So here is a doozy... The Los Angeles mayor decided to send 1,000 cops to de-camp Occupy LA, and now he is looting the artwork. "The mayor's office recognizes that this has historical significance so we're working together to make sure that we come up with a good and appropriate solution" (via @longdrivesouth). Thus, the mayor's cultural police forces are looking to permanently preserve the mural which had been painted on a plywood structure, built around a fragile fountain in the middle of the plaza.
All of this can make the head spin in circles with its absurd logic. While the occupation was pronounced unsanitary and dangerous, and while the mayor decided they no longer had a space for speech, one of the very forms of the speech itself now rises to the level of permanence. It rises to icon, a cultural treasure they will probably put on a tourism brochure some day. And while the culture itself that made the piece may be deemed to be criminally trespassing on the space of the plaza, there is no better way to disarm a culture than to put it inside a vitrine.
photo from mikeywally on flickr.
A bezoar is a mass of disparate pieces and materials. For this blog, you will find something somewhere between tweet-length posts and tumblelogging; inchoate thoughts; provocations and assorted scraps that don't fit anyplace else; criticisms of a political and geographic variety; ecoaffective ramblings; spatial imaginaries that don't conform. On Twitter: @AlJavieera; 1/3rd of @Demilit; bookmarked content: @AJFavorite.
1 Comment
They do say that the easiest way to kill art is to put it in a museum (or disarm a culture by putting in a vitrine).
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