Even viewers familiar with the British filmmaker Matthew Buckinghamâ??s penchant for politically and historically abstruse subjects may be puzzled by the bland color photographs in this exhibition. They depict interior views of a modern, institutional building: stairways with tiled walls and stainless-steel railings; bathrooms with metal partitions and electric hand driers; elevator doors in a painted concrete block wall; a corner near a bank of windows with a nondescript brown sofa.
A clue to what Murray Guy’s photographs mean is provided by photographic copies of an article from a Wisconsin newspaper and of a news photograph of a crowd of agitated-looking young people, both from 1967. They refer to an anti-Vietnam War demonstration at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in which students protested the presence on campus of recruiters for Dow Chemical, the napalm manufacturer. The newspaper report describes how the demonstration turned into a bloody melee when police with nightsticks broke it up.