Krzysztof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photography courtesy Robert Ochshorn.

Michelle Schultz: With your project War Veteran Vehicle - a transformed military vehicle that fires fragments of statements by soldiers and their families on the façades of public buildings – the highly personal and revealing testimonies make the subject quite vulnerable, and I imagine there are many barriers that need to be overcome to achieve this. Could you begin by telling me a little about the process that is involved and how you approach those that you worked with in the project?

Krzysztof Wodiczko: Well, those projects would not happen if I did not establish some trustful contact with the social workers who are trusted by veterans, homeless, or immigrants – places where people try to connect and try to help each other. I first present an idea, then they have to test me and I have to pass their test – they have to protect people with whom they work from people like myself, and from people like you. Then, the project and myself, we have to be tested by those who are potential co-artists. This is not easy – very often you start with rejection or destruction, psychologically speaking, of my presence and of the work. It is something coming from outside and invading them and maybe manipulating them. They must first properly destroy any doubt, and if I survive this, and the project survives this, then I show up again, and I am ready to be of some kind of service. In this process, the confidence amongst some of these people develops and they might make use of this project for their own lives, and for lives of others who cannot join the project because it’s too early for them, it’s too dangerous, too risky…

MS: Do you continue to keep in touch with the people that you work with in your projects? Are you aware of how the project has affected their lives, and the long-term impacts of it?

KW: For them, and for me, the thing in itself is the end of sometimes a year-long process of recording. Inevitably some ties develop, also among people who are part of the project who normally would not connect. So something is sustained – some of the projects continue in the sense that the network established by the project is still operational for awhile. So they help each other, but I am not part of it. My job is to disappear, it is their project. When it all somehow works for them, it is their success. If it doesn’t, it is my failure.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photography courtesy Robert Ochshorn.

MS: Now, you have initiated the War Veteran Vehicle project in various locations, including Poland, Denver, Liverpool and most recently, Eindhoven. Do you plan to continue this work in other places?

KW: Yes, but not forever. Unfortunately, circumstances demand more work in this area because there will be an enormous amount of soldiers coming back, especially in the United States. In Europe, most of the people are coming back from so-called peace missions, but it is a normal war. And it is very important that they make sure that through their words they explain that it is a war, and what it means to be at war. Also what it means to be a family of those who come back from war, or who have left for war, or who are absent because they are somewhere fighting, and in what way those families are proper war veterans themselves.

MS: Yes, some of the most powerful statements come from the families of soldiers who have come back from war, as they convey how these veterans have returned home, yet are lost to them psychologically or emotionally.

KW: An incredible amount of people are victims or survivors of secondary trauma. Each time someone comes back, he or she re-traumatises seventy-nine people according to experts who work on this in the United States. And young people are blindly signing up for the army because there is enormous amount of propaganda, a certain image and a lofty sense of mission, duty, country. This is something veterans know very well. They were processed through this war machine and they know there is no relation between the way they were before and they way they are now. And they know how much they are resented by society. In fact, they are foreigners and they are homeless in their own country and in their own homes. When they came back, they didn’t really come back, they’re gone. And the chance that this will happen is very high in comparison to previous wars because most people will come back alive, rather than dead, because of better armour and medical technologies. The fallout of them being alive, in this way, is tremendous.

In Poland, half of the people who are speaking through the vehicle are women. In Liverpool there is one woman, but it is very significant as she is speaking about almost being killed by her husband, and the husband also says that he almost killed her and he doesn’t remember. These things are not only the facts, but the fact that they are being said by those people themselves, in the open, is significant. Speaking in a public space itself is an act of incredible shift – only one percent of veterans speak in public, and almost none of the families. It is also acoustically very powerful  – it reverberates and echoes and is reflected from the blank and blind façades of the buildings and monuments that have witnessed events in the past.

MS: So the buildings and walls you use are not only a physical or practical part of the project, but an important symbolic one as well?

KW: Yes, there is an extremely thick wall that separates those who know what war is, and those who don’t. So in a way, this is an attempt to shake the wall, and crack it, and maybe make a little a little break in it. In that sense, the wall is an important word here, and the façade is also an important word, and the monument is an important word – because walls, façades, monuments and memorials are obsessed with not only remembering and saying certain things, but also with not saying a lot of things, and forgetting a lot of things about the war.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Flame, Governors Island, 2009. Photography courtesy Michael Marcelle/Creative Time.

MS: Many of your earlier projects have a very utopian drive to them – an attempt to make the world a more cohesive place by overcoming communication barriers through technology. However, with War Veteran Vehicle the overriding message seems to focus on the impossibility of reintegration for these soldiers – do you think that there is a point where technology may actually fails, or simply can’t overcome certain disconnects?

KW: Well, you say it is about impossibility, but I still think it is about possibility. Technology here, can be understood as a kind of cultural prosthetic – one can develop a capacity to speak in the process of making use of this project and bring to the open something that is repressed, maybe even forgotten. I think that this does show the possibilities of communication, and examples where people communicate something that should not happen, they communicate things that should change, that are unacceptable, for them and for the entire world. It’s a critical projection, and it’s a brave projection. It’s an act of maybe an effective contribution to the democratic process. This is something else to consider – can these projects contribute to situations and conditions under which they will not be necessary? Their function is based on the hope that they will become obsolete.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, War Veteran Vehicle, Liverpool, 2009. Photography courtesy Robert Ochshorn.

MS: And this is what your new project, Arc de Triomphe – World Institute for the Abolition of War, is looking at more specifically, isn’t it? It is a functional and symbolic structure proposed to encase one of Paris’s most famous monuments that would work in a practical way towards world peace. Can you tell me a little bit about the ideas behind the project?

KW: War memorials, of which Arc de Triomphe is the primary example, are actually mobilising people towards the next war, and perpetuate the cult of war and cult of leaders and sacrifice. They are not saying at all what is the cost of those wars – how many people lost lives, how many families were destroyed and how many generations suffered transmission of trauma. The mobilisation of people towards war is a very simple technique, used since Roman times, that happens over and over again. It is very easy to detect the falseness and manipulation in it, but people are not educated and  textbooks don’t bring that information.

MS: So how is it that you propose we liberate ourselves from war?

KW: In fact, war should be made illegal, as much as slavery became illegal. Slavery exists, the slave trade exists, but it is illegal, which has made a world of difference if you compare to the eighteenth and nineteenth century slave trade. So while war, also, would happen here and there, it would be very different. The abolition of war, as something illegal used to deal with conflicts, requires change, a major shift of consciousness, and an undoing of relations to memorials. So we begin by creating an institute, and an awareness.

MS: Do you think there is a realistic possibility for the abolition of war in this century?

