CATACUMBA DE LETRAS.

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Peter Brook first defined the bare stage - an architectural space devoid of objects and distractions, yet possessing the immediate potential of becoming a space of creation and emotional affect. Brook's ideas, combined with concepts of human physicality and ideas of performativity as responsive to environmental variables, transcended theatre and became incorporated into schools of architectural design. We live at a very particular moment in time, one where our technological figuration has allowed us to not only build environments, but to specifically tailor them to entice certain sensations and aesthetic experiences. The next logical step seems to be the creation of environments that not only make us feel, but have the ability of reacting to inhabitants and changing accordingly.  The advent of this concept is closer than most think; indeed, with the rise of interactive architecture, we are beginning to explore ways in which built environments might actually become malleable and reactive as opposed to remaining constantly static.  And this I think is the future of interactive systems. Sooner than later we'll begin to witness the rise of biologically-sensitive environments, capable of detecting an enormous range of biological patterns in our bodies, which will in turn dictate changes in building temperature, color, lighting, and maybe even shape.

Because the idea that the mechanical systems that surround us must be consciously attended to is an antiquated one. New systems of interaction will exist in the background, operating a sort of cabinet of wonders - in other words, we see the product without the process. The translation of this concept to architectural bodies not only makes sense, but promises to revolutionize how we go about our lives both socially and emotionally.

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Living Publicly A series of factors, it seems to me, constantly conspire to make Abu Dhabi an incredibly strange and alluring city. At the center of it all is a culture of silent disconnection, of utmost privacy in all aspects of life. We live in a tremendously segmented city where domestic spaces are perfectly hidden in enormous steel structures. We’re also incredibly gentrified - a process that has slowly segregated social class and cultural identity to different parts of the city. Put differently, we’ve made it so that we never have to deal with schisms in our day-to-day lives. We interact with external and rather ephemeral avatars of people, never able to peek into what they might be like behind the walls they call home. I’m reminded constantly of walking down long streets in the Netherlands, and noticing that not one house had curtains - they were at ease with each other; it was later explained to me that this custom was due to the fact that they had nothing to hide from each other. In Abu Dhabi, this culture of discreet segregation is compensated by a ritual of stares. Walk down the street and you’ll immediately notice how you’re intently followed by the eyes of everyone you encounter.

How about a project that breaks with this; breaks with the paradigm of inaccessible domestic space, by placing domestic space in the public realm, in its most explicit form? How to do this? Still a mystery to me.

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William Pope L. - eRacism William Pope L. is a North American visual artist whose work in performance art and interventionist art forms explore the concepts of political dissent and social intervention. His series, eRacism, began during the late 1970’s, and comprises a series of 40 “crawls” - endurance based performances in which he drags himself along the streets of New York City. In one example, the Tompkins Square Crawl (1991), Pope L. drags himself through the gutter of Tompkins Square Park dressed in a suit and holding a potted flower. Perhaps his most considerable performance, The Great White Way, entailed dragging himself along a stretch of 22 miles wearing a Superman outfit sans cape. The Great White Way took a total of five years to complete, stirring controversy along the way (particularly his encounter with police in front of Ground Zero). It’s important to note that this performance took place soon after the events of 9/11 in Manhattan.

In his eRacism series, Pope L. posits an exploration of horizontality as a direct break with what he perceives to be a markedly vertical and phallocentric society, symptomatic of a rampant capitalistic and consumerist society. His performance of horizontality in a public space where this bodily choreography is not the paradigm infuses his performance with breaks in the standard hierarchical organization and behavior of bodies as related to efficiency, as well as calling to mind images of disability, poverty, and disease. His performance is decidedly violent - by the end of the crawls, his clothes are ripped apart, his knees and hands scabbed over with dry blood, and his face dirty with particulate matter picked up from the gutters and streets. In his crawls, Pope L. evidences the existence of normative walls of hierarchical/bodily organization and choreography that are perhaps even stronger (or aid) the more visible divisions of class, gender, and race. 

