Jasper Johns
...nam War.In this show, we can see its patriotic meaning in the photograph of the late Phoenix lawyer and fomer Assistant Interior Secretary Orme Lewis as he dedicates the famous Iwo Jima monument in 1954.But more often, the flag is used for protest-used over and over to give the nation a good scolding.In many cases, the flag symbolizes high ideals that the nation has not lived up to, often juxtaposing images of bigotry and violence against the supposed tolerance and peace symbolized by the flag.In Ronnie Cutrone's Hate, a flag is the backdrop to a hooded Ku Klux Klan member holding a baby. The work has all the subtlety of a political cartoon.But in other cases, the flag symbolizes an unredeemable ''Amerika,'' the nation that commits genocide on Native Americans and Vietnamese, the nation built on African slavery, the nation that uses up the world's resources and tells Third World countries they don't have the right to do the same, the nation that bludgeons its Rodney Kings and acquits its thieving CEOs.This is the America of George Maciunas' U.S.A. Surpasses All the Genocide Records!, a flag made of accusations for stripes and skulls for stars.Or Ed Paschke's Purple Ritual, a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle and framed by eagles and flags. For Paschke, the flag is as American as cherry pie.For Faith Ringgold, The Flag Is Bleeding. For Diane Arbus, the Patriotic Young Man With a Flag, New York City is a portrait of patriotism as pathology. The flagwaving young man looks like a brain-damaged serial killer. It is a vicious photograph.This is not a show to warm a patriot's heart. And it is certainly not a show of uniformly great art--much here is of more historical than aesthetic interest. But it is a show that shows how the flag has been used polemically in the last half of this century..The most notorious of the artworks is probably Dread Scott's What Is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag? It forces viewers to make a choice whether to step on a flag spread out on the floor. Scott made the piece while he was a student in Chicago in 1989, and the work's first display brought howls of outrage from veteran's groups and politicians. Scott didn't help calm the controversy by appearing on television dressed in a Che Guevara beret and a Mao T-shirt.The show is loosely chronological, beginning with the 1950s. By the late '60s, the flag was more radically politicized with the Vietnam War.But soon after, another current in the stream borrowed the flag to make ironically non-political art.Surely the most famous use in American a...