KW: It might not be finished in this century, but we are moving in this direction. It is a process. However, there is evidence that societies and nations can be without war. There is no evidence that people were inflicting mortal wounds on one another in an organized way before six thousand years ago according to all of the archaeological diggings. And Europe has done this actually with the European community – it’s pretty difficult to imagine war between Germany and France right now, something that seemed to be potentially there every year before, or Britain and France, or wherever. We have no wars in Europe – but Europe is engaging in wars somewhere else, so we have to really be careful about this – but still, we don’t have wars here and it is a big change in the planet already.

People are very skeptical or cynical about this because they say it’s being manipulated. Sure – but there is nothing else but manipulation all the time, it’s called politics, but it’s better to have this kind of politics than the ones before.

It’s no big shocker that we are not at our finest economic hour, but John Baldessari may have stumbled upon a solution to our money woes. All this time we have been trying to make more money, when maybe we should have focused on making bigger money.

Just look at Baldessari’s new installation towering over 18th Street in New York, an $100,000 bill board entitled ‘The First $100,000 I Ever Made.’ At 25-by-75-feet, this grand-scale gravy is big enough for everyone to enjoy, in some capacity at least.

The $100,000 dollar bill was issued in a previous attempt to assuage financial hardships during the Great Depression when 42,000 were circulated. Today they are illegal, though some have been kept in the Smithsonian Museum and Federal Reserve. But big problems need big solutions! Bring back those bills and supersize them, please.

Baldessari is known for his conceptual work toying with the relationship between narrative, language and image in art. What is he saying here? Are we in a Greater Depression? Is this the final equation of art and capital? Or was the whole ‘bill board’ pun just too good to pass up? What do you think?

The aftermath of the Oakland Police's continued assault on occupiers and demonstrators. #StandWithOakland #OccupyOaklandd

Much of the news coverage of the violence in Oakland stemmed from videos and twitter pictures posted online by the protestors themselves. The New York Times published demonstrator’s twitpics with their original hashtags (The aftermath of the Oakland Police’s continued assault on occupiers and demonstrators. #StandWithOakland #OccupyO http://twitpic.com/75xhe3) insisting on the savagery of the police. Cinéma vérité clips of young people rushing to Olsen’s aid in front of a wall of riot police quickly became available and were broadcast alongside film captured by news crews. Indeed the OWS protests, like the right-wing Tea Party protests before them, are ready-made events for the 24-hour news spectacle.

Viktor Koretsky, Africa Fights, Africa Will Win!, 1971, Poster on paper. Ne boltai! Collection.

The amplified spectacle of the skirmish in Oakland tells a horrifying story of disproportionate police action, a brutal crackdown. Wisely, the protestors did not publish pictures of the bottles, rocks, kitchen utensils, or M-80 explosives O.P.D. officers allege were hurled their way. Nor did their hashtags mention any taunting or instigation, particularly the types of provocations that would prompt standard practice crowd dispersal tactics commonly used by police in urban areas, atrocious as those tactics are known to be. Media savvy demonstrators understand that the populist rhetoric of the movement – their broad message of discontent over institutionalized disparity ingrained within the economic system – is easily distorted by boisterous detractors, and that the messaging battle will be won with resonant images and symbols capable of stirring public sympathies. To that effect, the grievous events in Oakland were remarkably useful.

Coincidentally, it was on the morning of October 25^th that I visited the “Vision and Communism” exposition at the Smart Museum on the University of Chicago campus. While the future luminaries of Classical Economic theory toiled just a few buildings away, and only a few hours before the first images were broadcast from Oakland, I was perusing Communist propaganda posters by mid-Century Soviet illustrator Viktor Koretsky. Like the twitpics and videos that would come later in the day, the images I saw at the Smart Museum were grim, emotional, and easily digestible.

Viktor Koretsky, American Policy (Internal/External), 1970, Poster. Ne boltai! Collection.

The original maquette for a poster titled “American Policy” (1970’s) features two vignettes of uniformed men abusing their respective captives. The image on the left shows cops beating a defenseless black man, while the image on the right shows soldiers standing over a half-naked body in a burning village. These parallel images of suffering are reflected in the lenses of the sunglasses on the tightly cropped face of a scowling “big boss man” character – a symbol of bureaucratic authority. Koretsky was referencing the struggle for civil rights in America and the war in Vietnam in order to vilify America’s ideal of freedom and justice as rhetorical hypocrisy. Outside of their respective contexts, Koretsky’s poster and the images from Oakland bear a striking resemblance.

One of the valuable things about seeing Koretsky’s original maquettes is that they reveal the importance of collage in the process of creating one of the illustrator’s posters. While the rendering of the boss man character in “American Policy” is similar to a cartoon, the vignettes of the police and the soldiers have a certain photographic quality that suggests they may have been sourced from newspaper images. Incorporating photo-journalism into his images allowed Koretsky to manipulate the aura of authenticity contained within the photographs for the purpose of denouncing his country’s ideological enemy. The maquettes reveal how a persuasive partisan argument can be framed around a relatively disinterested document.

Viktor Koretsky. A Solid Peace for the World!, 1965, Poster on paper. Ne boltai! Collection.

The exhibtion contains a handful of more classic examples of what might be expected from a show about Soviet propaganda (also quite a few unexpectedly powerful posters expressing solidarity with black South Africans during apartheid), though a surprising number of posters speak knowingly of the conflicts that challenged mid-century America, i.e. foreign war, social and economic justice, and the growth of the military industrial complex. Koretsky’s posters rouse an emotional reaction not only because he was a master propagandist, but also because there are elements of truth behind what he produced. That is what makes these posters more difficult to ignore than the rote images of hypernationalistic sacrifice, happy-faced factory workers, or benevolently smiling political leaders that were typical of the Socialist Realism canon.

But even the truthfulness of the posters does not make them true. They are still works of propaganda and propaganda always manipulates facts for political ends. As I watched the images from Oakland flood the airwaves on October 25, I saw a movement documenting an ugly episode in its brief history, and simultaneously intensifying the construction of an argument.

“Vision and Communism will be on view at Smart Museum at the University of Chicago in Chicago, IL until January 22, 2012.

Photo credit: Henry Flynt, 1979

At the end of the ’70s, as New York City’s Soho transformed from an ethnic factory district to the art hub of the elite, the graffiti collective SAMO© — made up of an anonymous teenage Jean-Michel Basquiat, his high school friend/graff veteran Al Diaz, and artist Shannon Dawson — began its contrarian poeticisms. Basquiat was the driving force. SAMO© was “the drug,” the abstract, sarcastic, witty, site-specific prose poetry exhibit via vandalism, a “spiritual salvation” from the “so-called avant-garde had become a formidable, lucrative, orthodox institution,” as photographer Henry Flynt explains in his thorough essay. Documenting the tags in 1979, Flynt could not predict Basquiat’s eventual fame, yet, he understood the right way to photograph “the experience” of reading SAMO© — not just capturing the truncated text element, but its urban placement in full color. Spotted by The World’s Best Ever, check out these authenticated vintage shots in our gallery.

