[Rumori] idea to port over to political domain?

[Bob Boster]

bb> OK, I can't help it - and no one else has anything to add, so why not?


At 09:39 AM 7/6/2005 -0700, Steev wrote:

>an across-the-board valorization of "contamination" seems way off
>the mark.

bb> I think if you re-read what I wrote, that you'd find the phrase 
"across-the-board valorization" is a bit of an exaggeration...  I did say 
both "probably" and also acknowledged that it could be just "another" of 
many...


>maybe i'd be happier with the yellow arrow project if it was a
>rule that you could only put arrows in your own community or with
>the consent of the community - but it's like what i think happens
>with most "public art." some artist from outside the community
>gets a grant to put some  sculpture in a park or street
>corner and doesn't consult the people that live there, doesn't
>know anything about the place, though he might think he does. why
>should he get to crack someone else's superstructure?

bb> The question I have with this is who gets to define whose community I 
belong to?  Is it by some number of miles around my primary dwelling in 
northern CA?   If so, who gets to say how many miles?  What about someone 
who has multiple dwellings?  Or perhaps it's based on some less physical 
idea of community - i.e. you or I could do it in Silver Lake or Santa 
Monica or Brooklyn or Williamsburg, but not Beverly Hills or the Upper West 
Side because 'our people' are in the one area, but not in the 
other...  From where I sit (admittedly in a position of privilege, but also 
with gang graffiti on my garage), I just think physical geography is less 
and less relevant all the time.  I spent an hour on the phone the morning 
with a guy in Chevak, AK who I have more in common with than nearly the 
entire population of the county I live in (Solano).  And give your recent 
travels, I would think this is true for you too...

Also, as discussed earlier, just because someone puts one of these things 
up, doesn't mean that your 
hypothetically-outraged-disenfranchised-person-who-lives-on-that-block 
can't take it down again, or point it at a urinal, or even send a denial of 
service attack to the server that hosts the project...  It's not like the 
outsider has come into a given neighborhood and left behind a McDonald's or 
the forward operating base of the 1st Brigade/25th Infantry Division, just 
a yellow post it note in the shape of an arrow.

I'm surprised to see a champion of radical recontextualization indicating 
that permission should be required for public art making of a 
recontextualization bent.  (Cheap shot I know...but at least it gets us 
squarely back on topic.)



bb> As an effort to get us onto another track, was there anything with even 
a tangential appropriation bent on even a single Live8 bill this past 
Saturday?  Did anyone on the list participate in either a concert or 
demonstration that was associated with same?