What’s most interesting to me in Pope L.’s performance is the moment witnesses and spectators shift their preconceived notions and re-evaluate their relationship to the performance. This moment is best exemplified by his encounter with a police officer in front of Ground Zero - he’s asked by the police officer to stand up (and thus enter a realm of oppressive verticality, proprietary to the force structure the officer embodies); upon doing so, he negotiates with the police officer, who allows Pope to continue crawling. It’s at this moment that the audience shifts emotionally. They begin cheering Pope on, ceasing to insult and harass him. Perhaps the realm of artists then is only made clear in the presence of a concrete symbol representative of oppressive power. While the state can don a tremendous amount of force, if this force is not catalyzed into one easily recognizable - and by extension visible - symbol, then resistance is diffused and impossible. The question then becomes - can the artist create this symbol to then work against it? Is it possible to manufacture symbols of power as a tool to make artistic empathy even stronger, and thus further insurrectionary and revolutionary goals? 

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On Commissioned Art

Nadie dijo que ser artista era fácil. What do you do when faced with a commission that seems too much of a reach - something that lies just beyond what you’re absolutely certain you’re capable of? When you enter the world of commissions, you abandon the realm of roses and idealism, that ocean saturated with artists furiously claiming that art is made in a land of no kings. You realize you’ve inadvertently become a one-man business, walking a tightrope that seems a tad bit too loose, threatening to drop you into the snake pit plagued with suit-wearing vipers below. 

What do you do? 

You avoid the snakes.

Failing that, make yourself a vial of anti-venom.

So you’ve dealt with the reptiles. You’ve conquered the Silver Castle and now jealously guard the crumbs with which you’ll build your magnificent creation. You’ve entered a sort of prophetic trance - you’re sure that your troubles are over, you’ll manifest a work of art unlike anything the world has ever seen - a pile of crumbs towering over the tallest skyscrapers in the city, accompanied by a little plate at its base explaining the metaphor behind the work: the world is crumbling under globalization, and you’ve created a crumb-tower-of-babel. Brilliant! They’ll hail you as the new Christo. And then you realize you’ve been cheated. The crumbs you carefully collected are composed of a different material; the work can’t hold its own weight - your metaphor has become a self-fulfilling one; you’re doomed. Fuck. Change the idea. Work like a maniac. And above all, lie to the client. Lie to them, the crumb tower will happen, it might look more like a pile of debris, but of course - the message is still there, right? In your dreams, you see the tightrope - you see the vile reptiles jumping up at you, and the little vial of anti-venom is slipping through your sweaty fingers.

Above all: 

You avoid the snakes.

Failing that, make yourself a vial of anti-venom.

Maybe we are doomed. The thing is - we’ve tried to adapt a business model built on predictable results and straightforward processes to the creation of art. What daft board meeting did this idea come from? Put a straitjacket on him! I saw one of his paintings on tumblr, I want exactly that! Straitjacket dammit!

And so, above all: 

You avoid the snakes.

Avoid the snakes, really.

Drink the anti-venom.

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On publicly accessible archives.

It goes back to the age old human tribulation of documentation vs. interpretation. Our human nature seems to be, at present, bent on voracious progress - an interminable and frenzied move forward in all things. We’re also notoriously terrible at remembering, so we build libraries and archives, we write and we record, in a somewhat futile attempt at creating a sense of remembrance and chronological security. We implicitly measure ourselves against these archives, we dig into them once in a while for specifics - we also occasionally burn them down, and we also forget to reinterpret.    

While it’s fair game to claim that we inevitably learn from our past, we never really do so unless we are willing to reinterpret this past and digest it properly. To do so, we first have to secure access - this is easier said than done, seeing as the best archives are usually created by institutions that have a vested interest in doing so (i.e. institutions whose records entail a monitoring of progress, and thus profit). Governments more often than not have the opposite interest; the past is sometimes better when we can’t see it, when we fall into the false reality of a better today because we’ve lost all frame of reference. Cultural archives are fine, sociopolitical ones are not. 