A button York Chang designed for Arco Madrid. It quotes a Latin American artist Chang invented.

York Chang always wanted to be a Latin American artist. The complication with this was that he wasn’t: wasn’t from Latin America, hadn’t grown up there, didn’t have family from there. As he described Wednesday, at Paper Chaser’s X-Ten Biennial, an evening over which arts professionals talked for ten minutes each about their influences, he solved the problem in a fairly labor intensive, metafictional way, creating a Latin American art movement, making the work of its artists and working to convince others it actually existed. But, still, it’s the weirdness of the situation that interests me more than the solution. What can you do when you want, impossibly, to be something you can’t be?

Director Jason Reitman, of Juno fame, will be doing something impossible next Thursday (Oct. 20). He’ll be restaging The Breakfast Club with a collection of unannounced, perhaps unconfirmed, performers. Reitman’s “cast” will gather at LACMA, and then just do it, launch into the 1985 teen classic with no rehearsals to help them along. It’s the situation that audiences will come to see, and the potential is immense. Despite it’s seeming feel-good message–stereotypes don’t go past the surface, all people are deeper than they appear–the movie is almost like a piece of endurance theater, with amazingly absurd vignettes.

Still from "The Breakfast Club"

Molly Ringwald puts lipstick on with the tube between her breast. Emilio Estevez breaks glass like a mad man. And then they just sit in the library for hours on end.Who should play Allison, “the mute,” who puts chips in her sandwich and chews loudly? Aubrey Plaza? Maybe that’s too obvious. Winona Ryder, a troubled dark-haired beauty? And what if Estevez’s jock was played by someone not really cool or athletic at all? Fred Armisen? Somehow, I’ve got Mad Men’s John Hamm locked in my head as the criminal John Bender character. He doesn’t have the beady eyes, but I’d like to see him as the bully.

Another longer-lasting “situation” begins tomorrow, when the Museum of Public Fiction opens its California Hotel, a fully functional hotel suite that will operate out of its Highland Park space for a month. Artist collective Grizzly Grizzly will be the full-time residents and the public will be welcome on Saturdays, from noon to 6. There’s a mini-bar, a televised concierge and Wi-Fi.

Museum of Public Fiction's announcement for The California Hotel

Letter and brochure for Al's Grand Hotel, May 2, 1971, designed by Allen Ruppersberg.© Allen Ruppersberg. The Getty Research Institute, Gift of Michael Asher, 2009.

Allen Ruppersberg did something similar in 1971, and his “Al’s Grand Hotel” is the inspiration for Public Fiction’s rendition. Rupperberg used a house on Sunset Boulevard, decorating guest rooms according to themes (there was a Jesus-themed room and a bridal suite), and then presenting Saturday concerts by artist-musician Terry Allen. None of the stories I’ve heard about what happened there are outrageous. It’s just the fact that Al did it that remains interesting; he created a space for people to come and experience each other, where outrageous, memorable things could have happened. “I use my art to transform my life, I use my life to make my art,” Rupperberg wrote in his 1985 essay Fifty Helpful Hints on the Art of the Everyday. Neither life nor art always pan out to be something amazing, but they never stop having that amazing potential.

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Mildred's Lane," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17." Photo by Kristin Rochelle Lanz.

Some philosophy holds that the fundamental role of human beings is to be “world disclosers.”  Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions, a small yet conceptually powerful show at Oakland’s Pro Arts Gallery, demonstrates this principle via the visual arts.  The exhibit, curated by Amanda Cachia, is expansive in at least two important ways. First, the objects on view include both traditional and new media.  Even fashion, often omitted, is interestingly addressed.  The second inclusion is the more significant one: the makers of the work are all disabled people who have made disability their subject.

Some of you, I know, have just gone on to read another review.  Haven’t we had thirty years of identity politics?  Yes, indeed we have.  And some of it, as the critic Robert Hughes loved to point out, was narrow and preachy.  But hold on a minute.  The voices of “Medusa” are not “victimized voices.”  You’ll find enough canon-stretching and humor here to make a trip (or this article) worth your time.

True, this work is not heavy on visual appeal.  During my two-plus hours in the gallery, several visitors came and went rapidly, neglecting even the wall text.  But unlike the norm over the past three decades, there are sufficient enough making skills and aesthetic value present to capture the interest of a beholder longer than the standard, three-second gallery goer’s glance.  Slow and patient viewing is rewarded by encounters that permit seeing disabled people, our shared social world, and even ourselves differently.

Laura Swanson, "Peggy Lee," 2008. Inkjet Print, 20" X 30".

Some favorites include the inkjet prints of Laura Swanson.  Swanson has four punchy self-portraits exhibited that, at the very least, challenge the widespread narcissism rampant in contemporary Western society.  In them, the subject teases and frustrates our gaze.  Pillow depicts the artist, a little person, seated on a king-sized bed virtually hidden behind a red-and-beige checkered pillow with only her child-sized feet and hands visible.  Shower also nearly eliminates the portrait subject, who is engaged in the private act of washing behind a bunched-up veil of a translucent shower curtain.  Here the disabled body is blurred and hard to grasp.  Point made–in a teasing and sophisticated way–and well taken.

One of the images I would purchase, if not for my part-time teacher’s salary, is Swanson’s Peggy Lee.  At the center of the image, set in an interior, Swanson stands dwarfed by the stereo speakers of her own sound system; her entire wee form revealed in a blazing red t-shirt reading “West Coast” and hippy-flowered, dark pants.  Her face, traditionally the most revealing portion of a portrait, is substituted by an album cover featuring that of the comely 40s starlet, Peggy Lee.  While us able-bodied folks might try to avert our gaze from the sight of a little person out of politeness (“It’s not nice to stare at others”) or disgust at difference, or a complex mixture, Swanson beats us to the punch, reminding us that somebody at the other end of the viewing transaction also has mixed feelings, which we able-bodied can only imagine.

Joseph Grigely, "Songs Without Words (Eartha Kitt)," 2009. Pigment Print, 18" X 14". Ed. of 12.

A similar point about empathic imagination is made in Songs without Words, a pigment print by a deaf artist, Joseph Grigely, who employs the image of a yet another recording diva to convey his ideas.  Grigely has used an image appropriated from the New York Times obituary of Eartha Kitt, the Cherokee-African American actress and singer known for her distinctive sound.  This memorializing image, meant initially to do the work of evoking collective memories of the talents of the performer, is used here to evoke the private memories of the artist, and, subsequently, to pry open his audience’s minds.  When Grigely was ten he lost his hearing.  One wonders if he ever actually heard Kitt, but whether he did or not is moot.  His appropriation of the legend as the epitome of unique and individual sound is a telling metaphor of the death of his ability to enjoy the sensuous pleasure that many of us take for granted.  The ability to hear the ordinary rumblings of daily life is not the issue here; rather hearing is proposed as art.

