FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).
WTO PROTEST NOSTALGIA looks like it’s here to stay, like it or not.
And it’s already being transformed into something apolitical and nonthreatening.
Most of the works in the “Whole World Is Watching” exhibition of WTO-themed art at the Center on Contemporary Art treat last fall’s four days of marches, teach-ins, rallies, and police brutality as a sociocultural experience (a “happening”) rather than a cross-cultural movement against consolidating corporate power.
It’s easy to see how the show’s contributing artists could develop this point of view. WTO had lots of elements just ready to be turned into 2-D art representing 1-D worldviews.
There was excitement. There was motion. There were easily-caricaturable heroes (the protestors, especially the young, hip ones) and villains (the Imperial Stormtrooper-masked cops and the square bureaucrats giving their orders). There was violence against property. There was violence against people (almost all of it inflicted by the police; but with no known fatalaties).
Even the zines and posters about WTO at the COCA show, both those published during and after the protests, often seemed less interested in building a more equitable world than in provoking an “X-treme” visceral response among readers and viewers.
(Two major exceptions among the show’s visual-art components: Friese Undine’s wall of mug-shot-size portraits of world political and business leaders, and Chris Johnson and Jenniffer Velasco’s mini-mural of the street protests in which the symbols of the real issues (an Asian garment worker, for instance) are almost hidden in corners and interstices of the image.
At the show’s opening party last Saturday, I met many people who remembered the events of six months ago as an exciting time, a once-in-a-lifetime high of energy and even accomplishment (the city shut down; the WTO conference itself ended in disagreement and strife).
But will it come to mean nothing but that?
An ironic note of caution came at the Benham Studio Gallery’s art opening two nights before the COCA party. On display: Late-’60s rock celebrity photos by Graham Nash and scenes from the original Woodstock festival by Elliott Landy; scheduled to coincide with the opening of the Experience Music Project later this month.
Most all the turmoil and strife of the period were far out of these photographers’ camera range. You saw no racial anguish (indeed, no black people except rock stars), no political upheavals, no suburban sprawl, nothing in far-off trouble spots such as Vietnam.
And no garage-rock, bubblegum pop, Atlantic soul, or avant-jazz music. Just the media-appointed goddesses and gods of rock and crossover R&B, and their wild-oat-sowing fan tribe. Just a demographic-marketing target group celebrating its specialness and mistaking hedonism for revolution. (Remember, the original Woodstock was a business venture, partly funded by Warner Bros. and intended to be a relatively controversy-free entertainment.)
The WTO protest subculture (or rather, the white-hipster, demographically-privileged segment of that subculture) could so easily be similarly tamed.
MONDAY: Imagining the WTO generation thirty years from now.
IN OTHER NEWS: For one of menswear’s most creative inventors, “Aloha” means goodbye.
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