Public Parking
A journal for storytelling, arguments, and discovery through tangential conversations.
On the Creative Praxis of Splattering Paint on Monuments
Wednesday, September 2, 2020 | Bahar Orang
The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it endeavor to cover up this nature of things. Every statue of these conquistadors ensconced on colonial soil is a constant reminder: “We are here by the force of the bayonet.” - Frantz Fanon Now the statue is bleeding. We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation. This is not an act of vandalism. It is a work of public art and an act of applied art criticism. - Monument Removal Brigade What are the aesthetics of carcerality that organize and regulate our psychic lives? Monuments are carceral art objects that overcode and overdetermine public memory. They are symbols of state power and affirmations of the status quo whose function in urban psychogeography is to preserve and advance particular nationalist memories. They interpellate us, the public, as docile subjects and we pass them by, we become accustomed to them, we take them for granted, and our capacity for conceiving otherwise is blunted1. We walk...