Sunaura Taylor, "No Arms! (Self-Portrait)," 2010. Oil Paint on Print on Raw Canvas, 72" X 48".

Sunaura Taylor pulls off a similar coup in at least one work, as well.  Taylor deploys a compelling, intermedia blend of oil paint on printed paper (or canvas).  Her No Arms! (Self Portrait), a Photoshopped reworking of an old-timey photograph of a sideshow “freak,” communicates a sincere sense of just how a physical deformity (in this case, a congenital disability) might distort the self-image of the owner of that body.  If we can be coaxed to reflect on the effects of social judgements–such as calling someone “freak”– we then open to the possibility of altering our received notions of others.  And not just of the disabled, but of all other sorts of categorical name-calling.  At their most powerful, the works in “Medusa” engage viewers in a consideration of complex psycho-social interrelations and projections that are often denied.

A word must be added about the step this show takes toward disability fashion: a step which I hope combines with sustain-ability fashion.  Sandie Yi contributes photo-chromogenic prints of her wearable art, as well as some of the artifacts themselves.  The wall text explains that for generations, Yi’s family members have been born unpredictably variable numbers of toes and fingers.  Yi uses what some might view as a handicap to dream up self-defined standards of attractiveness, and–perhaps even more essential in wearables–of physical comfort.  Yi’s most alluring objects are delicate cuffs, constructed of translucent white fabric and white plastic molded into the shape of wrists, hand-embroidered with an inventive design of pink and beige floss that evokes the beauty of health and aliveness.  Arguing effectively against the look of conventional prosthetics and orthotics, Yi encourages a kind of innovation that links her work with DIY-art, theory, and aesthetics.  If this mode of thinking/making doesn’t sufficiently challenge our smug definitions of who is capable and who is not, what could?

Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, "Em-brace," 2011. Plastic, Fabric & Embroidery Floss. Set of 2 Chromogenic Prints, 20" X 30".

I continue to be intrigued by Carmen Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle, which stretches the definition of art furthest here.  Unfortunately, like most other viewers of this exhibit, I was unable to experience the work firsthand.  What is on offer at Pro Arts is documentation of Papalia’s participatory performances, in which the artist, who is not fully blind but has impaired vision, leads a shut-eyed human train over urban and rural terrain in acts of compassionate trust.  Three digital prints and repeating slideshow images portray able-bodied folks lined up behind Papalia, linked to one another by an extended right arm to the right shoulder of the person just ahead: a fleshy corpus of coordinated cooperation.

Although unrepresented in the show, a rendition of Shuttle was conducted in downtown Oakland on Wednesday, September 21, 2011, when to my chagrin I was already booked to lecture in a classroom.  Since I was not able to have this experience firsthand, I can only speculate.  But I am willing to wager that participants in this experience came away with an expanded sense of what it means to be impaired; and that, on reflection, they discovered something about their habitual way of being in the world by having “tried on the mode” of another.  If identity-politics in the visual arts have brought us anything lasting, it is the accumulation of just such significant moments of what Heidegger and his contemporary followers call “world disclosure.”

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Open Engagement Conference, Portland State University," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17". Photo by Heather Zinger.

For an earlier American educator and critic of the arts, John Dewey (who wrote during a period of economic Depression like that of our contemporary one), to produce, to trigger or to memorialize an experience that was distingushable from the habitrail of our everyday lives was the fundamental characteristic of an art work.  At its best this kind of art can enable us all to imagine and articulate alternatives to current social and even political conditions.  It can disclose possibilities previously untried or suppressed, or refocus our attention in ways that clarifies things previously unclear.  This kind of art could begin to regenerate the sense of hope that has been strip-mined from all but the most fortunate few in our society and thrust into the light of public discussion new ways to go forward, but differently.

“Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions,” is on view at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland through October 20, 2011.

In Nordkreuz (“Northern Cross”), Berlin-based street artist EVOL has created a miniature, underground city in the fields of Hamburg, Germany. The installation — which took him eight days to complete — found the artist outside of his typical urban environment, digging into a picturesque meadow to create a grid that viewers could actually walk through. The buildings’ compound-like, grey facade provides a striking contrast to the scenic surroundings, complete with dirt “roads.”

Check out the making-of the installation and the artist’s other work here.

An uncredited photograph from the exhibition Pomaranczowa Alternatywa Happeningiem w Komunizm (Happening Against Communism by the Orange Alternative) at the Galeria Miedzynarodowego Centrum Kultury.

Some background: various political and economic factors plunged Poland into a period of deep decline around 1980, and on December 12, 1980 martial law was declared.  Both an immense buildup of Soviet military at the borders and the arrest of union members and intellectuals precipitated an economic sanction by the US and other nations.  Rapidly, Poland became a nation of fear and scarcity.  Working with the influences of the Surrealist and Dada movements, “Major” Waldemar Fydrych decided to take matters into his own hands.  As a former art history student at the University of Wroclaw, Fydrych had co-organized the Independent Students Union and a massive peace march as well as cooperatively publishing a student newspaper called Orange Alternative, so he was no stranger to both art and politics.  When he saw all the patches of white paint the government was using to cover anti-regime graffiti, he had an idea that eventually shaped itself into a revolution.  His goal was to protest the brutality and militarism of the regime without replacing one dogma for another by shouting political slogans or creating formal hierarchical structures.  From the moment he picked up a brush, Poland became a site for the absurd pushing against the militaristic.  Enter the dwarf.

An installation view of one room from the exhibition. The television in the corner plays a looped excerpt from Maria Zmara-Koczanowicz's "Majer or the Revolution of Dwarves." Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The exhibition is dense with information, but it is presented in a charming and accessible fashion.  Most rooms include recreated ephemera from the many happenings, including flyers, t-shirts, banners, and costumes.  However, the videos are often the most engrossing because they include first-hand accounts and original films that documented the era.  Majer or the Revolution of Dwarves, directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz in 1989, includes interviews and police/journalist footage of some of the key players and happenings across Poland.

Another room of the exhibition. Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The absurdity and low comedy of the events and actions shines brightly across the decades, even in subtitled translation.  One video excerpt recounts a happening entitled Who’s Afraid of Toilet Paper? A man describes the action of giving away (extremely scarce) free toilet paper on the street, gleefully telling passersby to take two rolls, and he reenacts the recipients’ stunned and joyful surprise.  At another happening, protesters lampooned the military by dressing as soldiers and marching in the streets while carrying paper rifles or riding “tanks” made of bicycles and cardboard.  They chanted, “Nothing gives you fun like a machine gun!” and “Less condoms, more military exercises!”  It was silly, a caricature that turned a funhouse mirror to the brutally stark life lived under constant military and police presence.

