In a world of superficial sound bytes dominated by a generation absorbed with the self and the surface of things, Clinton Fein's work dissects the vicissitudes of our body politic, pricking the raw nerves that the increasingly conservative mass media tiptoes around.

Fein's politically charged art offers social critique through compelling, aggressive, and daring images. He subverts existing imagery by digitally altering, manipulating, and collaging fragments to create striking images that shock, mock, and amuse. George W. Bush becomes King Kong atop the World Trade Center, flailing futilely at inbound airplanes. Condoleeza Rice becomes Marie Antoinette, complacent in finery and bewailing the lack of forewarning of imminent turmoil. "The Last Supper" becomes peopled by the President's cabinet and cronies over a slogan proclaiming "Better Be the Last." The overwhelmed face in Edvard Munch's "Scream" becomes Bush's, or perhaps the American Everyman who did not elect him.

These images are not mannered or labored; they shoot fast from the hip and are produced at a prodigious rate, promulgated through Fein's website, Annoy.com, in a one-man parallel of the mass media news cycle. On the website, they are amplified by charged "editorial" commentary, whether in prose, verse, or parodies of popular lyrics. This continual program of publication can be read as constituting a type of performance art that simultaneously performs politics through activism.

Fein continues a venerable tradition of socially engaged art that has now been subsumed by what he views as the current taste for sly, slick, and narcissistic work. Much of what he sees on the gallery circuit appears to him as cases of the emperor proclaiming new clothes while parading nothing -- or at least very little content. Fein was born and educated in South Africa, which has a powerful tradition of resistance art against apartheid. This has colored his view of art as a social and democratic phenomenon capable of addressing the man in the street and promoting social and democratic values, which he does now as a patriotic American.

Fein's pointed gestures at the nakedness of emperors often has irked the powers that be and led him into some high-profile confrontations. In 1994, Clinton Fein's CD-ROM Conduct Unbecoming, based on the book by renowned investigative reporter Randy Shilts that examined the issue of gays in the military, pioneered the use of digital technology as an art form. When the US Navy unsuccessfully attempted to block its release, it became the first CD-ROM to triumph under First Amendment protections. Conduct Unbecoming went on to win the prestigious Critics Choice Award and was dubbed "evolutionary" by Rolling Stone Magazine.

Fein is currently on the board of The First Amendment Project , a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and promoting freedom of information, expression, and petition. FAP provides advice, educational materials, and legal representation to its core constituency of activists, journalists, and artists in service of fundamental liberties. In recognition of his First Amendment advocacy, Fein was nominated for a PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award in 2001. His art, work and website have also received considerable media attention both in the US and globally.

While art and digital technology are social and political tools in Fein's hands -- whether he is forging images on the internet, on the street, on T-shirts, or in the gallery context -- he also works as a stills photographer, producing more meditative essays on such issues as urban blight, graffiti, and the sado-masochistic and homoerotic overtones of militarism.

Fein was the first South African-born American to challenge government restrictions on technological communications when he filed a federal lawsuit on 30 January 1997. Fein filed a lawsuit against Janet Reno, former United States Attorney General, challenging the constitutionality of the Communications Decency Act .The CDA made the communication of anything "indecent with the intent to annoy", a felony punishable by a fine and up to two-year imprisonment. President Bill Clinton signed the CDA into law in February 1996. Fein filed the lawsuit, Apollomedia v. Reno, the same time he launched his Annoy.com web site. A three-judge panel in United States District Court for the Northern District of California made a divided decision on the lawsuit. Fein filed an Supreme Court appeal, which he won in 1999.

In June 1999, in a separate case, United States v. ApolloMedia, the U.S. government sent Fein an order to reveal a user of Annoy.com's e-card service.Earlier, in April 1999, the University of Houston tried unsuccessfully to obtain the website's records. The government later ordered Fein to stop discussing details of this investigation, its existence or its application. In United States v. ApolloMedia, Fein argued that this gag order violated the First Amendment and the statutory requirement that it have a definite duration.

The case moved from a Texas magistrate court to a Texas District Court and then to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. The Fifth Circuit granted the appeal. The District Court then unsealed the website's records and all related proceedings and lifted the gag order.

As an artist, Fein is represented by Toomey Tourell in San Francisco and Axis Gallery in New York, and his shows have been dogged by controversy. In 2001, Fein was scheduled to open a solo exhibition, Annoy.com, (based on his critically acclaimed web site of the same name), in San Francisco in October. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Artforum Magazine pulled an advertisement for Fein's show from their October issue. The advertisement displayed an image of a purse lipped former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, sitting naked in a urine-filled glass, referencing the technique used by artist Damien Hirst, in which animate objects are soaked in formaldehyde and encased in a glass containers. Fein’s advertisement, designed to link Mayor Giuliani with mayoral candidate Michael Bloomberg, incorporated imagery from the exhibition Sensation that resulted in mayor Giuliani withholding funding from the Brooklyn Museum. Clutching a crucifix with a nod to artist Andres Serrano and with another Giuliani targeted work, Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary forming the backdrop, copy on the top of the image reads: "Mike for Mayor" and at the bottom, "Start Spreading the News."

Artforum Executive Editor, Knight Landesman, stated that the magazine was understaffed and that the editors did not feel comfortable publishing a disparaging image of Rudy Giuliani.

In October 2004, Palo Alto-based printing company, Zazzle, destroyed two of Fein’s giant images. just before the opening of a solo exhibition at Toomey Tourell Gallery.The one image, reviewed at Chelsea’s Axis Gallery by New York Times’ Ken Johnson, was described as "an American flag with the stars and stripes made from the text of the official Abu Ghraib report is accompanied by fifty representations of the iconic image of a hooded man teetering on a box with wires trailing from his arms comprising the stars."

The second image depicting President Bush on a crucifix entitled "Who Would Jesus Torture?" was also withheld by the printing company, who told San Francisco Chronicle art critic, Kenneth Baker that the company had "destroyed the images." Company spokesperson, Matt Wilsey, claimed the image might "offend Christians," and threatened to sue Fein for defamation if Fein publicly criticized the company’s actions.

Fein's image, "Who Would Jesus Torture?" was published in Art of Engagement, Visual Politics in California and Beyond, by Peter Selz, released in November 2005, and exhibited at the Katzen Arts Center at American University in 2006. Peter Selz is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, is the founding director of the Berkeley Art Museum and a former curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

In November 2006, "Who Would Jesus Torture," accompanied an article about Fein in American Protest Literature by author and Harvard University lecturer Zoe Trodd, published by Harvard University Press. It was this interview that Fein cited as a catalyst for his exhibition Torture, which opened at Toomey Tourell gallery in San Francisco in January 2007, featuring gigantic, high-resolution photographs that reenacted infamous scenes from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Fein's Torture series was exhibited in Beijing in September 2007 and in London in October 2007[. A review in the December 2007 issue of Art in America magazine, summed up the impact of Fein's Torture series, stating: "Torture of detainees or their rendition to countries with even more abusive torture regimens has become semi-legal under the Bush administration. Fein reminds us, however, that these practices can never be anything less than intolerable."