Raising a fist in political 'Dissent!'

During the last presidential campaign, Richard Serra, the sculptor known for his enormous, rusted-steel abstractions, created a work of vehement political partisanship. Using a thick black crayon, he drew a ragged, expressionistic silhouette of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner and emphatically scrawled above the scarecrow-like figure's shoulders "Stop Bush."

Serra made the image available as a free download on a political website and he also had it distributed as a poster, which is the first thing you see as you approach "Dissent!," an enthralling show of politically adversarial prints at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum. (In the Fogg's version, the letters U and H have been erased so it spells a more general imperative: "Stop B S.")

Organized by Susan Dackerman, curator of prints at the Fogg, and drawn largely from the museum's own collection, the exhibition makes a case for the print as an ideal form for disseminating antiestablishment opinion. Prints are cheap to produce and easy to distribute, and as the show demonstrates through works dating from the 16th to the 21st century, artists have been using them with oppositional intent for a long time.

While the bulk of the show focuses on works from the past 50 years, a variety of early pieces provide historical perspective. A woodcut by an unknown artist from 1520 depicts the pope as a wolf threatening Christian sheep. Examples of Francisco Goya's nightmarish, antichurch and anti-aristocracy series of etchings "Los Caprichos" are on display, as well as beautifully drawn political cartoons by the Englishman James Gillray and the Frenchman Honoré Daumier. A lithograph by Edouard Manet shows soldiers firing on Paris Communards. Picasso's famous pair of etchings "Dream and Lie of Franco, " parts I and II, makes a surrealistic mockery of the Spanish dictator.

Jumping to the '60s, a screen-printed Cubist-style poster by Ben Shahn urges a ban on hydrogen bomb testing. A silkscreen by Andy Warhol reproduces a photograph of an Alabama race riot. Percussive montages of text, magazine photographs, and neon-bright colors by Sister Corita celebrate such avatars of progressive politics as Martin Luther King Jr., the Berrigan brothers, and Eugene McCarthy.

If you were around in the '60s and '70s, the exhibition will bring back memories of a time of tremendous political excitement and social disequilibrium. In this context, a poster reproducing Jasper Johns's painting of an orange, green, and black American flag, sold to support a 1969 anti-Vietnam War event, has an iconic, mysteriously funereal resonance. And an eerie, pro-McGovern poster by Warhol that portrays Richard Nixon with a demonic green face perfectly captures the feeling a lot of countercultural people had about the 37th president.

A corner of the gallery is devoted to prints, posters, T-shirts, and other ephemera produced by Harvard students in 1968 during a strike aimed at getting rid of ROTC, establishing a black studies department, and changing university housing policies. A cartoon fist is featured on many of the items, and it is bittersweet to think how urgently meaningful that now - hackneyed symbol once was.

With the end of the Vietnam War, dissent in America lost its galvanizing focus. Jenny Holzer's "Inflammatory Essays" from 1979-82 -- pages of angry texts that she pasted up on public surfaces around New York -- epitomize a sense of generalized paranoid rage against authority current during the punk era. One reads in part, "Fear is the most elegant weapon, your hands are never messy. Work instead on minds and beliefs, play insecurities like a piano."

The AIDS crisis activated many people in the '80s. Included in the show is a poster by the group General Idea in which the letters of Robert Indiana's famous "Love" design are replaced by the letters of "AIDS." Feminism carries on: A small 1989 poster by the feminist group Guerrilla Girls offers a sardonic "Code of Ethics for Art Museums" in the form of 10 commandments. One reads, "Thou shalt admit in public that words such as genius, masterpiece, priceless, seminal, potent, tough, gritty, and powerful are used solely to prop up the myth and inflate the market value of white male artists." Racism remains an enduring theme, as in a photolithograph by Glenn Ligon reproducing his 1988 painting of the words "I am a man," which he took from civil rights protest placards of the '60s.

Most recently, the war in Iraq has provoked resistance, albeit not on a Vietnam-era scale. The smartest of recent antiwar efforts in the exhibition is a page of comic strips printed in red based on a series that David Rees published on the Internet under the title "Get Your War On." Using clip art and an uncanny ear for vernacular speech, Rees staged brisk conversations about the war between white-collar workers at their desks and on their phones. With awesome economy and caustic humor, he channels moods of bravado, cynicism, anxiety, and indignation that have animated American responses to the war, terrorism, and related issues. "I wouldn't be surprised if Iraq were better off being run by a [expletive] ATM machine and the cast of ' Friends, ' " blusters one of Rees's exasperated characters. (Rees's work is at mnftiu.cc/mnftiu.cc/war3.html.)

One of the show's lessons is that prints of all kinds -- from the finest works made for connoisseurs to the cheapest sorts produced for popular consumption -- are worth collecting. Much of the material in this show was acquired by the Fogg's former print curator Marjorie "Jerry" Cohn.

As for the politics, in an introductory wall text, Dackerman advises, "At a time when voicing opinions in opposition to those of the dominant power structure is increasingly discouraged in American society, it is important to exhibit and explicate works such as those in Dissent! within the setting of a museum -- particularly a university museum whose role is to engage and instruct students."

A critical viewer may notice, however, that the values expressed by the exhibition are pretty uniformly those of left-leaning liberals. There's nothing here that would upset or offend a John Stewart fan or, I imagine, your average member of the Harvard University community. For most of the people who will see this show, a better title might be "Consent!"

Although I'm a registered Democrat and card-carrying liberal myself, I wish the range of opinions was more varied. If you really wanted to get people thinking about dissent, how about including some posters and T-shirts by pro-lifers, anti-taxers, and gun lovers from the far right, and others at either end of the political spectrum who dissent more radically from the mainstream? I guess those kinds of groups are not well represented in the Fogg's print collection, but if they were, we'd really have something to talk about.

Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com.