But to reinterpret means to grow, and often, to cathartically forget. Public archives are a tremendous resource, a societal booster if you will. They allow us to tap into the collective consciousness shared by us all, and steer it in better and brighter directions. It is only by reinterpreting them that we truly begin to understand where we stand, what rivers we can cross, and which ones are better left behind. Public archives are essential - they are a source of societal power, and thus must be protected and fomented. And yet this power comes with the implicit obligation of actually using them; in our case, using them for art, and eventually for dialogue. They morph in nature, becoming everything from statistical sheets to therapeutic explorations, heightening our sense of the collective, bringing us together. Public archives are the matchbox of the 21st century - used carefully, they can fuel entire countries; underestimate them and the societies that create them and they’ll burn the countries down.

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There are two paths an artist can take when installing a piece of public art. On one hand, the artist can become a sort of anonymous entity, planting a seed and watching it grow without attribution or influence. On the other, the artist can become a sort of “active ethnographer”, actively engaging with the community that will eventually serve as the canvas for his piece. The problem with the anonymous artist only becomes evident when cultural intersections come into play. In other words, when an artist inserts a piece of art in a culture that to him is alien. In biology, this behavior is termed “parasitism” - where one organism benefits at the expense of the other. This is the case, for example, of Banksy’s intervention of the Palestinian Segregation Wall. His work was planted in an anonymous fashion, with no previous or posterior communal engagement, and thus failed to create a profound local impact. What it did create was international fervor - excitement among the circles he, but not the Palestinians, belonged to. What was created accidentally was a piece of fine art, as opposed to applied art. 

The active ethnographer, the true public artist, is one who in some form engages with the community he wishes his work to be entrenched in. What this reveals, more than anything, is a true commitment to social and artistic relevance through social inquiry - it demonstrates that the artist is truly committed to his work, and understands that it will create impact (whether that impact is good or bad is another topic entirely). It is only through applied public art that change can be engaged and directed correctly. And in many ways, involvement with the targeted community also means the creation of meaningful networks, collaborators, leading to a piece that is both more engaging and powerful.

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ZU Collaboration Update How is the collaboration coming along?

I hesitate to say terrible only because we’re actually playing with a concept as opposed to nothing.

Why terrible?

Because working in this group is akin to working with ten-year olds obsessed with whatsapp and things that look pretty. It’s taken me two weeks to set up a decent conversation via e-mail with them, and to stop them from changing the idea without telling me. 

What idea are you working on at present? Well, in reality, I feel like I’m being held hostage by them. It’s an issue of space and time, you know? The fact is, I don’t see them often. Unlike them, I don’t have access to their personal space, I haven’t yet penetrated their environment, meaning there’s an inevitable sense of superiority on their part. They want to somehow create divers swimming underwater, attempting to fetch pearls using lights. I’m leaning heavily towards the use of projection technology, seeing as I’m somewhat familiar with it, and it gives us a medium to achieve a huge range of things. But yeah, the idea is their’s, I’m wondering how to make it ours.

Are you looking forward to Thursday? Why, yes. Finally we can have a talk face to face as opposed to through this demonic whatsapp thing. And maybe now they can stop telling me that they’re meeting with their advisors to go over ideas. Also, I’m scared to meet their advisors, if this is indeed the type of stuff they’re approving. 

What do you expect for the next few weeks?

Help me god.

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Installation Proposal - Abu Dhabi Bus Terminal

The Abu Dhabi bus terminal presents itself as a fantastic subject for public art intervention. The way to think about intervening this space, in my opinion, is to look for those objects, or conventions, that seem out of place. A bit of time spent at the Terminal will innevitably force you to notice the terribly palpable lack of clocks, or the prevalence of blue trashcans, or the occasional set of upturned chairs. 

To intervene here means to appropriate oneself of these objects. For example, how would setting up an enormous clock smack in the middle of the terminal affect the environment? What would happen if you packed the inside of the terminal with an enormous mountain of metal chairs? Perhaps it’d be best if you set up beds instead of chairs? 

