The Silent Red Thing: Self-Censorship in the Hyper-Networked Hypermarket Arts

I can't forget the puzzling silence of Mark di Suvero. During the Occupy Movement, Joie De Vivre, his seventy-foot-tall sculpture flanking the east side of Zuccotti Park (Fig. 1), was simply known as "The Red Thing."¹ General Assem bly facilitators would announce, "Food, Outreach, Direct Action, People of Color working group, meet in one hour under the red thing!" because there was substantial gathering space beneath it and the populist renaming signaled that we had invited it into the commons (Fig. 2).

Figure 1.

Noah Fischer, View from Zuccotti Park (2018). Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.

Noah Fischer, The Red Thing (2018). Watercolor. Image courtesy of the artist.

However, the red thing turned out instead to be a kind of Trojan horse. It was the first piece of liberated Zuccotti Park to be clawed back into Mayor Bloomberg's New York. On October 26, 2011, the New York City Police Department surrounded it with barricades (which were inexplicably marked with the logo of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (Fig. 3),² and thereafter patrolled it on threat of arrest (Fig. 4).

The significance of this art-cage was recognized by the artists from the Arts & Culture Committee, who penned a common letter to the artist:

OWS is now in Day 52. This movement will only continue to grow and evolve. It is our wish, and we believe yours as well, that the sculpture be integrated spatially with the activities taking place at Liberty Plaza. Therefore, we ask you to make a public statement urging city authorities to keep all barricades away from this and other public sculptures in the area, allowing free access to the area under and around public sculptures.³

The letter wasn't a shot in the dark. In 1971, di Suvero had self-exiled in response to the Vietnam War. Five years earlier, in 1966, he had been approached to build the monumental Peace Tower by Irving Petlin and the Los Angeles-based Artists' Protest Committee: a work that monumentalized a collection of smaller anti-war paintings later auctioned off to support the anti-war efforts. Installed in a vacant lot, Peace Tower became a site of confrontation where anti-war demonstrators were harassed by Marines and pro-war counter-protestors, who beat up an artist during the tower's installation.⁴

Figure 3.

Naeem Mohaiemen, Zuccotti Park (2011). Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Figure 4.

Naeem Mohaiemen, Zuccotti Park (2011). Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Jailed twice for anti-war demonstrations in the 1960s and again outside the Republican National Convention in 2004, di Suvero became something of an art world anti-war icon. His work Peace Tower was remade at the 2006 Whitney Biennial, where it was placed by the curators directly outside the museum in public view, perhaps to compensate for the 2004 Biennial's stunning silence on America's two overseas wars.⁵ It wasn't a stretch to recognize di Suvero's aesthetics (quotidian industrial materials, strong linear formed geometry, red color) and social ideas (sculpture used in mass movements) as a progeny of the monumental Leftist sculptural tradition stretching back to Vladimir Tatlin (Fig. 5). As such, the chance to speak up for OWS, a movement that had accepted his sculpture into its political constellation, seemed more a gift to the artist than an unwanted pressure. The letter was sent by trusted couriers, and it was confirmed that he received and read the letter. But di Suvero never spoke up, and a month later, the barricades that had initially encircled his sculpture expanded to encircle the entire park, while activists nursed NYPD-inflicted wounds marking their violent eviction.

The issue of silenced voices has recently drifted into political discourse as the far-right media cries out accusations of censorship, often the result of traps planted by the racist and xenophobic alt...