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A lot
of strange things went on in the city of Chicago during
the last weekend of April. A huge walking, talking "landfill
monster" strolled down the Michigan Avenue Magnificent Mile,
the city's glitziest shopping district, berating people
for their excessive shopping habits and moaning about not
being able to swallow any more trash. Also on Michigan Avenue,
a squad of people cloaked in white work suits rolled a huge "ball
of trash" down the sidewalk. At the Chicago Board of Trade,
a group from around the country called The Society for the
Representation of Society break danced and performed stunts
around a rolling piece of random objects and debris, entitled
the "Nomadic Apocalypse." Heavy breathing, moaning and other "Zombie
sounds" emanated from trash cans and subway tunnels. Wire
nests, looking like the homes of futuristic termites, showed
up on Stop signs and lightposts around the city. Cars did
a loud automotive ballet in a lot off Lake Street. A woman
culminated her weeks-long project of going up to random
men on the street and asking them to kiss her passionately,
on film. Meanwhile, bands of other women roamed the streets
harassing men, subjecting them to the kind of catcalls and
obscene comments that women are all-too familiar with. In
the Lincoln Square neighborhood on the northwest side, a
community organization's ongoing campaign against gentrification
and the local alderman's role in it grabbed the public eye,
with stickers and fliers denouncing Starbucks' entry into
the community and heavily controlled city news and advertising
kiosks were transformed into forums for news the city doesn't
want its residents to hear. Ladders mysteriously appeared
on fences and walls all over the city, offering a symbolic
route over these metaphorical and physical barriers. And
stickers and graffiti blossomed around the city, including
stickers saying "Save the Mermaid's Nipples, Boycott Starbucks" in
reference to the coffee giant's cleansing of its former
racier logo. Two adjacent billboards in heavily gentrified
Wicker Park were tagged to read "Ethnic Cleansing." Appropriately,
the one bearing the word "Ethnic" was an opulent ad for
Air Italia, while the one reading "Cleansing" was for Tide
detergent. meanwhile, Guerrilla Love Radio, a local pirate
radio station, broadcast news of these goings on along with
underground music and rants on local political issues.
This hodge podge of political and situationist art and events
was the work of the Department of Space and Land Reclamation
(DSLR), a project dedicated to challenging and undoing the
work of the Department of Streets and Sanitation, the Department
of Housing, the Police Department and the various other
government and corporate entities that make it a daily practice
to remind people who is in control of the city.
Parks,
roads, and other public spaces in Chicago and other cities
should and do technically belong to the people who live
in the city, work long hours and give a community its vitality
and life. But more and more, these public spaces are becoming
figuratively and literally privatized, with every inch
of public space potential fodder for commercial advertisers,
and with regulations prohibiting actual public uses of
space such as spontaneous art, "disorderly conduct," or
even sleeping in parks or on benches.
"Global capital has reached such a point that both the physical and intellectual landscape have been completely purchased," reads the DSLR manifesto handed out at the event's headquarters, a loft known as The Butcher Shop on Lake Street in the industrial area just west of downtown. "To
exist today means to tread on the property of others. The city has increasingly
become a space completely built around consumerism. The freedom of expression
has come to mean the freedom to advertise. Advertisements on billboards, advertisements
on public buses and trains, advertisements on clothes, advertisements on radio,
advertisements on television, advertisements on menus. Like a minefield of manipulative
codes, urban space has been designed to maneuver us from one point of sale to
the next. Racist and classist anti-loitering and anti-gang laws have been instituted
across the country as increasingly individuals and cultures are illegalized to
protect rising property values."
DSLR is Born
The DSLR event in April was the culmination of several months of planning that
brought together individual artists, activists, and groups from around Chicago
and the country. There were over 60 planned projects going on during the event,
as well as countless spontaneous sticker and graffiti raids and performances.
