Love Is a Souvenir: A Case Study

Abstract

Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear. (John Lennon)

In 2011, the Center for Tactical Magic began discussions with a loose group of artists, designers, journalists, activists, lawyers, and civil rights groups about how to effectively address the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) controversial racial profiling tactics, often referred to as ‘Stop and Frisk’.¹ A year later, the Center teamed up with the Street Vendor Project of the Urban Justice Center, along with the non-profit arts venue Flux Factory, to launch Love Is a Souvenir, a collaborative initiative involving dozens of New York City souvenir vendors in Lower Manhattan. Presented here is not merely a glamorized summary of the Center’s public intervention into the social and cultural topography surrounding Stop and Frisk but rather an account of its objectives, processes, outcomes, and shortcomings. In short, this is a case study of the successes and failures of an engaged, critical, and creative initiative.

Part 1: The Questions

When we started this Center for Tactical Magic project, we were interested in how the racial profiling policies of the NYPD were being framed entirely within a localized juridical discussion, whose participants consisted mostly of activists, lawyers, and low-income communities of color. At the same time, similar policy trends were being explored in other major US cities, including San Francisco and Oakland. Three crucial questions propelled our initial process:

Rather than simply creating an aesthetic, representational response, how can we critically engage this issue in a manner that can produce actual effects?

Can discursive art practices be better situated to enhance or expand the discussion around social issues in a manner that works in tandem with other organizing efforts on multiple fronts?

How can seemingly unrelated social forces be leveraged against policy-makers in an attempt to achieve social justice?

Part 2: The Sphere of Influence

We then mapped out a performative matrix² of the key players, along with other social, political, and economic vectors that could influence New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office. We surmised that the discussion could be expanded beyond the parameters of New York City legal structures if we could shift the conversation into corresponding realms of public image, tourism, and cultural economies of representation.

Part 3: The Community Partners

In looking at the tourist trade, we began to think of street vendors as New York’s frontline cultural ambassadors − those who would frequently interact with tourists. Souvenir vendors in particular work every day selling items that promote New York’s public image as a place characterized by love, liberty, and respect (e.g. ‘I Love NY’ shirts, Statue of Liberty hats, and a bevy of NYPD-branded items). We approached the Urban Justice Center and connected with Sean Basinski of its Street Vendor Project. He informed us that most of the souvenir vendors in Battery Park and at the Statue of Liberty ferry landing were African-American veterans, many of whom had experienced harassment by the police. He agreed to work with us on developing the project further and to help make introductions within the street vendor community.

Part 4: Conceptual Development

The conceptual thrust of Love Is a Souvenir was three-fold:

Although New Yorkers hurry past souvenir stands without batting an eyelash, tourists will go from one to the next looking at their wares and trying to get the best deal. We thought that a different or unusual item, such as an idiosyncratic T-shirt, might catch people’s attention and provoke an exchange. The shirts essentially could function both as protest signs and as props to generate conversation between tourists and vendors, many of whom were already directly impacted by aggressive policing.

Once in place, the project could also serve as a narrative prop for the media to expand the conversation around Stop and Frisk beyond the limited scope of debate. This would help address the enduring social/cultural/political shift that was not being addressed.

Enough attention to the project potentially could leverage the tourist audience and economy against the Mayor’s Office, suggesting that aggressive policing has become so synonymous with New York’s public image that it has become part of the tourist experience. If Stop and Frisk could be re-scripted as a crisis in New York’s public image, it could possibly activate widespread New Yorker pride against Mayor Bloomberg’s policy decisions.

Part 5: Design Process

We produced six different T-shirt designs. Through email and social media, we established a focus group consisting of community organizations, activists, creative professionals, colleagues, and friends. The focus group weighed in on the designs to help select the final version. The selected design was a simple détournement of the iconic ‘I [heart] NY’ logo. We imagined it as an interrogation of the ways in which public policy imprints itself upon the social and cultural fabric of the city − both literally and figuratively. The love is gone, and it has been replaced by a symbol for a racist policy. New York’s public image is changing − and not for the better − unless we put some heart back into it.

Although the other designs were perhaps aesthetically or conceptually more interesting, the final design was seen as best suited to our purposes. Additionally, the focus group helped to build awareness of the issue, as well as the project.

Part 6: Into the Streets

Among the dozens of vendors we spoke with, across wide demographics, only two did not want to participate. And, of those two, only one cited support for the policy of Stop and Frisk as his reason. Nearly all said they had been harassed by police or knew someone who had been. Some stories were emotionally heavy, and the conversations were often lasting and intense. As artists, we often struggle in these situations with the ethics of how or whether to attempt to document these moments. That we were not more prepared to archive this aspect of the project is perhaps the first major shortcoming.

