“I Wish It Were True”

If you always thought relational aesthetics was a little bit bougie, how about some good old-fashioned social sculpture? To create I Wish It Were True, 2005, artists Leslie Hewitt and William Cordova pooled their collections of bootlegged black and Latino cinema; weekly public screenings in one of Project Row Houses’ restored shotgun homes attract artsy types, activists, and neighbors from the mostly poor, mostly black Third Ward. The politically charged works veer from obscurities to acclaimed masterpieces: Warrington Hudlin’s phenomenal 1974 documentary Black at Yale, John Sayles’s The Brother from Another Planet, Soy Cuba, and two films by Haile Gerima are among those showing this fall. The building’s spare white interior, with a wall of some 200 hand-labeled VHS tapes and elbow-to-elbow wooden benches, creates an earnest but airy atmosphere that brings to mind both schoolhouse and living room, perfect for thoughtful viewing followed by a little consciousness raising. I Wish It Were True takes up art-world hot topics like the archive, copyright law, the possibility of radicalism in a specularized age—and is all the more impressive for the way it keeps its act of intellectual Valjeanism plain, unsanctimonious, and self-aware.