A DIY dwarf photobooth with side-panel instructions from the exhibition. Photo: Bean Gilsdorf

The most affecting moments occur when the camera catches more than tomfoolery, when the frightening reality of 1980s Poland is glimpsed.  One video shows an apartment full of young people dressing in costumes in preparation for a protest.  A sunny young man adjusts his straw halo for the camera and says, “Wouldn’t it be a pity if they pulled us all in?” and the camera cuts to a view through the apartment window where a military vehicle sits waiting at the curb. Despite his broad smile, the flash of fear in the man’s eyes tells everything: what he risks, and how he feels about it.  Everything is at stake, he could lose it all in the time it takes to be put into the back of a van.  The tension is palpable, his bravery immense. It is precisely this sense of courage and conviction—and of the menace shimmering darkly just beneath the surface of ridiculous hijinks—that gives this exhibition its profundity and force.  One of the leaflets I read before exiting the gallery contained a final thought connecting this historical overview to our present situation: “Is the Orange Alternative spent after 30 years?  In the late 1980s Major Fydrych declared: the Orange Alternative will cease to exist when people no longer need it. So far it does still exist.”

At this point, everyone knows that street artists leave completely unexpected artworks that don’t last long but that are often more absorbing than the works we usually get to see in museums. Because of the ambitious and courageous nature of illegally staking your claim to expression, translating the fresh thoughts and passion of street art into the sedate world of the white cube has always been near impossible.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction (detail), 2011, Courtesy of the artist, Photo: John Kennard

To me, Swoon has always been aware of this. She stands out as having an inherent understanding that “street art” in the modern art market involves that translation. She has unabashedly kept her work from being simple objects; slick, archival consumables that works within the limits set forth by collectors and institutions. To use an analogy, she wants to produce the symbolic rawness of the Andre the Giant sticker, not the corporate efficiency of the Obey brand.

Swoon has been commissioned to create “Anthropocene Extinction” for the Boston ICA‘s fifth installation of the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall (on view through Dec 30, 2011). Her work is a sermon built from international symbols of humanity’s relationship to planet Earth. It’s an alluring mural of cut paper and relief prints with an umbilical cord of cut paper party-streamers running to a bamboo sculpture that lives next to the museum’s giant glass elevator. It enlivens the space like no other Fineberg Art Wall installation. The work shows off her skills with lines and drawing, her ability to control color, and the quality of her printing techniques.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Geoff Hargadon for Brooklyn Street Art.

The rhythm and composition of the individual prints/paper cuts is exceedingly regular and controlled. The mural is a hodgepodge of stuff with no given proportion. It’s a scalable image capable of being resized for almost any application. The bamboo sculpture takes after Asian scaffolding. It seems like a pagoda, but has what looks like wedding cakes on it and a beehive surrounded by butterflies at the top. No matter how attractive it is, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to represent or how it relates to the mural.

Swoon’s message relies on the myth of the noble savage. Ms. Bennett, the last living nomad personifies a blameless innocent, a buddha sitting on top of a string of Tibetan deity masks, surrounded by animal totems that represent the extinction in the work’s title. Why Ms. Bennett is 20 times larger than the animals, I’m not sure. It certainly encourages the reading that the animals are less significant than the human. It also seems very Victorian to send out an artists to bring back the last living nomad to a museum setting.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Black Rainbow Extraordinaire Magazine.

Not that it makes it less of a work, but this installation has nothing to do with street art. It uses wheatpaste, but is that all it takes to be a street artist? The work as exhibited is a printstallation; a hybrid format (of installation made from or about prints) that has been a part of the print community for years. Do street artists get shipping budgets and 9 days with a crew of 5 plus an equal amount of student assistants to put up their work? To insist that this is a street art piece implies that her work is so unexplainable and independent from the norm of contemporary art that she’s some kind of freak outsider. She is an artist. An artist who still leaves jewels for people to find on the street, but an artwork in a museum does not parallel the relationship between artwork and street.

Over the course of its three-day installation in July 2011, Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, both reveals itself and conceals the expansive space it inhabits. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is engaged in a dangerous experiment, and it is not the levitation of a twenty-ton piece of Richard Serra’s steel sculpture, Sequence, 2006, thirty feet into the air. Nor is it the gyration of a 200-foot tall crane lifting the first of twelve panels—each almost thirteen-feet high and between thirty- and forty-feet long—from a flatbed trailer onto a concrete slab three-quarters the size of a baseball diamond. The ironworkers from the Hauppauge, New York, rigging company, Budco Enterprises, have handled all of Serra’s North American installations for the past 20 years. The dangerous experiment is, instead, the transplantation of the sixty-five by forty-foot labyrinthine sculpture into a site that the artist did not specify when he first created the piece.

Two 20-ton plates from Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, swing into place. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra is famous for his site-specific sculptures. Of Tilted Arc, 1981, the 200-foot long grandparent to arced works like Sequence, Serra proclaimed, during a U.S. General Services Administration hearing to determine the disposition of the piece, “To remove the work is to destroy the work.” Commissioned and approved by the Carter administration, and constructed in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, Tilted Arc was eventually decommissioned, forsworn, and bundled into storage by the Reagan administration. We can never know whether the Tilted Arc controversy—the first salvo of the 1980s culture wars—would have subsided had the surrounding political context not pre-empted the community’s process of coming to know the sculpture. Many of Serra’s public works, however, are now valued by the communities that first rejected them.

Other Serra pieces, including Clara-Clara, 1983, and Torqued Spiral (Closed Open Closed Open Closed), 2003, have, with Serra’s participation, found second homes. Sequence, however, may evolve into the most itinerant of Serra’s behemoths. Conceived for a gallery at the New York Museum of Modern Art and installed there in 2007 for Serrra’s 40-year retrospective, the sculpture traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2008. This year, Sequence, now owned by the Fisher Art Foundation, traveled from LACMA to the Cantor Arts Center, where it is currently on loan from the foundation and where it will reside until in 2016. Then it will move, perhaps finally, 35 miles northwest to a new wing of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Left: Trailer as it prepares to move a plate from storage lot to installation site. Riggers remove the chains holding a plate to its trailer. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Can Sequence, removed from its place of origin, sustain its prodigious capacity to shape space and lead us to the conscious and embodied experience of what we often take for granted? Will it still unmoor space and time from the feet and inches, seconds and minutes that define them in everyday life and provoke the reorientation of thinking and the individual psychological experience that Serra seeks for participants who engage the sculpture? In 2007, Serra told PBS’s Charlie Rose, “I think these pieces really need the definition of architecture,” referring to Sequence and its two gallery siblings. “They need a flat floor. They need a certain contained volume. I think these pieces might be able to be in a courtyard, but if you put these pieces outside, say in a big field, they’re going to get lost.”