It was scheduled specifically to fall between the anti-globalization protests
during the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) talks in Quebec City the
previous week and the May Day workers' holiday the following week.
The Butcher Shop served as a hub and meeting spot for the events. Graffiti by
local artists blanketed the walls of the space, which also included a floor-to-ceiling
art gallery with collages of wheatpasted posters and photos of graffiti and
other public art from around the country. Guerrilla Love Radio (107.lFM) broadcasted
out of the space, with the mic open to anyone who chose to take it.
Reclaiming of land and space took place in literal, symbolic and psychological
forms in the various projects. The physical reclaiming of space took place
through things like stickers and graffiti. The symbolic reclaiming of power
happened through political messages about consumerism and democracy. Overall,
artists claimed psychological rebellion against the homogenization of culture
and the social norms that suppress things like spontaneous creativity, freedom
of expression and public displays of affection.
"Radical culture in Chicago is very vibrant but really all over the place," explains Nato Thompson, one of the organizers of the event and the curator of the Counter Productive Industries exhibit the year before, which helped spawn DSLR. "The trick is to bring these different groups into proximity with each other."
"When you're doing public political artwork there is a sense of isolation," adds Amanda Klonsky, an artist and activist who organized poetry readings during the event. "This re-energized a lot of people and brought people together. When you get white punk anarchists, hip hop kids, graffiti writers and Art Institute
students in one place like this, too many people are ready to expect a social disaster. But this was the best party in town."
Art and Politics
With participants coming from a mix of art and activist backgrounds, the organizers
made it a focus of the event to challenge and examine artists' roles in the communities
they live in, including the fact that artists often unintentionally serve as
a developer's best friend when an area is undergoing gentrification. The Lincoln
Square project dealt directly with gentrification, with the campaign targeting
Alderman Eugene Schulter, who has notoriously courted high-priced developers
and pushed through zoning changes that displace lower-income, long-time residents.
Around the time of the event, Schulter had placed a $5,ooo "bounty" on the head of a young tagger who had been painting anti-yuppie slogans on local buildings, which Schulter argued was a hate crime. Along with graffiti and hip hop artists, one of the panels featured a representative of the First Defense Legal Aid organization, which provides free lawyers at the station right after arrest to all minors and to some adults charged with felonies.
Participants noted that the DSLR event was significant in that it did foster more cooperation and interaction than often occurs between historically segregated groups of artists and activists in Chicago.
"It's extremely hard to bring together an interracial group of artists to work on a project," says Klonsky. "Even for radical artists, it's very hard to sit down and say we have a problem with racism. That weekend was a multi-racial group of people, from different classes and different political leanings."
In
organizing meetings before the event, participants expressed
a desire and commitment that the DSLR event not be a one-time
thing, but an ongoing effort for change, including building
links between community organizations and artists.
These goals have been met so far with varying degrees of success. Regular but
very loosely organized meetings are ongoing, open to anyone
interested in the DSLR idea. Not surprisingly the loose
ongoing group includes far more "artists" than "regular" community
members with families and jobs that require them to work
long hours.
Key organizers of the event say they have mixed feelings
about the ongoing existence of DSLR and the composition
or goals of the group. "I have a perpetual fascination with trying to kill DSLR," admits artist Josh MacPhee, one of the main organizers of the event. "I
don't want this to become an example of branding, which
is how capital and corporate power regenerated itself.
You have these logos where workers become proud of the
fact that they are producing crap for little money. We
don't want to brand ourselves as the next franchise activist
group that everyone wants to align themselves with. I feel
like it's time to do other things, not to be a group that's
just concerned with perpetuating itself."
"If the name is needed for press or whatever, that works, but we want this to be something that is decentralized, to have people working in loosely organized subgroups," says
organizer Emily Forman.
For good or bad, the DSLR "movement" has taken on a life of its own, with participants
in various campaigns claiming the moniker as their own.
