Visual Resistance at the Whitney Biennial
Posted March 1st, 2006 by eliot
Last weekend, members of Visual Resistance installed a mural at the Whitney Museum. Our friends at Deep Dish TV had been invited to show their Shocking and Awful series at the Whitney Biennial. They were assigned a 20-inch TV mounted on a 20-foot wall, which they wanted to spice up a little bit. They called us about 10 days ago and asked us to come up with a mural based on Picasso’s Guernica.
Picasso painted Guernica in response to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy’s savage bombing of the civilian population of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The painting was toured throughout Europe to raise awareness of republican Spain’s cause, and after the war was exhibited in New York to raise money for Spanish refugees. It has been an inspiration to antiwar activists and political artists for decades. Colin Powell had a tapestry reproduction of the painting at United Nations headquarters covered up before his speech selling the Iraq war. Artist Mary Frank created hundreds of placards with images from Guernica for people to carry during the massive February 15, 2003 protests against the war, and World War 3 Arts in Action created similar placards for the March 22, 2003 protest. Deep Dish interviewed Mary Frank for their Art of Resistance segment.
In 7 days, we created paper cutouts of four figures from Guernica and mounted them on a background of wheatpasted stock ticker on a wall measuring 21′ x 10′ on the Whitney’s lower level. Here are some photos of the installation:
More photos on our photolog and flickr. One of our goals in this project was to create the images using common street art techniques so that they would be easily reproducible for use on the street. The paper cutouts turned out the be very intricate and fragile and took a long time to paste up, but I am including below two images that I quickly Photoshopped from pictures of the installation that you can download and use to create stencils, silkscreens, or cutouts:
The lamp is by far the easiest figure to recreate — for stencils and paper cutouts, you just have to bridge the lightbulb to the top curve. The other figures are progressively more complicated, but each can be reproduced with any number of common printing techniques.
Several months back, John Unger proposed an open-source art project called American Guernica. The idea was to put Picasso’s painting on billboards throught the US as a protest against the current wars being waged by the US. While billboard space is probably out of our range, working on this Whitney installation has gotten VR folks talking about using Guernica images on the street in New York. If you’re interested, drop us a line. I’d especially like to talk to talented graphic designers who can transform some of the figures into ready-to-cut stencil templates using Illustrator.
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Our installation will be up throughout the Biennial, which ends on May 28. The Whitney is on Lexington Ave at 75th St. Admission is $12, except for Fridays from 6–9pm, when you can pay what you want. If you tell the security guard you are going to the gift shop, you can get to the lower level (where our mural is) for free although it’s unclear whether you can then get to the rest of the museum from there.
Many thanks to Bryan, Elvira, Dee Dee, and the rest of Deep Dish for this opportunity and to Jason, Beka, and Winnie at The Change You Want to See for the generous use of their studio space. For background info on Guernica, see Wikipedia, and J Hoberman’s fantastic article, Pop and Circumstance. For a longer treatment that came in real handy for us, see Guernica: The Making of a Painting.
