the big, contrasty, black-and-white icons in the center. As recognition sets in, Fox’s cold-eyed, ironic intentions are made clear.

This artist explains aspects of her work in ways that are surprisingly literal. The harsh black-on-white treatment she chose for the hangings imparts a sharp visual edge, but Fox gets at the choice behind this in another way. There is no gray area regarding torture, she says; a nation does it or doesn’t do it. Therefore presenting this work in stark black and white is entirely appropriate.

Fox took another mordant look at the departing administration in a sculpture called Bush Radio. She embellished the shell of a ‘30s-vintage cathedral radio with broken crockery, ceramic figures, game pieces, doll heads, cutlery and sand. As the wall hangings do, this piece conveys an almost innocent first impression, deploying children’s playthings, cartoon-like figurines, and surfaces reminiscent of cake decoration. And, like the hangings, it immediately takes the viewer elsewhere.

The radio itself embodies a broadcast appeal to suspect values, its mosaic surface implying a horrific shattering. Fox has built in dinner forks to suggest greed, and headless, armless figures to stand for the casualties of a long war with no end in sight. Front and center she’s fixed a plastic monkey’s head that unpleasantly resembles the commander-in-chief. Below that grinning face are three pastoral figures grotesquely altered to represent key members of the administration.

There’s much more, all contributing to an unsettling - and funny - fusion of everyday, innocent-appearing physical elements and furious political intention. Bush Radio is tuned in loud and clear to Fox’s unforgiving take on eight years of a failed presidency.

Recently, CommonSense2 Editor Chuck Brown and I visited Marilyn Fox in her Kutztown studio. The following transcription of our conversation amplifies some of her thinking on the works I’ve described here, and reaches deeper into the inspiration behind her art.

Chuck: So Marilyn, tell us a little bit about your career as an artist.

Marilyn: My career?

Chuck: When did it start?

Marilyn: I’ve always been an artist. So that’s a given. Over the course of time, different things might have influenced me or inspired me. I’m not at all stuck with any particular imagery. I tend to use what I have, use what I can and tend to want to explore. It’s not always going to be landscapes or imprints or paintings or sculpture. I do whatever kind of moves me at the time. I don’t know if that really answers your question. I do it because I love to do it.

Chuck: What’s your professional relationship with art?

Marilyn: I work at a college as arts coordinator and gallery director. It’s a local college.

Chuck: Does the college have a name?

Marilyn: Well it’s not Kutztown. Depending on what I say, I might not want to name it.

Chuck: Oh! Well…

Marilyn: This is my art. The other is my daily bread.

Chuck: Uh-huh.

Marilyn: So to speak.

At this point Marilyn begins to unroll large canvasses, hanging two on the wall and unrolling two on the floor, taking up most of the available walking space in the studio. They each seem the size of bedsheets. As she does she speaks of them:

Marilyn: These are practically indestructible (as she tacks one to the wall). But it is traditional art as opposed to the radio which is something else altogether. Did you want to ask me something specific about any of them?

Chuck: How long have you been a painter?

Marilyn: I’m not just a painter. I’m an artist.

Chuck: Okay.

Marilyn: The difference is I love to paint. I’ve done hundreds of paintings. The thing is, it’s not just paint. Artist is a better term. It’s not just semantics. I don’t just paint. That’s like my art over there (she says pointing around the studio). So it’s making art, not always with any kind of message.

Chuck: (pointing at the canvas with the Statue of Liberty surrounded by symbols of torture). What was going through your mind when you made this work? What do you want the viewer to feel when contemplating this piece?

Marilyn: My interest in this started when George W. decided to dissolve habeas corpus. That got me so wound up. Something that is so significant for centuries and George W. Bush decided to act as an emperor or a God and dissolve habeas corpus so that he could do what was necessary in his mind to fight the war on terror, thus becoming a terrorist himself. Terror is really a threat. You know, it’s the threat of terror. Whereas he actually was one of the major abusers. When that happened I was really wound up about that. So I started doing some research and reading–this was a couple of years ago. Research and reading about habeas corpus. I think it was the 11th century when England was at war with France, the Brits dissolved habeas corpus so they could pursue what they considered to be war criminals. But the thing you need to know is that they only did it for nine months. You don’t have a blanket authority to get rid of something like that and not have an end to it. With George W. Bush, there was no particular end to it. We’re going to wire tap; we’re going to torture-waterboarding; you know, we’re going to do all kinds of deprivations of prisoners to get what we need. Well, then I started thinking about where does this idea of torture, of one person being more powerful or more important than another person come from. That’s obviously something that’s part of all human history. The reason that I put that one up first is because that depicted some of the earlier images I got, based on torture and things like the Crusades. The beauty of the thing is that 21st century waterboarding goes back to the Middle Ages and earlier. The images from this are all appropriated because you can’t do better than what’s already been done. They are etchings and woodcuts from art history (the images around the exterior of the sheets). All this stuff started to roll because of George Bush’s habeas corpus. George W. has used torture as a means to really separate people : I’m the good guy –you’re the bad guy. It’s not only an American thing. Obviously it’s been going on for centuries. The Statue of Liberty seemed like an ideal piece for the torture scenes. I’m showing different types and uses of torture. I started thinking about lynching. A lot of the images about lynching actually continued up through, what’s been documented, the 1960’s. Not only blacks, but also white people who were in sympathy with black Americans who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Again, the Liberty Bell is another American icon. There’s a lot of icons in this. You know freedom and breaking away from the nasty Brits-and all that kind of stuff. You know-you see the Liberty Bell and American lynching.

