Meant to be an experiential art exhibit, the show also integrates video and audio art featuring enthusiastically intoned images and music from Sesame Street, as well as Obama’s speech with all its rhetoric charm and avowed intent exalting “change” and attempts to rein in the impacts of the recession. These elements effectively become allusions of entertainment of a pervasive profit driven US media, Hollywood culture, neoliberal intelligentsia and Establishment propaganda which tend to distract if not obfuscate the real sense of the crisis which also provide false reassurances.

Conversely, as a committed referential artist, the exhibit takes cue from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, a veritable discourse in the anti-canon of the capitalist and globalist mantra.

As Cruz laments, “The US has indeed become a cesspool of vacillating greed, glut and of pervasive inequity.”

“Kahit saan, may pwedeng damputin at gamitin” (Anywhere there are things you can pick up and use) and yet Americans still produce so much…. And mall sale gimmicks are screaming everywhere, yet a whole lot of people can’t buy and this has become the enduring logic and object of this project,” Cruz said.

.To Cruz, barely with any element of subtlety, The Great American Dream is an apt re-examination of the glut of American capitalism leading wholly a picture of an economics of despair –a system grossly inappropriate which in turn, has been causing the economic turmoil worldwide. It is a probe beneath the surface of hedonism and pleasure which extends to all citizens of the world as something pervasively purveyed if not imposed by US hegemony– economically, politically and culturally.

As the show is finally mounted locally here in the Philippines, it also provides us a unique sense of place and familiarity. It is not just the culture of Americans that it wants audiences to ponder about but also our own collectivity and attitudes. It hopes to engage us headlong on the urgency of contemplating our long-standing colonial relations with America and also shapes our own sense of consumerism and cultural sensibilities.

Unapologetically, this art project locates Cruz in the political spectrum as an acutely aware and deeply involved artist in the community. It transcends aesthetic pleasures and decidedly presents a nagging repertoire of political statements with its conceptual foundations intact as it when it was first staged abroad.

Cruz accomplishes a worthy feat in staging a project that becomes an ethical and social insight and which wittingly tackles a most nagging current issue of recession. In the end, the show triumphs on what it set out to portray and the political ax it intends to grind: the urgency of understanding a crisis within a crisis.

Mideo Cruz recently completed his residency program under the Asian Cultural Council, and this exhibit earlier done in the US has been the output for the said program. In New York, he mounted the Great American Experience (TAE) in Grace Space in Bushwick and Point B in Williamsburg. Soon after his show, Everything Must Go was exhibited in Edge Zones in Miami.

Cruz is one unrelenting artist-activist, a facile generator of anxiety and debate and is skilled in the production of excitingly intellectual images and forms within the unorthodox as seen in his art practice teeming with imitable social and political commentary. He is also a member of Artists’ Response to the Call for Social Change and Transformation (Artists’ ARREST).

The Great American Experience runs from April 19 to May 7 at the Lunduyan Art Gallery, 88-B Kamuning Rd., Quezon City.(Bulatlat.com)

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