The Challenge of Translating Site-Based Art to the Museum Setting

Featured on nonprofitquarterly.org

If you didn’t look very closely at the unassuming bust of a young man in glasses on display at the Brooklyn Museum, you may not have realized that the sculpture is not a famous author or scientist, but in fact Edward Snowden, the former CIA employee responsible for one of the largest classified intelligence leaks in the history of the United States. The bust features prominently in the second installment of Agitprop!, a three-part exhibition of political art. The title of the exhibition, which is a combination of the words “agitation” and “propaganda,” is meant to refer to works that utilize art to create political and social change.

As with many contemporary art works, however, the subject of the sculpture is only a small part of the intended aim of the work. This piece originally appeared in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park in the early hours of April 6th, 2015, furtively placed atop a preexisting revolutionary war monument from 1908. Within a few hours, NYPD removed the statue and retained it until the artists responsible for the project claimed it. Jeff Greenspan, Andrew Tider, and Doyle Trankina, who conceived of and created the work, were fined $50 for being in the park after dark and had to retrieve the 100-pound, four-foot-tall sculpture from the local precinct. In a statement about the project, the artists titled their work “Prison Ship Martyrs Monument 2.0” and stated that its goal is to “highlight those who sacrifice their safety in the fight against modern-day tyrannies.”

The work’s original installation in the park and subsequent exhibition in the Brooklyn Museum highlights the challenge in establishing political art as a conventional artistic genre. The work is exhibited in a mélange that includes such disparate projects as Soviet-era protests, a series of 1930s photographs of laborers in Mexico, and Jenny Holzer’sInflammatory Essays series, which appropriates polemical political rhetoric to promote awareness of the subliminal ideologies that infiltrate daily life. The exhibition description on the museum’s website states that its aim is to “connect contemporary art devoted to social change with historic moments in creative activism.”

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