The reason I don’t have one answer to what the installation could be is simply because there are far too many elements that could become great interventions. There’s also the difficulty of installing something that divides one side of the terminal from the other. Perhaps my strongest suggestion would be to, instead of creating permanent installations, to set up a temporary wall between the two sides of the Terminal (a sort of Tilted Arch). The wall would be enormous, ideally in a metallic material, brutally exposed to the elements and violently cutting down the half of the bus terminal. The installation would be temporary because I’m more interested in what would happen once the wall is lifted - after months of not seeing the other side, what would people do?

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Banksy in Palestine A cursory analysis of Holiday Snaps

If you’ve ever looked at a train through a frame of metal beams you’ll have noticed how curiously reminiscent the carts of the train, enveloped in a linear frenzy of silver momentum, are to a strip of film passing through a projection light box. The appropriation of this tremendous effect is a testament to the agonizing urban Brooklyn youth of the 60’s, whom armed with nothing more than a few spray cans made true the metaphor of the subway-train film strip. This was the inception of graffiti, an art form conceived in reaction to a New York that had given up on the youth. Curiously, this reaction came in the form of “tagging” - where the artist writes a highly elaborate variation of his pseudonym on a public space with the aid of spray paint. It is a cultural response inherently devoid of any content. These were the early days of graffiti - deliberately non-social. But these forms, like the film strips they first imitated, were not static. Soon a small group of artists branched off of the graffiti movement, choosing to push the form away from a simple culture of visual input based on symbol systems, and towards the realm of representational visual material. This new movement was quick to detach itself from the practice of tagging, espousing the term “street art” to describe their precise and non-symbolic style of public intervention. The street artists adopted techniques akin to muralism, as well as wheatpasting and stenciling to incorporate messages sensitive to their social and political contexts. Early adopters like Keith Haring paved the way for the contemporary masters of street art - the likes of Blu, JR, and Banksy. 

Banksy’s career began in the early 90’s, as part of Bristol’s DryBreadZ Crew. By the year 2000, Banksy had reverted completely to stenciling, taking advantage of its ease of production and precision compared to tagging or muralism. Soon Banksy became a popular sensation through word of mouth - his stencils had managed to perfectly condense pop culture and the sociopolitical contexts that surrounded it. By 2002, Banksy was pioneering the street-art gallery seen, debuting at the 33 1/3 gallery in Salt Lake, and eventually appearing at the Westbourne Grove gallery in London in 2005. By adopting the style of Blek le Rat (considered the father of stencil street art in France), Banksy quickly became the world’s most renown street artist, easily working his way into the fields of film, installation art, and gallery art, all while maintaining a fervent and witty political tone in his works. His highest grossing piece, Space Girl & Bird, fetched $576,000 at Bonhams in London. Banksy’s most political work to date is probably his 2005 intervention at the Palestinian Segregation Wall in Qalqiliya, where he created a series of stencils with undertones of strong criticism towards Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. 

Upon completion, the Palestinian Segregation Wall will run along the Palestine-Israel border for more than 700km. The barrier, known to Palestinians as the “Apartheid Wall”, measures more than 8 meters in height and half a meter in width, regulating the flow of Palestinians in and out of occupied territories. According to Israeli authorities the wall is a fundamental national security tool, despite being deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice. This was the canvas chosen by Banksy in 2005 to create his holiday snaps, a series of nine stencil-based art works selectively placed along the segregation fence. The images are prevalently well-tailored to the context onto which they are imprinted. What makes them truly spectacular is that all of them make direct allusion to not only the wall, but its psychological and social effects on the people subject to it. Many of the stencils feature paradisiacal landscapes framed by windows (Window on the West Bank), or visible through cutouts on the wall (Cut it Out). Many of these also include children (Art Attack, Balloon Debate, Escapism, and Unwelcome Intervention), a recurrent motif that seems to allude to the innocence of a generation born into inescapable (and illegal) repressive conditions. The children look for a way through the wall and into a better life while maintaining the innocence that makes them such powerful symbols. All in all the images are tremendously controversial, drawing attention to questions of escapism and subversion by presenting them on the very canvas that generates these questions. While holiday snaps poses more questions than it answers, the motivations behind the piece are clear after no more than a cursory examination of Banksy’s philosophy. His manifesto, as replicated on his website and a series of publications, is a quote from Colonel Mervin Willet Gonin, one of the first soldiers to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945:

