The Art of Civics

Photographer William Meyers explores American citizenship, which is in better shape than many think.

O n Thursday, I wrote about artist Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition at the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Gibson — the artist who represents the U.S. at the prestigious, much-visited Biennale — is driven by aesthetics, money, and, since the federal government does the selecting, politics, though of a soft-core variety. In walking through Gibson’s radiant though facile pavilion, I sensed the zeitgeist, or, better, the “spirito dei tempi” unfolding at home. American politics is in the air, everywhere.

There’s politics and political art, which, like all art, can fall into categories of the good, the bad, the ho-hum, and the heinous. There’s nothing wrong with that. Politics is part of life, though political art tends to concern transitory topics that don’t stand the test of time. Then there’s art about civics, which overlaps with political art but treats the subjects of citizenship and how citizens, government, and politics commune. It’s how we deal as individuals with matters, not all of them problems, of common concern among people who aren’t family and friends. That art can be about fundamentals.

A couple of months ago, I saw Civics, a poignant, pungent group of photographs by William Meyers, a New York photographer I didn’t know. The collection consists of around 110 photographs created from 2009 to 2020. Its subject is that wonderful, quirky thing called American citizenship. Meyers, who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, focuses his camera mostly on that island.

Meyers is an artist with a reporter’s eye, and he conveys civics — the practice of citizenship — as more alive than we might think. Civics is a visual primer about not only the practice of citizenship but the art of being an American.

Civics, as a portfolio, is loosely divided among such themes as elections and voting, public services, protests, the centrality of an honest, thorough news business, and volunteerism. His work combines street photography — unscripted, fleeting scenes of everyday life — and documentary photography — photography with a social, political, or economic message.

Let’s start with elections and voting since November 5 is days away.

Listening to the Candidate, Rego Park depicts a small, random moment — a voter listening to a candidate — that, like any good work of art, conveys something big. The election in question is the special election in 2011 in Queens that decided who would replace the disgusting, disgraced Anthony Weiner in Congress. The voter is looking and listening, using his senses to absorb and measure the candidate making his pitch. Is he full of o’ horse apples, as we say in Vermont? Will he at least behave with dignity rather than send nudies to strangers?

Campaigning’s a contact sport in a democracy, whether in America, the U.K., Israel, Italy, or India, all places with, more or less, competitive elections, unlike, say, Russia, or Iran, or that fantasy Switzerland among the sand dunes, the West Bank. Meyers chose a delicious moment, since that special election delivered a shock. The candidate in his photograph is the Republican Bob Turner, the Queens businessman who won and became the first Republican congressman in the district since 1920.

Ya never know. Elections in America produce upsets. Turner bested the scion of a powerful, old-time Queens Democratic family, who might have taken victory for granted but suffered in the undertow of the Weiner scandal and Obama’s gross unpopularity. In a democracy, the individual voter can possess an awesome power.

Civics doesn’t pair photographs, but Election Night, Losing Candidate’s Headquarters, November 2, 2010 shows another facet of American civics. The party’s over, if this one ever happened. Listening to the Candidate is action civics. Election Night is civics as deflated balloon. One’s intense, the other’s sad and empty. That said, losers aren’t inconsequential in politics. This loser, a Republican running in Harlem, had things to say. He put his name on the line. He gave voters a choice. Turner? He went on to lose his reelection, in 2012.

Meyers is 86 and came to life as an artist only in the past 20 years. I love that. Second, third, fourth, even fifth acts, which I’m performing now, can be the best. He’s not a late bloomer as much as a frequent bloomer, bringing to art a lifetime of experience. He served in Navy intelligence as a young man and worked for a congressional committee for a bit, but, mostly, he ran his family’s chain of car washes, gas stations, and parking garages. These are, like citizenship itself, nuts-and-bolts enterprises. They’re egalitarian, too, serving a swath of humanity.

Voting is one way to deal with matters of common concern, but we vote for people who implement programs, develop budgets, tax us, and manage — or control — we proles. Government, for better or worse, writ small or large, grows from civics. Marriage Bureau, from 2018, is a lovely photograph. Meyers visited the city clerk’s office where couples can get marriage licenses. An intense moment unfolds as a couple huddles in a bureaucratic moment before they huddle till death does them part, we hope.