Chuck: Sort of the hypocrisy of liberty.

Marilyn: Yes. And I wanted to look back and see how long this has been going on. To think it’s ever going to change is kind of ludicrous because there’s always some emblem that people can hide behind. Whether it’s the Catholic Church or Uncle Sam, the emblem justifies the torture. Whether it’s in the name of Uncle Sam or Christianity, there’s always something to justify it. This sovereign region over another—it’s just ongoing. That’s why I wanted these to be done in black and white. I didn’t want any color. There are no shades of gray when it comes to torture. You’re either tortured or you’re not tortured. It’s not like I was sort of tortured, but it really didn’t hurt that much. If you’re being lynched, or even if you’re being chased to be lynched with the threat of being lynched, you’re obviously being abused and tortured. That’s terror—there’s no gray. So there’s a reason for the black and white imagery here. The borders of these works, seen from a distance, look just like decorative borders. If you’re standing on the other side of the room, it looks like a Liberty Bell with a decorative border. It’s not until you get closer that you realize that somebody is being lynched or tortured in some other way.

Chuck: So you’re luring the viewer in with some traditional design, and it’s not until they’re up close and personal that they find out.

Marilyn: Yes, that’s part of it. Isn’t that what’s happening? Aren’t we lured in with “we’re doing the right thing—we’re the good guys”? These other individuals are less than human. So it’s okay for us in the name of whatever institution is in power. Here’s another form of American terrorism (pointing at another work). We have the American eagle. I was going to go with the Germans and the holocaust, but that’s obviously a very well known and very well documented and very much talked about event. I mean, there’s a holocaust museum in Washington.

Chuck: Yeah.

Marilyn: But we seem to have forgotten or at least swept under the carpet that we also had concentration camps for the Japanese during World War II. So I had to find images of Japanese Americans, many who were citizens, many who were first, second, third generation, who were no threat, but because of their race, because of their color, they were rounded up and thrown into concentration camps. For some of the images, I actually did a couple of paintings because at one point I wanted to get one face of one individual who was dealing with this. Then it became a family. This is a picture of a family being hauled off on a train and the little boy is waving an American flag. You have this painting of the barracks they lived in with little boys playing baseball outside, taken from a middle-class home, which is what they were, and put in this situation. They’re still Americans. They’re still playing baseball. They’re in what they called internment camps.

Chuck: That’s nicer! (Laughs). And their sons are in the infantry fighting in Italy.

Marilyn: There’s such a lineage of that stuff going on that we just added another vegetable to the pot of soup. We’re not any better than those people. We’re not any better. That’s what surprises me because we like to have this air of civility. This American way of life. Mom and apple pie. With Uncle Sam I have an obviously famous image. An Iraqi father carrying his dead child; other obviously famous images of torture. And a lot of these things, I think what blows my mind the most is that children are so victimized in this. An Iraqi child. Little boys playing baseball. This one (pointing to another border) is someone being lynched, and there’s a little girl there who’s dressed up because the lynching was a carnival atmosphere. I mean, it was a celebratory thing. So not only were the victims of American torture those who were interned or those who were lynched, but the children that grew up thinking this was okay. Another generation of children who witnessed a lynching and saw that their parents and family were there and the whole community was there and no one stopped it. It already planted in their minds that it’s okay because we’re better than so and so. They’re ready to do what’s next. In a way, I see that the torturers and abusers are also victims. They have in their minds that it’s okay, and therefore it continues and continues and is not going to end. There’s always going to be someone who says this is what we have to do to get what we want for the greater good of Uncle Sam, or the Liberty Bell or whatever. I think George W. Bush’s habeas corpus was making me crazy.

Chuck: There are several things I’d like you to expand upon. I’m real interested in what you said about the frequency of these things being repeated, becoming something that desensitizes us? Talk a little bit more about that.

Marilyn: Psychologically, and I’m not a psychologist, but the more you’re exposed to things like torture, the more insensitive you get to them. It becomes acceptable to you. You’re like the bully in the school yard that beats up other kids. So you see that bully every day. I wouldn’t dare comment on television or movies because you have all this violence, and people act it out. It’s entertainment. It’s one place I see people getting desensitized. A lynching was entertainment. Another person’s or group’s plight becomes entertainment. Our children and our grandchildren will have this as part of their legacy.

Chuck: It seems to me that these things have been going on for years but that they are accelerating in the Bush administration. Am I putting words in your mouth?

Marilyn: I would like to say yes, but I would like to qualify it by saying we were fortunate in learning about it. We don’t know what the administration before did or didn’t do. Even not just in aggressive abuse but in neglect of those being abused. Like Darfour in Africa. I don’t know. George W. Bush certainly broke all the rules.

