The Community Is Watching, and Replying: Art in Public Places and Spaces

Abstract

The author describes her public-art projects and installations, in which she has employed various combinations of video, photography, audio, sculpture and performance, often in collaboration with artist Molly Cleator. The pieces spectacularize unresolved conflicts between the artists regarding what is personally truthful as compared to what society dictates, especially concerning the "three deviants": women, art and nature. The artists question who defines these related realities and how. The author has also offered hundreds of artists a forum called L.A. Freewaves, a media arts organization and festival working in traditional and nontraditional venues throughout Los Angeles, in an effort to disseminate community-empowering public art widely.

I will state up front that I am from the East Coast of the U.S.A., live on the left coast (in Los Angeles), hate TV, do not watch TV, listen to public radio, wish I ran a TV station or at least a program and read massive amounts of media-deconstruction theory. Public art-making, video-festival organizing and art teaching comprise my creative triumvirate. In my artwork I place intimate images into public arenas or I manipulate public, often commercial, language into personal messages. Through the video festival I set up forums in which others may express in their own language. And through teaching public and media arts, I let young people know these opportunities exist and give them the tools to make their own images. Public art, independent video festivals and education are all about speaking one's mind in the face of very large commercial structures and providing the space for others to do likewise, or at least begin strategizing to do the same. With 3,000 ads in our face per day, with only 9% of the TV directors being women and with more extra-terrestrials on TV than Asians, Latinos and Native Americans combined, there is much missing in our public pictures and many false mirrors presented to us.

Thirty percent of the content of mass media is advertisements, i.e. corporate art, pixellated, transmitted and sprayed over the world. Ads are on our orange peels, protruding from the seams of our underwear and on our doorknobs and windshields. They link the articles I read and the songs I hear and programs I do not watch. I try to prevent ads from entering my eyes, ears and pores, alienating me from my fears, desires and culture. I cut labels out. I lobby to prevent the telephone company from selling my phone number to businesses. I refuse to give salespeople my address when I make purchases and I throw my junk mail in the recycling bin so it never enters my house.

By contrast, I fantasize about an artist-run TV channel to counteract the numbing but nerve-wracking reruns of stereotypes and to fill in some of the constant omissions. Poverty and culture, for example, the homeless and the high brow, would quickly lose their sinful and alien tones. The torrential power of mass imagery and messages would be opposed, redirected, diverted, siphoned off . . . or reinvented, diversified, personalized, i.e. reprogrammed with a multicultural skew instead of a corporate bottom line. Personally, I think TV could have ended racism in the U.S.A.

Using the same instruments as the industry (cameras, decks, monitors, projectors, sound systems, etc.), an artist or activist can tap the same power in the same pop language or expand perceptions of what mass media does and can do. Art using this technology can, more specifically, assist viewers to distinguish their realities from illusion, a required skill soon to be rare, atrophied by pervasive edutainment.

Personal History

In 1970, while in college in Geneva, Switzerland, I found the 35mm still camera to be my vehicle of transition from a state of helplessness to that of creating my own visual utterances. I learned that I could respond. Eventually, however, these static images did not suffice to reflect my worldview, which came to include motion, change, language, sound and multiple viewpoints. Single frames no longer can convey sufficient complexity. Neither does video fulfill all these artistic requirements, but...