“It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

Banksy’s work thus deals in the realm of dehumanization as a result of modern governmental and social systems. His art can be understood through the metaphor of the lipstick - an element that both returns proprietorship and individuality to the individual, as well as actively disturbing senses of place and appropriateness by twisting popular icons and symbols. All issues of motivation aside though, his work had a mixed reception. While conducting his stenciling he was repeatedly harassed by Israeli troops, who more than once held him at gunpoint while instructing him to halt his work. The images spread virally, and internationally the reception was one of applause to an event that created an enormous amount of awareness and incited a significant amount of dialogue regarding both the purpose of the wall and the nature of the Israeli state. And yet where the project failed was the lack of local documentation conducted both prior to and after the installation of the pieces. It was an interesting case of exterior furor and interior indifference. A short exchange between Banksy and an old Palestinian passerby makes this point quite clearly: “You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful... We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall, go home.” 

    The question that seems to hover over any discussion of both street art and foreign intervention (particularly in the Middle East) is bifold - it is a question of postcolonialist theory as well as of fine and applied art polarities. Can an external agent effectively provide commentary on local issues? If so, then must this commentary (if artistic in nature), live in the realm of “useful” or “applied” art? It is important to understand that the notoriety of Banksy’s work in Palestine is both a factor of his individual international fame and the significant absence of potent (and well documented) traditions of public installation art in the Middle East (relative to Europe, and North and South America). The latter factor is one for concern, seeing as by definition the world of street art is fueled mainly by reactionary forces to oppressive or denigrating conditions. The closest example of a Banksy-esque character in Middle Eastern street art is El Seed, a notorious (albeit new) Tunisian street artist working mainly with Arabic calligraphic styles. I say “the closest example” to highlight the incredible lack of large names in regional street art pushing political agendas in the Middle East. This should not be the case. The Arab Spring is the sociopolitical event that should have functioned as an inexhaustible source of fuel for dedicated local street artists - where is this art? Perhaps the issue is one of poor documentation, but if this is the issue, then it must mean that the art itself was not potent enough to merit documentation. 

In these conditions, is it acceptable for a foreign voice to be made as present as Banksy’s was in Palestine? The answer could be yes, but then the discussion would be over. The true problem lays in the relationship between process and installation, as process is the main avenue towards useful and applied art. Banksy’s piece is the perfect example of a failure in this process. His very methodology (complete reserve regarding identity, no pre and post-processes of dialogue) makes the holiday snaps series a work at odds with the context he seeks to intervene. Process must exist - if nothing more, to at least begin the inception of movements of social change. Without process the result is unexpected, uncontrolled, and often misinterpreted; interesting from the artistic point of view, but meaningless to the social contexts it feeds from. Without process the result is nothing more than a somewhat arrogant expression of Western intention; art detached from its context and regional roots. What Banksy created in Palestine was beautiful, insurrectionary, and most of all, ballsy. But it was not useful - it was not applied - and therefore, fundamentally meaningless. In many ways, Banksy resembles a Che Guevara of the arts. His revolutions worked and meant something so long as he stayed in South America - the second he left for Africa with the same intentions, the game was over. 