Left: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (center, in black shirt), and riggers John Barbieri, Joe Berlese, and Bill Maroney, survey the concrete slab. Right: Master Rigger Joe Vilardi (right) and rigger John Barbieri (left) plot reference points that will guide the installation of Richard Serra's "Sequence" (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The gallery at New York MoMA, an awkward H-shaped space with a low ceiling, seemed barely able to contain the three pieces. For some, this was the exhibit’s flaw: the sculptures had no room to breathe. We are used to viewing sculpture from the outside, framed by an expanse of space. For Serra, who seeks always to confound the viewer’s desire to see the entire sculpture at once, the cramped MoMA quarters may, in fact, have been preferable. Indeed, the frustration some visitors felt may have stemmed from the sculptures’ ability to stymie the creation of a purely visual experience separate from the body’s active engagement with them. In New York, Serra had produced new space in a place where visual inspection suggested there was little to spare. Within each sculpture’s orbit, the participant’s perception of space expands and contracts, independent of the gallery’s concrete dimensions. In this context, Sequence seemed akin to a magician’s hat from which emerges far more matter than could be contained by the dimensions of the magician’s head.

How then can such a piece successfully reconform itself—and the experiences of its participants—to an exterior space 3,000 miles away? How can the activity of getting lost in what Serra describes as “a seemingly endless path between two leaning walls” about which “you cannot recollect or reconstruct a definite memory” be preserved in a courtyard where landmarks—a roof, a terrace, a tree, even a hanging cloud—continually orient the participant?

Left photos: Lost inside Richard Serra’s Sequence (on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation). Right: Parapets of the museum’s old wing peek above the sculpture. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

On Monday, July 18, the bare concrete pad seems to provide some reassurance. Two- to three-feet thick and doubly reinforced with rebar, according to Cantor Operations Manager, Steve Green, the pad should satisfy Serra’s desire for a flat floor. More than this, however, nestling the bulk of the sculpture into the cul-de-sac formed by the Cantor’s original building, its octagonal extension, and its new wing, seems to realize the “definition of architecture” Serra had specified for Sequence and its siblings. Further, Museum Director Tom Seligman said that the Cantor Center had been in close contact with Serra, and the artist approved of the site.

Half of Richard Serra’s "Sequence" (on loan by the Fisher Art Foundation) nestled in the cul-de-sac formed by the museum’s old and new wings. Photo: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

At 1:00 p.m., the pad is empty. Seen from the second-floor McMurtry Family Terrace of the new wing, the 200-ton crane that would lift each plate sat idly on the dirt to the left of the slab, the site of a past and future lawn. In the distance, each of the steel plates sat on its own flatbed trailer. The silence was barely disturbed by the arrival of Budco Master Rigger Joe Vilardi and his crew. Brandishing a floor plan, a T-square, two tape measures, a spool of hot pink twine, a roll of lime green masking tape, a hammer and stakes, the team carefully mapped out the reference points for each steel plate to guide the assembly of the sculpture.

Joe Berlese (left) and Domingo Tejada work with John Barbieri and Joe Vilardi (behind the plate in the left hand photo) to guide it into position. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. "Sequence" is on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation.

Over the course of the next three days, the assembly unfolded, at times like a dance, but one that never masked the painstaking process of hauling the trailers, attaching the plates to the crane, hoisting, swinging, lowering, and positioning the plates, and winching, clamping, hammering, grinding, and welding.

Riggers from Budco Enterprises undertake a variety of tasks to install Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

The assembly mimicked the disorientation and confusion I felt when I first walked Sequence’s pathway—formed of two nesting S-curves—in 2007. The first plate, closest to where I stood, curved from the terrace, blocking the space beyond from my gaze. Each succeeding plate seemed not only to bare itself and define the growing form, but also to hide more of the concrete and abscond with the expanse—compressing the volume as if into the magician’s hat. I had not expected that this process, as beautiful as the evolving form was, would also entail a feeling of loss, a spurned desire to see.

Time-lapse video portrays the four-day installation of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Serra describes the primary experience of Sequence as confusion: “After a point . . . you become confused about whether you’ve been in the same place before or whether you are turning back on yourself. And then you arrive at an exit and you think, ‘This isn’t where I thought I was going to be.’” Sequence is not only about this confusion of orientation, but also about the veiling of space, about the theft of the certainty of my bodily relationship to the space I inhabit. Experiencing a new perspective, I lose the old one. Retracing my steps, I fail to recover the space that was.

On the fourth day, I walk through the completed sculpture. My experience of Sequence matches both Serra’s description of confusion and my New York memories, at least until I look up. Hovering above the sculpture is a bit of parapet, the curved wall of the terrace, a tree top, the octagon’s wall, the building’s pediment—all landmarks that might orient the Sequence participant and fix reference points that establish what Serra calls “your body’s own axis.” Do these markers undermine Sequence’s ability to steal, along with everything else, a consistent sense of verticality by registering not only top and bottom, but also north, south, east, west?

Landmarks of the Cantor Arts Center do little to orient the participant walking through Richard Serra’s "Sequence," on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

To remove the work is to destroy the work? It is a mistake to assume that Serra hews to site specificity out of abstract and unyielding principle rather than out of practical necessity: to collaborate with a site is the unavoidable means he applies towards his goal of engaging space. A sculpture’s intended site is integral to this process of creation. That particular site, however, may not always be integral to the resulting sculpture’s capacity to achieve Serra’s goals for his participants. Tilted Arc could achieve Serra’s goals for it only in Federal Plaza. As Serra wrote in 1985, “Tilted Arc was constructed so as to engage the public in a dialogue that would enhance, both perceptually and conceptually, its relation to the entire plaza.” And, as art historian Douglas Crimp notes, “[Tilted Arc] imposed a construction of absolute difference within the conglomerate of civic architecture. It engaged the passerby in an entirely new kind of spatial experience that was counterposed against the bland efficiency established by the plaza’s architects.”

Can Sequence, born in the cramped MoMA gallery, achieve Serra’s goals for it in the expansive space of the Cantor courtyard? It remains, I suspect, that Sequence works best in the place where it originated. Sequence’s seeming expansion of the New York MoMA gallery space seemed magical in a way that Sequence, situated in the Cantor courtyard, cannot match. But Sequence’s capacity to reconceive space is far more potent than the mundane verticals of the courtyard’s architecture. And the sculpture’s capacity to confuse is far more significant than the landmarks that might otherwise orient me within the Google-mapped world of my mind.

Serra’s goal for Sequence was not to perform a political or social critique of the New York MoMA gallery’s space, as his goal for Tilted Arc had been to engage Federal Plaza. Instead, he sought to finesse the limitations of the gallery’s architecture toward the goal of engaging the participant in this disoriented experience of space and time.

Video of a walk through the interior passage of Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation. Video: Rob Marks, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

Ultimately, Serra seeks this work to “be a catalyst for thought, [to] change how people think . . . and how they see.” In this sense, his work remains profoundly political. It is political, too, in its capacity to force the subject back and forth between the positions of outside observer and embodied participant, and to construct an environment in which the participant freely relinquishes, or at least shares, agency with the sculpture. Sequence, then—at Stanford as in New York—is not just movement and meter. It is an emergence from the safe cocoon of autonomous selfhood into the danger of an unpredictable dance, a negotiation with the sculpture, the space it reveals, and other visitors, as each participant navigates a self-contained—yet profoundly communal—encounter.

