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On a recent Sunday afternoon in Chicago, bombs fell on Iraq; a poodle read Beat poems about George W. Bush and a group of kids learned how to use A/V equipment.

One Vision: Hollywood Soldiers, 2003—07

It was a typical day at the buzzing Hyde Park Art Center, where  “Consuming War,” an exhibition curated by artist Barbara Koenen, is currently on view. The show’s title has multiple meanings, referring to the way the war has come to dominate the practices of its 14 artists; the artists’ belief that American over-consumption is an underlying cause of the war; and their conviction that the war itself is a consumer product, marketed like any other. The work on display is predictably cynical, but the best pieces have some wit or originality that leave the viewer with a sense of hope rather than paralyzing despair.

Cartoonist Lynda Barry’s popular character Fred Milton, Beat poodle, sets the tone. “Today they were bombed and things blew up,” he says in a 2003 comic strip, reporting from the front in Iraq. “Pets also blew up. And trees, books. Homes, shops, streets and cars were blown up too. Oil fields have not been blown up. . . . I repeat, the oil is safe and in good spirits.” All of the show’s artists strip away the government’s rhetoric about terror and WMDs to portray the war as an economic conflict facilitated by America’s militaristic culture.

Michael Hernandez de Luna skewers our veneration of aggressive behavior in a series of his controversial fake postage stamps. American Gun Goddess (2007) transforms a blond in an American flag bikini into a multilimbed deity wielding six different machine guns. The dynamite-laden tot posed in front of a fiery cloud in Hamas Baby Bomb (2003) is only shocking for a moment: “Consuming War” doesn’t blame the war on toy guns or G.I. Joe, but it does suggest that a lifelong diet of violent images leaves us unable to take thousands of deaths more seriously than a video game.

Edra Soto’s One Vision: Hollywood Soldiers (2003-2007) identifies American cinema as a cog in the war machine by bringing together 36 stills from films such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down. The only differences between their depictions of American men in uniform lie in the soldiers’ smiling or stoic facial expressions; all are clearly more handsome and brave (and have many more lines) than any enemy soldier. Movies play such a pernicious role in shaping our conceptions of war that it’s a shame Soto didn’t do more with these images.

Fred Holland, Arms for Oil, 2005.

Wafaa Bilal’s heavy-handed 40-minute video Al Qaeda R US (2002) reveals the way war is packaged for television. It incorporates decades of news footage from 11 countries, showing countless tragedies caused by American military intervention. Like Soto and de Luna’s work, the piece raises timely questions about the media’s role in Americans’ consumption of war, but its barrage of images doesn’t tell sympathetic viewers anything new; it just depresses them further. Though Michael Rakowitz’s The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2007) is equally angry, the installation’s collaborative replicas of artifacts looted from Baghdad’s Iraq Museum and multicultural soundtrack (an Arabic cover of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”) acknowledge that international cooperation is possible.

Rakowitz’s piece yields many layers of meaning; others derive their power from a simplicity ad agencies would appreciate. Every student passing through the gallery was transfixed by Frederick Holland’s American Blend (2007), a white oil drum labeled “Product of Iraq” that dispenses an endless stream of red liquid. “Is that really blood?” one child gasped. As the adult with him began explaining the sculpture, their reasoned dialogue seemed to be a victory for those who would rather make art than war.

Through Jan 20. Wed 12, 6-8pm, the HPAC hosts “Talkback: Buyer Beware.”