References

"The Art of Revolution." The Atlantic. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

"Banksy 'The Palestinian Job'" Banksy 'The Palestinian Job' N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013. http://www.briansewell.com/artist/b-artist/banksy/banksy-palestinian-tag.html

"Banksy at the West Bank Barrier Index | | Guardian.co.uk Arts." Banksy at the West Bank Barrier Index | | Guardian.co.uk Arts. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

"Banksy." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Feb. 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

"Graffiti." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 25 Feb. 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

"Primer of Visual Literacy [Paperback]." Primer of Visual Literacy: Donis A Dondis: 9780262540292: Amazon.com: Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

"The Seven Wonders of the Revolution." The Seven Wonders of the Revolution. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/4776/the-seven-wonders-of-the-revolution

"Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series [Paperback]." Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series: John Berger: 9780140135152: Amazon.com: Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

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Film is victim to an inevitable hierarchy: you shoot, then you screen. Reversing this order would’ve seemed pointless until the advent of the broad umbrella we now call “public art”. In the realm of PubArt, documentary and subsequent expression share an interesting if at times confusing relationship - do you document and then perform, or do you perform and then document? It’s something of a Catch-22 in that the question is unsolvable, and seems to become irrelevant when then abstracted to the mind of the artist; no answer or particular order is right.  

The introduction of new technologies (like computer vision, MaxMsp, Processing, etc.), has allowed for the development of PubArt installations that begin to blend documentary and performance in perfect synchronicity. By responding to external input - i.e. audiences - performance or installation pieces become an abstracted documentation of the world around them, engraving the social and political contexts they are placed in. The idea of video being limited to the categories of either documentary or expression is quickly becoming archaic - as technology races forward and becomes more accessible to more and more artists, perhaps the relevance of this hierarchization of process and delivery will begin to be reversed, even eliminated altogether. In any case, it's a question that to new generations becomes increasingly irrelevant - and when conventions become irrelevant, art becomes exciting.

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Art in the Public Domain

A graffiti artist and a government official sit together in a conference room. It’s not the beginning of a bad joke; rather, these two polar opposites meet to discuss the evolving nature of public art in the Arab Gulf. Dubai’s Art in the Public Realm conference is one of the many early stabs the UAE is taking at addressing an issue that is fundamentally at odds with its judicial and social structure: street art. In many ways it was like visiting a zoo at night - you know the elephant is in the room, but no one can bring themselves to flash a light on it.

It’s interesting to sit in a hall where the discussion, like a ball hovering around some massive roulette, shifts infallibly from “we should foment grassroots art!” to “well, as long as it’s acceptable to us [who]?” It’s a ball that while the well-oiled governmental gears continue to turn, will inevitably continue to hover between red and black, regulation and no-regulation, young and old - the inescapable paradox of PArt.

So writing about Art in the Public Realm seems as futile as the conference itself. Despite having the unsurmountable pleasure of meeting El Seed himself, I left with this uneasy feeling of emptiness, like somehow the light at the end of the tunnel had dimmed somewhat. As I sat through slide after slide of “prominent artists” visiting kindergartens and making popsicle houses with kids who were hailed as the next generation of Jenkins and Blus and Banksys, I couldn’t help but feel that the whole bubble had begun to rot from the inside, the seeds of plague planted by misguided goals of wealth, cultural fabrication, and masked intentions. Perhaps it’s that now more than ever I realize this is an issue that is so desperately stuck in the mire of bureaucracy, that there’s little hope of anyone pulling it out. Like a hot rock, it’s thrown around from one set of hands to the next - remaining eternally in a sort of meaningless flight that allows me just enough hope before plunging me into the realization that nope!, someone’s thrown it off again. And to be honest, it’s no one’s fault. Like everyone, I applaud the government on its incredible ability to sustain tremendous growth in all aspects (culturally, economically, etc.). Perhaps it's us, the street artists, that are wrong in the first place. Why try to start a dialogue where there shouldn’t be one in the first place? Speaking to El Seed after his talk, he said “of course there’s no street art here. Street art has to come from desperation, from a type of anger. There’s no desperation here, no anger.” Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s our turn to begin embracing the regulations instead of trying to sneak around them. 

But we have to be met halfway. 

