Sixteen people were arrested this week for displaying artist Gianluca Costantini's drawings of people killed by ICE inside a DC Senate building. The action was organized by Women's March members and used portraiture as its medium deliberately. Faces, not statistics. The act of display was the act of accusation.
When the Gallery Moves Into the Capitol
The choice of the Senate building as exhibition space is not incidental. It is a theory of where art has to go when institutions won't host it. Tracey Emin is simultaneously building a $5 million community arts hub in Margate, transforming a dilapidated beachside pavilion into permanent cultural infrastructure. Both moves are responses to the same question: where does art that matters to people who are not collecting it actually live? One answer is: you build a building. Another answer is: you walk into the building that already holds power and unfurl it there.
The Body as Institutional Argument
The Simone Forti interview published posthumously this week in Hyperallergic, by Julia Bryan-Wilson, runs underneath this moment as an unexpectedly resonant document. Forti spent decades arguing that the body in motion was a form of thought, that performance was not illustration of an idea but the idea itself. The ICE portrait action is a version of this: the bodies of the protesters, present in the Senate building, were inseparable from the portraits they carried. The arrest made the point. A work by Gianluca Costantini, drawings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good, became a public nuisance in the same week that Meta was found liable for being one. The ProblemChild Advisory model of anti-gatekept art for the people is what you get when the gates are actually doors to the Senate.