Currently, a movement to "liberate the Real World Seven" has been one of the
main efforts of the loosely-organized DSLR crew. This is referring to the infamous
MTV show The Real World, which is currently being filmed at a loft at the uber-trendy
Milwaukee-Damen-North intersection in Wicker Park. Wicker Park, now almost completely
consumed by expensive night clubs, restaurants and high-end art galleries, was
for many years the benchmark of gentrification in the city, with former Mexican
and Polish residents pushed out for waves of artists, musicians and finally businesspeople
and wealthy suburban transplants. While the mass media has tagged the Real World
protests as being about gentrification, the protesters who have showed up by
the hundreds on several occasions articulate a critique that goes far beyond
gentrification, The Real World, MTV and its parent company Viacom are the epitome
of the consumerism, homogenization and corporate control that are plaguing our
cities and lives, activists say. At one protest several people were arrested
on charges ranging from reckless conduct to obstructing an officer, and several
reported being roughed up by cops.
In on-line debates, a number of activists remarked that the outrage expressed by Real World protesters at their treatment by police indicated they were indeed sheltered from and oblivious to the kind of police repression that minority communities suffer every day.
Attacking Corporate Public Art
The DSLR philosophy holds particular ire for co-opted public art that is used
to further privatize space-for example bland abstract sculptures that result
in the paving over of badly needed green spaces, or city-sponsored murals that
replace traditional graffiti walls, or public sculptures designed specifically
to keep people from sitting or sleeping on them.
An ongoing DSLR project dubbed "Daley Village" (after the Chicago mayor) has been to target the city's Suite Home Chicago displays, a city-wide public art project which is the follow-up to the internationally-known Cows on Parade project of two years ago. As with Cows on Parade, corporations sponsor pieces of public art-in this case plastic living room sets including couches, coffee tables and TVs-which are decorated by artists in keeping with the corporation's wishes and displayed around the city. Throughout the summer DSLR participants were plotting a massive surprise demonstration to point out that while the city and corporations can find money to build fake living rooms all over
the city, Chicago's homeless population continues to grow with little housing relief. The Cows on Parade suffered a similar space reclamation in 1999, when activists placed actual cow manure under the animals with signs saying "The Real Poop" and giving history lessons about the assassination of Fred Hampton and other things the city wants to forget.
Ripple Effects
Perhaps
the most important ripple effect of DSLR and movements
like it is the fact that it shook up both artists and
activists regarding things that have been neglected in their movements.
Many political artists complain that political art and
other forms of protest have become for the most part
dogmatic and boring.
"The problem with a lot of political art is that it's very instrumentalist and didactic," says Thompson. "You want to be able to be quirky and weird, not just linear."
Public art projects, even things that might not be overtly political like a woman kissing strange men on the street or a ball of trash rolling down the street, serve to spark the creativity and organic modes of expression that are stifled by the current capitalist and heavily-policed society.
"There is a very limited, narrow role that creativity is allowed to play in our social movements," explains Klonsky. "Maybe something creative will spice things up a little, invigorate people. Like if you paint a beautiful stencil in a weird place, it's not saying overthrow capitalism, it's just a stencil. That's not telling people what to think, but it makes people think."
And artists, who may become consumed with their own work and passions while forgetting or never learning of the political and economic struggles of the people around them, can be woken up to these issues through a reinvigorated political art scene.
"Art strictly defined is very alienating," says Thompson. "It has a long history of being bourgie and purposely elitist."
Whether the increasingly trendy "DSLR" handle continues to exist or not, Klonsky, Forman, Thompson, MacPhee and other participants hope the kind of diverse and celebratory energy and rebellion that was fostered in April continues to grow.
"One thing about most of the DSLR projects is the fact that you're breaking the law," MacPhee explains. "I
think that's valuable, first, for the person doing it-I try to encourage
people to break the law as much as possible. And it's also important for the
viewer, who sees someone transgressing the rules and more of a space is created
to do that."
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