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Ojo del Gigante KZK - 2012

I am, at heart, a muralist; within the world of public art I tend to be understood as part of a wider “street art” movement - graffiti artists, taggers, vandals, etc. It’s a world of unwritten rules that perpetuates itself with a sort of wild west furor of lawlessness and public dissent in the face of authorities that are often visually and aesthetically oppressing in the public realm. Banksy captured this sentiment in his manifesto - “Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.”

It’s also a temporal world. And drastically so. Street art operates in layers, one over the other, evolving like a sort of three dimensional film reel, constantly responding to input and generating constant output. More than once have I painted a piece only to have it covered by another work within the week - I’m convinced street art makes you buddhist in that you constantly operate within a mandala framework. The one rule that pervades all is this - new work must always be superior to the one covered (whether this relates to skill, technique, content, etc. is all debatable in the public forum that is the wall). The point being that street art lives in an organic temporality, literally feeding off of its cultural, social, and political context to thrive. And public art is not all that different - trying to attach a feeling of permanence to art that is inherently chronological seems paradoxical (except for art that is deliberately atemporal, like war memorials or monuments). The benefit of temporality in the public forum of PArt is the creation of a vital dialogue between generational and social gaps that coexist in our societies. Mary Douglas, in her anthropological analysis of stigma in modern communities, puts forth the concept of “marginal power” as a key element of how both humans and societies operate. Power and power relations are created and flow in the margins between groups, bodies, spaces, and ideas. Anachronistic art then becomes obsolete in helping to mold dialogues that exist in social boundaries, as it provides no form of bridging these. Temporality is vital precisely because it forms the very basis of inter-social relationships as understood in Douglas’s terms - forming a bridge between generations, social and political groups through the creation of context-sensitive public forums. Public art then must be temporal.

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Stream of Consciousness Notes on the Abu Dhabi Bus Terminal

  “Al Audin Wazir sits alone in the back of an old Toyota van - you’d be forgiven if you gave it no more than a passing glance. Around him shadows persist, cast by arches and stepped roofs oddly reminiscent of oceanic lines. People stick to the shadows like pigeons to grain; when they can, they find somewhere to sit, propping up their legs as if avoiding the ground and subsequent feeling of solidity they will soon abandon. Broken clocks hang from broken terminals over broken dreams. Half of the place is abandoned, as if nothing permanent is allowed to remain in this place of eternal transition. Outside, the terminal ends have been stylized in the fashion of docks bathed by a concrete ocean; on some of these, people stand and look out as if waiting for the metaphorical ship or incoming storm. A road divides two kingdoms, two families, the existence of which is a paradox attributed to an eternal temporality. Inside the cement cathedral bodies are scattered. I say bodies because I see only absence in their eyes. Every man is faithfully accompanied by his life, tightly packed away and held still by a precarious sheet and nylon ropes. The bathrooms are flooded and reek of amalgamated piss. Chairs litter the terminal, the most interesting ones are turned upside down. The trashcans, a neon blue, seem oddly out of place. I seem oddly out of place for that matter, perhaps it’s because I am the only one not leaving. We have reduced the romance of the arabian oasis to an expanse of cold and unmovable stone, that innevitably exists in contrast to the movement that thrives on it. Al Audin Wazir asks me for a cigarette. There are no children, no clocks - there is no transcendence.”

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MADONNA - Mr. Brainwash, 2009. Exit Through the Gift Shop - Banksy's satirical piece on the role and nature of contemporary art - inevitably calls to mind the life and methods of Andy Warhol through the creation of a somewhat less profound protagonist and proxy: Mr. Brainwash.  Though considered by many to be little more than an extremely convoluted joke, Mr. Brainwash and his pseudo-Factory have gone on to produce works that - in the vein of Warhol - reframe and deify contemporary icons in the style that Andy immortalized. 

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El gigante Armenio.