Richard Serra’s Sequence, on loan from the Fisher Art Foundation, is on view now at the Cantor Arts Center. Photos: Saul Rosenfield, © 2011, with permission of Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University.

In honor of last weekend’s events in Libya, DailyServing kicks off our newest series, #Hashtags, with an article by writer and editor Matthew Harrison Tedford on street art and politics.  #Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts.  Please send queries and/or ideas for future to hashtags@dailyserving.com.

Anti-Qaddafi graffiti in Benghazi, February 25, 2011; artists unknown. Courtesy of Al Jazeera English.

In the last ten months there has been a rash of high-profile arts censorship incidents. Late last year, following complaints, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly was pulled from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. That December, a mural at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles by street artist Blu was painted over, again, following complaints. In April, the work of Mustapha Benfodil was pulled from the Sharjah Biennial. In June, Aidan Salakhova’s work was removed from the Azerbaijan pavilion at the Venice Biennale. And of course, there was the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei.  I would like to continue listing these incidents, but they would fill this column.

There is no shortage of negative consequences to censorship, and I trust my readers are well aware of many. But there is an odd silver lining to take away from all of this. It says something about the power art possesses when one of the most important lawmakers in the United States, a powerful Emirati Sheikh, and the governor of Maine all become involved in art criticism, as has happened over the last year. These acts of censorship only exist because powerful people and organizations recognize that art influences the world—something that is all too easy to forget.

The positive side of this power has been witnessed this year in turbulent North Africa. Alongside the protests and insurrections of this year’s Libyan civil war, there has been an equally vociferous artistic outpouring. Rather than mere epiphenomena, resulting from but not influencing the revolution, the explosion of street art and graffiti in Libya has been a pragmatic part and parcel of the uprising.  My own biases and doubts sometimes lead me to question the role of artist-as-activist. But the artists of the Libyan civil war have faced challenges far more dire than those of most North American or European MFAs or career artists—I’ve never even seen a Kalashnikov on an art school campus. By examining a situation where artists risk their lives and the future of their country is at stake, one can cut through biases about the immediacy of art and see its relevance to political situations that appear less pressing or dire.

In a June 18 Al Jazeera English report on the post-uprising street art of liberated Benghazi, journalist Sue Turton stated that the anti-Qaddafi graffiti had grown increasingly sophisticated since the beginning of the revolution. The images shown in the report depict the colonel’s head in a trashcan, in a meat grinder, being punched, hanging from a noose, and scrawled on with a confusing mix of swastikas and Stars of David. Unlike barely-legible Sharpie tags, these murals exhibit technical skill and are often large scale. Some even appear to have been created with paint, palette, and patience. Not only have artists taken the city as their canvas, they have done so with more confidence and pride than was possible under the Qaddafi regime.

In the same report, cartoonist Akram Briki stated that prior to the uprising he would draw pictures of Qaddafi and his crimes, but he could not show them to anyone and had to tear them up, out of fear of repression. Briki’s actions suggest a fundamental need to express political convictions or concerns, so much so that he felt compelled to do so, if only for himself. If humans are truly political animals, then a lack of substantive political expression is a torturous form of dehumanization. Another street artist, Radwan Zwae, reported that before the uprising, he was arrested and beaten for attempted graffiti, and his friend was shot and killed for drawing a caricature of Qaddafi. Now, in an atmosphere that allows for political expression, he is allowed to actualize himself as Radwan Zwae, artist. It is worth noting, however, that my research found no evidence of pro-Qaddafi graffiti in rebel-held Libya, or an indication of what the reaction would have been from the rebel National Transitional Council.

Anti-Qaddafi graffiti in Benghazi, March 6, 2011; artist unknown. Courtesy of شبكة برق | B.R.Q.

Journalist Rory Mulholland reports in the Guardian that, when the uprising began, Briki (also romanized as Akram al-Bruki) and a group of young men took up arms with their art. The group handed out paper caricatures of Qaddafi, intending people to publicly display them. On March 20, a member of the group, Qais al-Halali (also Kais al-Hilali), was killed by gunmen, suspected by some of being secret police, just after finishing a piece on a Benghazi roundabout. Undeterred, Briki and his colleagues continued their aesthetic insurrection, believing that murals and street art boosted the morale of the armed rebels.

Another interesting observation is that many murals and graffiti scrawls contained English text, suggesting they were intended to be viewed by foreigners just as much as by locals. The word “freedom” appears on countless walls, along with phrases such as, “We don’t give up; have victory or die,” “We are not your puppets anymore!,” “Game over,” and the Obamanian “Change we need,” among others. For these artists, graffiti is more than self-expression; it is also a means of communicating with the outside world. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand tweets.  The international support rebels have gained is indebted to their public relations campaign, of which images of these murals serve as an assertion of dissatisfaction with the ruling regime.

Anti-Qaddafi graffiti on a former government building in Benghazi; artists unknown; February 25, 2011.

In both the resolve of these artists and in the confidence of their murals, one can witness one of the essential elements of politics. Philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that politics arises when people make “pronouncements on the common which cannot be reduced to voices signaling pain.”[i] That is to say, when one is only a victim, he is not engaged in politics, but is the subject of oppression. The majority of the murals and graffiti of liberated Libya, however, are triumphant and optimistic. With these works, large segments of Libyan society have not just argued, but have shown that they are equals that can co-star on the political stage with the Qaddafi regime. Graffiti is an aesthetic assertion of freedom and power.

These works are the beginning of a post-Qaddafi culture and set the groundwork for the state that will follow, should the rebels succeed in dethroning the colonel. Freedom of expression is quite literally splashed on the walls of the country. Kleptocracy and oppression have been openly criticized for all to see and rally against. To be sure, revolutions rarely end swimmingly, as the messy French Revolution and America’s apartheid revolution quite plainly illustrate. There is no guarantee that democracy will prevail even if the National Transitional Council establishes total sovereignty between the Egyptian and Algerian borders. There is almost no doubt in my mind that graffiti will be viewed as criminal vandalism, as it is all over the world. But the more the messages of these murals are seen, openly discussed, and digested by the Libyan people, the harder it will be for a new regime to usurp these hard won freedoms.

As graves fill in Libya, one could accuse me of failing to understand that the end of the civil war will come through warfare or diplomatic negotiations or something else far more “practical” than adolescent taggings. My approach to understanding the political role of art, however, is holistic, appreciating that no gun, no diplomat, and no mural can change the course of a revolution alone. But politics and culture are not separate spheres, not even separate sides of the same coin. They are inextricably weaved together. To understand this is to acknowledge that cultural producers are politicians—revolutionary or counterrevolutionary politicians, depending on one’s own disposition. We must fight against censorship with vigor, but when Eric Cantor and John Boehner personally attack an exhibition, we can at least take solace in their fear of contemporary art. Libya’s aesthetic insurrection documents the immediacy of the political role of art, but it is not more immediate there, just more present.

