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I have a confession to make. Cynical as I’ve grown in recent years, I still do have a rather squishy spot in my heart for the losers in this world—all the clowns and clods, the misguided and the mistaken; all the failing and the failed. Maybe it’s from the many years I've spent observing and writing about artists, but I just can't seem to turn away from the futile dreamers, misguided idealists, and strangely quixotic (even desperately foolish) empty-gesturers whenever I encounter them.

What breaks my heart, however, and makes me ever more cynical, is seeing just how terribly inept, even self-defeating, these losers can sometimes be. And this is true even when their hopeless causes are completely righteous and right. Consider, for example, the hapless RNC protesters who brought their dirty dreadlocks and less-than-charming bandannas to town from all around the country just a few short weeks ago.

No doubt they were sure that St. Paulians, and sundry citizens around the world, would embrace their right-meaning antics. After all, few rational people would argue against their chief cause—the wrongness of war. In fact, a majority of the population has considered the Iraq War a mistake for the past several years. Unfortunately, though, or perhaps predictably, the protesting rabble was not met with particularly open arms.

Most local citizens were put off by the protesters’ unsavory and less-than-civil means of expressing themselves—destroying private property and breaking windows of small businesses, directly confronting the police and throwing bleach on conventioneers, flouting rules and stock-piling Molotov cocktails, and just generally making a senseless nuisance of themselves. For me, however, while all of these tactics—some of which I observed personally—were obnoxious and difficult to justify, what truly was miserable about the approach of these protesters was its sheer lack of imagination. The breakaway rabble had no clue that a protest needs some sort of compelling symbolism, something for others to connect with, in order to successfully capture empathy and support. Shrill gestures, violence, destruction, and other flouting of the rules of civilized society do not make compelling symbolism. Instead, acts of a hopeful, imaginative, or out-reaching nature are what's needed to attract and capture the attention and support of others.

I was reminded of the simple power of compelling symbolism when I recently visited the Minnesota Artists Gallery (at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) to see the new exhibition “Millions of Innocent Accidents” by an artists’ cooperative known as Hardland/Heartland. As soon as I walked into this gallery and saw the poorly conceived, dolefully hopeless work that this well-meaning group of artists purported to consider compelling visual art—all their random and indistinct trash and burnt paraphernalia and jumbles and piles of detritus and tossed off dreck and doodles and goats' heads and black tar corner accretions—my spirit fell. The show was a disaster, off-putting and uninspiring, and it was clear at a glance that this loudly shouting, in-your-face visual group had failed to reach out to others in any meaningfuly to get their righteous points across.

To be fair, what HL/HL is attempting, in their own heavy and artless way, is worth considering. As per the pre-show publicity, they intended to address “popular and consumer culture as well as the realms of media, politics, war, and fear.” And make no bones, these days things are rather hopelessly fucked up. The country seems filled with people unable to reach out past their own outstretched arms to comprehend viewpoints and experiences beyond their own, or to empathize with anyone not like themselves. Young people in general, and young artists in particular, facing a hopeless future, have every reason to be agitated and off-kilter.

Still, what good does it do to add to this lack of mutual understanding? And in this show Hardland/Heartland pretty much fails miserably to put together a visual or symbolic statement that others would find cogent and compelling, let alone beautiful and mind-altering.

There’s almost too much general confusion in this show to critique very clearly. The gallery is filled with a lot of random and disordered junk: wall images, sculptural objects, installation pieces, paintings and drawings, found objects, collages, small video displays, and so on. I’ll try to break some of it down to give a sense of the dismay and despair of it all.

A large wall of these random images, hung in a salon fashion, creates some large amount of ambiguous noise in the gallery. There are images of James Dean with a pink triangle, a number of scribbly images with the word “Meth” written on them (which might explain something), references to peyote ceremonies and native drug cutlure (ditto), a copy of the Declaration of Independence with words crossed out, and a found illustration on which the following, astoundingly blunt and unpoetic words have been scrawled:

The group's drawings (dozens of 'em, scattered here and there on the walls) are scribbly, cubistic sorts of pastiches—very similar to what one sees in just about every undergraduate art department across the country. No real context here. Nothing to hang one's hat on, other than seeing the scrawly gestures of someone else's hand. The collage pieces are much the same—callow, out-of-context, and laden with a sense of their own cleverness. For instance, in one found poster of rapper Snoop Dogg they’ve inked oozes of bloodlike ink on their face and hands. This is too obvious a target by a factor of twelve. What's next? A complaint against the "Girls Gone Wild" set of Hilton, Lohan, and Spears? And so it goes.

I’m hip to the frustration, the angst, the anger, and the need for these youngsters to make noise, but I’m confused. What, if anything, is all of this trying to accomplish? Are we supposed to be attracted to the several globby sculptural accretions in cases or on the floor, comprised of tar-like oozing substances in which are embedded ugly found objects like beads, twigs, baubles, fur, even meat and a deer’s head? These are about as compelling to look at as a preadolescent's messy bedroom. Are we supposed to sympathize with “Memorial” (2008), an ominous mass of blackened twigs and other scraggly materials that is quite possibly the ugliest piece of art I’ve ever seen in an art gallery?

This meandering, unsympathetic show, while it means well, is just a half-step removed from the aimless gestures of all the young protesters who came to town hell-bent on giving the rest of us the stiff little finger. The chief problem is that, while it’s clear that Hardland/Heartland’s hearts are in the right place and they have the energy to make a lot of work (and I mean a lot of work), they just don’t know how to make much that is compelling and symbolically relevant or that embodies and expounds on their frustrations, fears, and angst in a way that someone else would care to look at. There's no hope here, no imagination, and certainly nothing to empathize with.

In the end, in this show the artists of Hardland/Heartland, talented and energetic as they are, reveal they still need to learn how to explain their own navels in such as way that other people might want to gaze at them too.