Our imagined solution to this problem was to have journalists there to take on the documentation role. On the first day out, no media outlets had responded to our press release. On the second day, there was one: The New York Times. The Times staff were a pleasure to hang out with, and we spent the entire afternoon talking to street vendors and snapping shots as they hung the T-shirts in their stalls. At the end of the day, the journalists said they would do their best to tell the story, but they cautioned that the editor would most likely present it as a personality profile and a public interest story. Sure enough, that was largely the case. Although the issue was present in the reporting, the spotlight was not where we had hoped it would be.

Part 7: The Exhibition

A project like this can easily exist outside the formal conventions of presenting art. However, to exhibit this project is one way in which we expand the conversation and directly support the assertion that such issues are not merely of concern to lawyers and minority communities. On the one hand, the documentation of such a project serves as a surrogate for experiencing the work as it exists in another public context, and the gallery plays host to discussions that might not occur without the display elements to provoke audiences. But the exhibition does not merely serve to validate a work performed in a separate context; rather, it expands the context in which the work is performed.

This is only possible if we consider the difference between work that is engaged and work that is representational. Put another way, we might borrow heavily from Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934), in which he makes a parallel distinction between works with a ‘position’ and those with an ‘attitude’. That is to say that while every work must inhabit a particular space, a positioned or engaged work must be self-reflexive about the conditions in which it is produced and experienced. The same holds true not only for the work, but also for art institutions that exhibit such work.

If museums and other exhibition venues see their roles solely as preservers of culture, one cannot expect that any work would move beyond telling a story, representing a set of ideas, or having an attitude about a subject. However, institutions that articulate a mission of cultural engagement must necessarily conceive of the exhibition as a set of ideas that are activated and put into motion beyond the walls of the exhibition space. As artists working with such institutions, we felt it essential that we considered the exhibition in an expanded context and attempted to meet the corresponding challenges.

As part of Public Trust, a group show at Flux Factory curated by Christina Vassallo and Douglas Paulson, this project was situated among others that sought to actively interrogate public institutions. The exhibition did not start and end at the threshold of the gallery; rather, it used the gallery as a sort of operational hub to define, enable, and deploy artistic strategies externally. Thus, the exhibition was regarded as something that existed both within and without the formal exhibition space.

Even for those who will never see the exhibition in any of its forms, giving the project an additional frame outside activism resituates the audience’s relation to the underlying issues. In that moment, art is less likely to be limited to representational forms and is instead regarded as creativity activated toward sculpting our shared social and political reality.

Part 8: In Conclusion

This work failed and succeeded on different levels. Although the various community interactions throughout the project’s lifespan were rewarding and effective, our media relations were lousy and our documentation not much better. Although we didn’t expect this project to resolve the problem of police misconduct and draconian public policies, we wanted to position this work in a manner that could actively lean on the levers and tangibly affect the grinding of the machinery.

With honest reflection, we would have to admit that the project did not circulate widely enough to achieve the impact we had hoped for. Yet if we regard this as a template for future endeavors − both ours and those of others − we can find value in an underlying framework of analysis that still seems sound and connected. By recognizing that the production and exhibition of artworks exist within a larger sphere of social, cultural, and political influences, we can begin to develop creative strategies and tactics that deepen artistic (and curatorial) involvement within a particular field of inquiry. The combination of art, activism, and social engagement can benefit from a multifaceted approach to the research, development, execution, and exhibition of a project. This may often mean that each aspect − research, fieldwork, outreach, a media campaign, performance, documentation, and so forth − gets treated as its own work participating within overlapping spheres of influence. After all, the political realities we are all faced with do not simply remain contained within an isolated frame on a neutral wall, so why should we?

Figure 1

Alternative t-shirt design #1: Mayor Bloomberg reprises David Copperfield’s landmark illusion, ‘Vanishing Liberty’.

Figure 2

Alternative t-shirt design #2: Can we escape from the dystopian future world of Escape from New York?

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Footnotes

Notes

Aaron Gach is a convergent media artist whose work consistently addresses public space, social politics and community dynamics. Inspired by studies with a private investigator, a magician, and a ninja, he established the Center for Tactical Magic in 2000. This collaborative authoring framework is dedicated to the coalescence of art, magic, and creative tactics for encouraging positive social change, and is largely the result of creative partnerships with a wide array of individuals from many different backgrounds. In addition to producing national and international projects for museums, communities, and major cities, Aaron Gach has taught courses in Community Art, Street Media, Art & Magic, Collaborative Practices, and 4D Art at the University of California – Santa Cruz, Stanford University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and currently at California College of the Arts.

Address: Community Arts Program, California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94618-1426, USA. [email: agach.ctm@gmail.com]

References

Benjamin

(1934) The Author as Producer. Address delivered at the Institute for the Study of Fascism, 27 April, Paris. In: Jephcott

(trans.) Reflections. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

McKenzie

Schneider

and the Critical Art Ensemble (2000) Critical Art Ensemble Tactical Media Practitioners: An Interview. TDR 44(4): 136–150. Available at: https://www-jstor-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/stable/1146868 (accessed 11 October 2015).

New York Civil Liberties Union (2015) Stop and frisk data. Available at: http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data (accessed 11 October 2015).