john t. unger studio

American Guernica: Great Minds Think (Sort Of) Alike

Ever since Clive Thompson posted about American Guernica on his excellent blog collision detection, the idea has really taken off. Quite a few people have chosen to participate in spreading the idea.

The coolest aspect of this is the discussions that have ensued in the comments of some of the blogs. It seems the Guernica project has really lived up to my goal of "making people think without attempting to control the outcome of that thought." A wide variety of interpretations have come forward, from using the project in a classroom exercise on interpreting images as text, to viewing the covering of the Guernica tapestry at the UN as a more successful instance of "shock art" than most intentionally provocative artworks. Heh. I really like that notion, even though I'm not sure that I didn't misinterpret it.

I'll be posting some of the discussions I find in other blog's comments here, but I'd also like to encourage readers to check out the other blogs who have posted on AG. Many of them have a ton of interesting content on other topics as well.

I'm also going to start posting about other projects which use Guernica as the starting point for discussion. In the course of looking to see who was linking to AG, I've found a bunch of other artists and groups who are thinking along similar lines. In fact, it turns out that Guernica has already been installed on a billboard, before it had even occurred to me!

 

 

The picture above is a billboard at Sunset & Hollywood in LA, installed in 2003 by Making Art Work, an organization dedicated to stimulating interaction between people and art. I was unaware of their work when I proposed my own American Guernica project. Matthew D'Abate wrote a great article on the MAW billboard project for the Daily Titan. I've reproduced it in the extended entry, just to make sure it remains available in the future.

Making Art Work's project was more strongly influenced by the censorship issues of the covering of Guenica during the UN press release than protesting war. On their site, they write:

In defiance of the U.N.’s censorship, a billboard of Guernica at the corner of Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards in Hollywood will be covered with a curtain each night from March 7 until March 17. The curtain, made of UV sensitive ink, is visible only under black light.

This is a slightly different mission or outlook than the American Guernica project. Although I was influenced by the UN incident, my motivation for suggestion Guernica billboards is more about protesting war… specifically the war in Iraq, but also war in general. I love the irony in the idea of erecting Guernica billboards along major highways, for instance, where, during traffic gridlock the project would take on the additional context of the role which gas and oil play in this war.

Anyway, now that I've found so many projects using similar themes and imagery, for similar yet different goals, I feel like it really confirms some of my ideas about collaboration, open source art, and so forth. Rather than feeling that overlapping projects devalue each other, I feel that the variety of interpretations and actions really reinforce a broader community of artists and politics. In my view, that's a good thing!

American Guernica Makes the Rounds

My call for entries, American Guernica, earned me a brief stint in the spotlight at one of my favorite blogs: We Make Money Not Art last week. I wish I'd posted about it earlier, because the moment has passed already, but I still highly recommend checking out Régine's blog. WMMNA is one of the first blogs I subscribed to and is still one of the first I check every morning.

American Guernica also got picked up on Visual Resistance, a very cool blog that "features political art and innovative projects aimed at raising awareness of urgent social issues through visual media." Eliot expanded nicely on the ideas behind the project and provides some great links to other Guernica-inspired protest art, including a picture of his first stencil, based on a portion of the painting.

 

 

Tags: billboard, Picasso, Guernica, antiwar, war, peace, politics, News and politics, culture jamming, free culture, activism, iraq, art, culture, collaboration, street art, tagging, graffiti, design, opensource

American Guernica: A Call for Guerilla Public Art

Update: American Guernica has been picking up steam. I'll be posting regular updates on the project under it's own category.

I've written here before about the idea of open-sourcing art projects to involve as many participants as possible. American Guernica is a perfect test case for that notion.

In a nutshell, I'd like to invite any interested groups or individuals to help plaster the USA with billboard size reproductions of Picasso's Guernica. Ideally, the work would stand without any text or headlines or additional commentary: if the painting is all that's seen, it forces the viewer to make an interpretation instead of being told what to think. Being told what to think is exactly what got Americans in trouble in the first place, no?

The following paragraph is not what inspired the idea, but I think it explains relatively well what one might hope to accomplish in this project:

A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war. Commissioned and donated by Nelson Rockefeller, it is not quite as monochromatic as the original, using several shades of brown. On February 5, 2003, a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Diplomats, however, told journalists that the Bush Administration leaned on UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq.  -- quoted from wikipedia

If the painting intimidates warmongers into covering it, then why not make sure that it goes up in as many public spaces as possible?

In terms of how the project is carried out, I don't really think it matters whether billboards are rented, plastered over in dark of night (see: BLF, the Billboard Liberation Front) or created just for this purpose. Obviously not everyone has the budget to actually rent billboard space, though it seems like this might be an option for funded activist groups. Now that most billboards are made to hold printed tarps rather than pasted up sheets of paper, it would certainly be easier and faster for guerrilla Guernicas to be painted on canvas and installed at whim. For those who do take the guerrilla approach, it might help to read this basic primer on how to appropriate billboards. Also check out the Wooster Collective for ideas and techniques.

I don't think it matters whether the images are photos, stencils, handpainted, collaged or what. If the project really took off, part of the excitement would be seeing the results of many different people interpreting a well know work in their own way. I will happily publish any photos sent in by participants of the project.

This is what I'm envisioning:

 

 

 

Disclaimer: I did these in photoshop, not the real world. Part of my motivation for open-sourcing the idea is that in the last year, I haven't managed to act on it myself. I'm hoping that people with stronger motivation or resources will be able to make it happen if I plant the seed here.

Meanwhile, I think I'll look into what it costs to rent a billboard in my area and set up a contribution fund on Fundable.org to cover the cost. Fundable is great for this kind of thing because they automatically refund everyone's money if the fundraising for a project is not completed within the specified deadline.

Tags: billboard, Picasso, Guernica, antiwar, war, peace, politics, News and politics, culture jamming, free culture, activism, iraq, art, culture, collaboration, street art, tagging, graffiti, design, opensource