This couple was getting a license. People can marry there as well, though no walk-ins allowed. Women sometimes come wearing wedding dresses, as, I’m sure, some men do as well. Here, the groom-to-be’s big, tattooed arm shows us that he, literally, has her back. In this critical bureaucratic moment, the clerk is a player. The couple’s a number. Let’s hope it’s their last three-way.

Then there’s New York City Housing Authority, from 2018. Marriage Bureau is intimate. Living at 3333 Broadway in Harlem isn’t. It’s a 35-story rental building with 1,100 units built in 1975. At the time, it was the largest residential structure in the world. It was a Mitchell-Lama building — low-income housing — and has to be among the most inhospitable.

Meyers’s photograph suggests the place has no beginning and no end. He’d read Jane Jacobs’s The Life and Death of Great American Cities when it first appeared in 1961. She argued, and he agrees, that replacing demolished slums with public housing would be a disaster. The slums, at least, were established communities. Public housing — vast, impersonal, and aesthetically dead — was no community. It’s a failure in civics. It’s a massive government failure. As a marriage between home and humanity, it could not be saved.

Then there’s a section on protests — Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, labor-union demonstrations, and a protest against Obama’s nuke deal with Iran. Who could forget the $400 million in cash airlifted in the dark of night from D.C. to Tehran? One photograph depicts a group of Tea Party doctors in lab coats. Tea Partiers weren’t all lager louts. Nearly all the BLM protestors were young, white, bourgeois socialists, bubbled and educated beyond their intelligence. They’re the most susceptible to hoaxes about the weather, of all things, Russian collusion, “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and endless others since they have no discernment. Their mothers never taught them not to believe everything TikTok serves them. There’s a photograph of Scabby, the inflatable union rat, both picturesque and to the point.

Newsroom, New York Daily News, from 2015, shows two banks of reporters typing in a modern newsroom — not on dinging, clickety-clacking Underwoods but on desktop screens lighting the room. Lining the back wall are famous front pages. “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” “Men Walk on Moon,” and “Who’s a Bum,” referring to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ 1955 World Series win, not their subsequent flight to L.A.

“It’s Ike in a Landslide” reports news that, in 2015, was history, not only the history of an election but a sign of the glory days of New York newspapers. New Yorkers were proud, with good reason, of newspapers with chutzpah, of cynical reporters who suspected everyone with money and power of evildoing. With so many newspapers and so much sass, truth will out.

Healthy civics can’t exist without take-no-prisoners newspapers. Now, Meyers suggests, reporters and editors are effete toadies, too refined, lazy, and dumb to know they’re supposed to be licking their lips vampirically at the very thought of a juicy story. Without sound, reliable news, citizens can’t make good judgments.

Some of the best photographs in Civics are about volunteerism, which isn’t uniquely American but distinctly so. Americans volunteer — for candidates, for blood drives, for PTAs, in volunteer fire departments, rescue squads, and soup kitchens. Our instinct isn’t to look away but to jump in, to intervene, to ameliorate. One photograph in Civics shows a man flat on a city street in the middle of a seizure, a dropped cup of Greek diner coffee by his side, along with a Good Samaritan — a passerby — kneeling beside him, putting her coat under his twitching head so he doesn’t concuss, others calling 911. Meyers makes it high drama, but it happens in America, a million times a day.

Is this human nature? Yes and no. Years ago I spent lots of time in Vienna working on a big exhibition on fin-de-siècle Austrian art. In American cities, people walking on the streets, at least before iPhones, were always looking, sussing the next chance to make a buck, eyeing babes, or simply out of curiosity. In Vienna, people looked down. They saw nothing. Of course, in places soaked in socialism, all is to be resolved by the government, or left to fester or fade into oblivion.

Meyers’s first portfolio, Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan, was exhibited at the New York Public Library a few years ago. It’s a collection of photographs of places and spontaneous scenes in Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and Brooklyn, which, despite New York’s renown as the world’s center of photography, haven’t been plumbed by too many eyes and cameras. Meyers says his current bio is “I walk around and see things,” which makes him a modern and unlikely flaneur.

Meyers debunks the hyperbole — the caricature — that American civics is in crisis. Young people seem unusually ignorant about the mechanics of our civil — not civic — order. On the one hand, we’re in the days when competing candidates are hero or Antichrist. The quick, icy coup removing President Biden, his replacement by a puppet and a moron, and the epic that’s Donald Trump are features of this year’s model in American democracy. Norman Rockwell might have been challenged to put a positive spin on it all, but Meyers is an optimist, as am I.