For galleries of the graffiti and street art of the Libyan civil war, see:

The International Business Times

The Huffington Post

The New York Times (this blog post by C.J. Chivers is necessary reading about racist and anti-Semitic strands of Libyan street art)

[i] Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics and Politics,” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 24.

Liu Bolin, Hiding in the City No. 93 – Supermarket No. 2, 2010. Photo courtesy of Eli Klein Fine Art

Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin is the master of blending in with the world around him — no matter what the environment. Which is ironic, considering as he explained to The Daily Mail last year, “The inspiration behind my work was a sense of not fitting in to modern society and was a silent protest against the persecution of artists… My work is a kind of reminder, to remind people what the community we live in really looks like, and what kind of problems exist.”

In The Invisible Man, his third solo show at Eli Klein Fine Art, Liu’s self-camouflage skills are prominently displayed in a series of large-scale photographs — snapped both in his home country and during a recent trip to Italy — which take up to 10 hours each to complete. The artist has also spent the past month working on a new series, Hiding in New York, which will make its official debut later this year. Click through to preview a few images of Liu Bolin disappearing around NYC, as well as some of our favorite pieces from the show up at Eli Klein through August 28th.

Fritz Haeg lecture, photo by John Muse

Last week the Open Engagement Conference gathered artists, critics, curators and one museum director to discuss an emergent field, Art and Social Practice. It was organized by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice faculty Jen Delos Reyes and Harrell Fletcher along with their MFA students. This is the third iteration of the conference and it featured Julie Ault, Fritz Haeg, and Pablo Helguera – all of whom work across platforms such as art, architecture, education, curatorial practice and publication.

The structure of the conference included lectures by these artists as well as panels that addressed the relationships between Social Practice projects and museums and educational institutions with social practice programs such as CCA, PSU, OTIS, MICA, and UCSC. There were also a number of breakout sessions, performances and exhibitions.

Elyse Mallouk presentation on "Landfill" photo by John Muse

One early breakout session was a presentation by Elyse Mallouk, a CCA visual and critical studies MA student, on Landfill – a new project designed to archive the ephemeral detritus of Social Practice projects. The website emphasizes posters, pamphlets, maps and objects that were used in projects by artists such as Jeremy Deller, Santiago Sierra, and Superflex. One issue brought up in the discussion about this project was how to address the tension between fetishizing objects around ephemeral projects and treating ephemera in terms of their materiality and aesthetics. Another was about PLAND (Practice Art Through Necessary Dislocation). This project, run by three women who have worked as curators, artists and writers, is an off-the-grid residency program in Taos, NM. Their mission is to produce “open-ended experimental projects that facilitate sustainability, collaboration, and hyper-local engagement.”

Open Engagement, Photo by Jason Sturgill

The Museum summit included discussions about Social Practice projects at the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, The National Gallery of Victoria, the Portland Art Museum and the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Larry Rinder, the director of the Berkeley Art Museum, noted that he wished that more museum directors were there to discuss the issues around Social Practice. One reason for the importance of this was drawn out in the discussion, where there was often a clear tension between curatorial and education departments when it comes to projects that don’t focus on objects. One potential problematic was the tendency for Social Practice projects to serve as merely peripheral or interpretive events that exist in a decorative manner, around what is perceived to be the primary programs of the museum.

Rick Lowe, Fritz Haeg, Harrel Fletcher, Julie Ault, photo by John Muse

The artists’ lectures and their final panel discussion revealed some lingering questions that were only touched upon by the conference. What is the relationship between Social Practice and other art practices that have long historical and theoretical trajectories such as conceptualism, performance, institutional critique and the wide range of artistic engagements with art and politics? What is the relationship between the mostly American examples presented and other global models of socially motivated art practices? And finally, is there an aesthetic to Social Practice projects that involves groups of people gathering around and doing something?  As one community organizer from the Queens Museum of Art pointed out – maybe these will serve as the basis for next year’s conference.

"TELLUSTools", 2001, Double-LP, The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. Gift of Harvestworks. Cover Art by Christian Marclay. Produced by Carol Parkinson, Harvestworks. Image courtesy Kanji Ishii

Where were you when the Music Television Channel was first introduced in 1981? I was seven years old and had a babysitter who, in her early twenties, was the coolest person I had ever met. I would follow her around just in the hopes that this perceived “coolness” would somehow rub off on me. It was through her that I was exposed, for the first time, to the brand-new phenomenon of the music video. Her family had just gotten cable and we would sit around and watch this small American network running loops of film shorts that visually illustrated the concepts and narratives of song by popular musical bands at the time. What we didn’t realize at the time, was that visual and popular culture as we knew it was changed forever.

Looking at Music 3.0., now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York through June 6, 2011, is an in-depth look at this moment in time and its effect on our cultural history. The third in a series of exhibitions exploring the influence of music on contemporary art practices, Looking at Music 3.0, focuses on New York in the 1980s and 1990s and the birth of the “remix culture.” The exhibition features 70 works from a wide range of artists and musicians: Beastie Boys, Kathleen Hanna and Le Tigre, Keith Haring, David Byrne, Miranda July, Christian Marclay, Sonic Youth and Run DMC.

Spike Jonze, Sabotage, 1994, Music by Beastie Boys. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of the artist. © Capitol Records, Inc.

The exhibition begins with the German band Kraftwerk, positing that with tracks such as Trans-Europe Express, 1977, they had a large influence on the decades of music to come with their pioneering usage synthesizers and computer-speech software. It then expands into a wide array of issues and movements that were occurring during this time:  the birth of hip-hop and its growing strength in voicing the ongoing discrimination against the black community; activist movements seeking to counteract the AIDS epidemic and the increasing drug usage that was threatening New York; the introduction of art theory to new music as well as the rise of the digital domain; and the growing voice of artists commenting on the complicated relationship between commercial entities and its control of mass communication and the shaping of modern culture.

Le Tigre, "From the Desk of Mr. Lady," 2000, CD. Cover Art by Kathleen Hanna and Johanna Fateman. Image courtesy Le Tigre Records

A highlight of Looking at Music 3.0 is the in-depth look into the wave of Feminism that was grounded in the riot grrrl capital, Portland Oregon, in the 1990s. On display are photocopied zines and posters by artists Miranda July and Johanna Fateman, as well as audio tracks from the band Le Tigre. These recordings serve as examples of the impromptu punk bands that were forming all over and the band’s usage of humorous lyrics and electronic dance music to confront a myriad of social ills that existed in New York.

Anyone interested in the history of music and visual culture will enjoy this exhibition. But for those of us who remember where we were when the music video was first introduced, you will walk out asking yourself, “What happened to the revolution?”