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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Artists discuss the city in GSU exhibit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cathy Byrd, the Welch School Gallery director at Georgia State University, asked artists, architects and community activists to respond to the idea of urban change in “Urban Intervention: The Beltline.” Their contributions range from advocacy to metaphor.
My review:
Many of their projects make the Beltline a point of departure, so to speak, for a broader look at city issues. Call them citizen artists. In artworks ranging from a cartoon-strip fairy tale to a garden of native, drought-resistant plants in Hurt Park, they prove that you don’t need a soapbox to (forgive me) find your voice.
Joan Tysinger’s video “The Wheelchair Diaries” brings home the perils of taking a wheelchair “walk” on city streets. The piece, pairing two perspectives — the view from her chair and the same path shot by friends who walk with or behind her — creates a queasy sensation, which aptly complements her experience.
Tysinger narrates as she goes, revealing the countless decisions and disappointments she faces as she negotiates an obstacle course of fractured sidewalks, missing curb cuts and lightning-quick green lights. You come away not only with a vicarious experience of the abstract term “wheelchair accessibility” but also with admiration for a true road warrior.
Video and photography are frequently the vehicles of choice for advocacy art. No matter how often we hear “the camera lies,” we still respond to the immediacy of those media. That’s the premise behind “Photovoice,” a community-based program for promoting social change through photography. Members of a citizen advocacy group used the program to document the problems — vacant lots, trash heaps, boarded-up homes — that blight their South Atlanta neighborhoods as part of the Dirty Truth Campaign (dirtytruth.org).
Some of their photos are in the gallery along with a video by Margaret Hooker, a community outreach worker. She was pleased to be swamped by visitors at the exhibit’s opening. “Our neighborhood is hidden. The show exposed us to a totally new audience.”
In addition, the organization has planned an event for policy-makers in the gallery. Obviously, blurring boundaries between artist and layman, art and advocacy has its benefits. But it can be difficult to strike a balance between the two. “Willa’s Wonderland,” the comic strip-style fantasy tour around the Beltline by Amy Landesberg and Ralph Nelson, is creative in its conception and presentation. But preachiness (the moral: the importance of building a dream with vision and wisdom) gets the better of the wonder.
Architect Ryan Gravel, who first conceived the Beltline, and artist Danielle Roney go too far in the arty direction. One contribution is an abstruse video that documents ongoing happenings in Beltline neighborhoods. (Some explanatory text might have helped.) The other is a video maquette for a public art project, which seems to require a lot of technology for a rather minor return.
Architects Ed Akin and David Green hit the sweet spot with their installation. A single cicada in a plexiglass box faces a wall on which are projected images of industrial air-conditioner fans blown up to heroic geometry. The sound of their whirring motors, piped near the insect, transmogrifies into cicada chirps near the photo wall. In the center, between them, single stones suspended from the ceiling hover above a reflecting pool.
The piece is a poetic incarnation of the idea that the Beltline, symbolized by the central element, must negotiate between, or integrate, the natural and man-made environments to succeed. And it suggests the complex interrelationship of man and environment, both built and natural, that urban interventions can change — for better or worse.
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