Jack: When you tackle this from the point of view of putting all these American icons on canvasses, it has a special meaning for us (as Americans). At least I think so. You’re making literal reference about torture or refusal to torture is pretty much a hard line—black and white. I think that makes these canvasses extremely striking. There’s so much contrast here. They just-pow!-come right off the wall at you.

Marilyn: I am an artist first, and I want my stuff to look good.

Chuck: Has this been shown anywhere?

Marilyn: Yeah. I put together an exhibition at Penn State Berks. See, you’ve just blown my cover. It was called Our Own. Another artist presented mosaic works, more in the vein of Gothic images of torture. They really work with mosaic. They had this presence about them. Byzantine icons-excellent. We alternated pieces when displaying. One of mine, one of hers.

Jack: One of the things that I see happening here, and maybe less true of some of the others, but very much so on the Statue of Liberty one and I assume that this was one of your intentions—if you’re not looking carefully at just what these elements are in the border, it has a kind of prettiness.

Marilyn: Yeah. These things are pretty. They’re pretty in the sense that these engravings, and they’re most likely wood engravings, were created by artists who were commissioned to make them. The skill and craftmanship with which the images were made is superb. It’s beautiful stuff, well-crafted, dynamic and easy to read. I want to thank Karen Stanford from the Kutztown University library for locating some of these images. Engravings, medieval torture—she was able to come up with photographs for me to go through.

Jack: I know your work very well for having seen a lot of it through the years. It’s never been my impression that you’re sort of a political artist. This strikes me in a lot of ways as being a departure for you.

Marilyn: It’s because it hit me personally to begin with. If something hits me personally, then I’ll make something out of it. Everything can be political to a certain extent. There’s a little piece that I’m working on that’s not done yet that takes the shape of a ladder. Ladders have a nice poetic meaning. The image of a ladder is going up. It’s used a lot by artists to indicate going to another level. So I started making this ladder and all of a sudden it became a corporate ladder. So this does have political implications. It’s about trying, for me, to go up to the next level. Either on the job, or artistically, and all the snafus you might find on the way up the ladder. The footing’s not secure. It’s a balancing act. You might fall. I wanted it to be pretty because there’s a seduction with going up the corporate ladder. I wanted to use these Chinese papers and this papier mache to have these flowery pretty colors on it. It’s political, but not in the large arena.

Chuck: I’m thinking of a title The Political Art of Marilyn Fox

Marilyn: Well, my work is all untitled, but you can give it that name if it works for you. Along those lines you might take a look at my George W. Bush radio. It’s cool when it’s lit. Someone was throwing out this old radio case and I knew I could do something with it. If you do that enough with enough junk, you end up like this. People give me broken things. I never throw anything away. It became the George Bush radio. Or you can call it W’s Radio Show. So George became the monkey, obviously. Dick Cheney became Duck Cheney. That’s Karl Rove because he looks like he should wear a Little Boy Blue’s suit. Also Condoleeza Rice. It’s like the three see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil characters. The radio is about the kind of nonsense that would spew out of George’s mouth. Nonsense and lies. I think somebody figured out that he had at least one lie for every day he was in office.

Chuck: That’s conservative.

Marilyn: (laughs) It’s almost like you can’t make fun of George because he does it so well himself. He’s already there. Spinning. Spin on everything. The people on the radio are pawns. These broken headed creatures are the soldiers who are coming back wounded, lives destroyed. And they’re always going to be destroyed. Gone at the age of 20. If not gone, terribly maimed. Guys without legs, arms or blind and that kind of thing. Of course, you have your Republican elephant over here. I kept finding more and more stuff to put on this. I dumped sand on it to indicate Iraq. I thought of putting oil on it but that would be kind of messy. The airplane indicates 9/11. 9/11 made possible the excuse for George Bush’s invading the wrong country.

Jack: This is wonderful.

Marilyn: The birds are picking at Karl Rove’s head. Picking his brains.

Jack: These things come together out of shattered pieces.

Marilyn: Um-hmm. Shattered and eventually smashed. Yes, the radio needed a little embellishment. You know, I don’t think of myself as political, but as with any artist, you are influenced from what is going on in the world around you. No matter how insulated you think you may be, you are influenced. Plus, it’s a global village because everyone has access to TV and CNN. Things seep in.Things seep in whether you want them to or not. That could be why this piece became the corporate ladder.

Chuck: These pieces are political, but they’re art. You’d be surprised how many artists are delving into the political. I saw some work on Katrina from a New Orleans artist. The art had the political point of view that these people were let out to pasture. I don’t think that saying something is political art is saying that it’s bad art. Or lesser art.

Marilyn: No. You can go back to Picasso making art out of the Spanish Civil War. I saw an exhibition about AIDS. It was not what you would consider graphic in terms of the death and destruction, but it was taking the microscopic view of what the AIDS virus looks like and making it into something else. That was in the mid 80’s. I saw a show on cancer. So you transfer things like that .

Chuck: Thank you for your time.

Marilyn: You’re welcome.