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CUBA

        Por un segundo su alma se perdió en el pesado, obsceno aire del trópico. La ventana hacía de proyector de cine - mil palmeras pasaban por ese marco de metal, perdiéndose todo detalle en una confusión cinética. De la radio se escuchaba, entrecortada, la melodía de una guitarra y una voz joven que cantaba sobre revolución y las tiernas caderas de una colombiana. La carretera se escurría entre los montes, hundiéndose en la interminable jungla de la sierra. Desde el asiento trasero, veía la mano de Rodrigo que palpaba la rodilla de la chica que habían conocido en Holguín. Ésta, aburrida, echaba su cabeza hacia atrás dejando al viento jugar con su pelo - un fuego negro, violento, que parecía quemar el disco rojo que comenzaba a esconderse bajo el irregular horizonte. La humedad abrazaba todo, condensándose en el frío metal de los rifles que iban apoyados en su falda. Cada tanto el coche saltaba, como intentando esquivar los miles de pozos que a causa de los años se habían apropiado de la carretera - atrás, las cajas de madera en donde iban ocultas las municiones se movían. El ruido, como el de una lluvia metálica, lo asustaba. Se acordaba de esa historia que tanto repetían en el campamento - “desde que se le reventaron las balas, le dicen la regadera, por los mil hoyos que le quedaron en el pecho.” 

Condujeron hasta que la noche y los bichos se abalanzaron sobre ellos. Se detuvieron en un charco de tierra roja a un lado de la calle para arreglar las luces del auto. Pronto dedujeron que el problema tenía que ver con las balas que habían salpicado toda la frente del vehículo. Raúl encendió un cigarrillo, decepcionado al darse cuenta de que le quedaban sólo dos en el bolsillo. 

-Le dimos duro parece. - murmuró Rodrigo.

A pesar de haberse quitado las chaquetas de tela gruesa, el calor los bañaba de sudor a los dos. La chica parecía acostumbrada, y, sentada sobre la rueda de repuesto, silbaba una de esas viejas melodías que parecen nacer y morir sin lograr salir de los montes. Como acompañándola, se le sumaban miles de gritos animales desde lo profundo de la jungla. 

-Y si nos quedamos acá? - preguntó. 

-Ya nos deben estar buscando. Casi termino... -

De repente se bañó la jungla de luz, y la chica volvió a su asiento.

-Está. - dijo Rodrigo, tirando su chaqueta encima de los rifles. Ya sentado en frente del volante, le susurró algo a la muchacha, y ésta riéndose lo besó en la boca. 

Raúl se tardó en volver al auto. Había cruzado la calle con la intención de terminar su cigarrillo y mear tranquilo. Tirando lo que quedaba del tabaco al suelo, se percató del chirrido desesperado que éste pegó al caer entre las hojas húmedas. La textura de éstas le llamaron la atención - le acordaban al patio de la casa que antes habían tenido sus padres en la Havana. Levantando la vista, le dio la impresión que la oscuridad de la jungla lo envolvía, latiendo alrededor de él. Los troncos y las ramas que antes había podido distinguir ahora se entrelazaban, perdiendo sus contornos como si reflejadas en la oscura agua de alguna laguna o mar lejano. El corazón negro latía cada vez más fuerte, y sentía que el aire presionaba sus oídos. De lo más profundo de la oscuridad escuchaba disparos y gritos. Pronto estos lo envolvieron, y Raúl se perdió en las memorias vivas de tantas luchas y tanta muerte y tanta sangre. Un viento caliente lo atravesó; sintió que las raíces de sus dientes se pudrían y que sus huesos perdían toda firmeza. No podía apartar la vista de la enorme boca negra que había reemplazado la jungla y que lentamente lo empezaba a envolver. A la distancia vio que todo indicio de luz se perdía en la omnipotencia de esa oscuridad pesada, caliente y vulgar. Incapaz de mantenerse de pie, colapsó, cayendo en la cama de hojas húmedas. Escuchó más disparos. 

Los gritos se le acercaban. 

-¡Llegamos! - gritó Rodrigo desde el frente. 

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Torre; Armenia Obscura.