Update on Target Practice: great interviews last week, one or two more to shoot, editing to a scratch track has begun. Citizen Artist projects are always more than just the individual artwork. Target Practice started out as a poem. It’s slowly becoming a film. It’s already a continuing art installation. We placed 40+ Black Lives Matter signs in a six block area. Most of them replaced previously stolen signs. The new signs also said, in small print at the bottom, “in Glen Echo” to bring more locality. (They also have our logo real small in the corner. Branding is everything.) The installation was a reenactment of George Floyd summer when the neighborhood was a sea of BLM signs. Small-time domestic terrorists have, as expected, participated in this Citizen Artist project by stealing over 2/3 of the signs. One house is on its fourth sign as they steal them again and again. CPD has played their part by minimizing the import of the thefts. It’s a contemporary passion play with banal villains and comic opera cops as stock characters.
I wish I could interview some police officers so I could have their catch-22 style responses on record. Rather than acknowledge the thefts are racially motivated, they suggest youthful pranks (etc., etc.,etc.,). As though youths have never participated in a lynching. Because I am white, they say, racial hatred can’t be the motivation. These are their less absurd assertions.
Target Practice is being produced with support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
