Art Walk Review. Signs on Main Street.

   

Art Review
"Untitled"
Skid Row Street Signs (Various)
Artist: Richard McDowell
Curator: Bert Green
Gallery: Main Street near Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles
Debut: September 14th, Downtown Arts Walk at Gallery Row
Closing: On-going
Additional narrative and working art titles: art.blogging.la (One Man's B.I.D. Is Another Man's Crack Haven)  blogdowntown (Skid Row Signage: ACLU Crack Haven [with comments] ), viewfromaloft (This Way Please) and at post time, Downtown Los Angeles Central City East Blogger  (Is the Los Angeles Community Action Group Engaged in Censorship)aka "Blog-LA-Sphere"

Site specific public art traditionally uses community dialog during it's development and responds to space and form of a planned location. Richard McDowell's Skid Row Street Signs, presented September 14th during the Downtown Arts Walk, served as crack, pot, heroin wayfinders remains compelling commentary evaluating Downtown's changing landscape. The dialog after the execution of the installation demonstrates the new process of socialization that engages social criticism, artists as resident responding to personal public space and the involvement of non artists interpreting artistic intent and context –– all as the purpose of the signs remained a mystery.

          

The procession of McDowell's streets signs, by estimate 3.5 ft by 1 ft, were stationed with irregular intervals at sidewalk locations well known as pick up points for narcotics along the Main Street portion of Downtown's Gallery Row. The signs are in fact very functional way finders with it's simple typography and readability –– ironically more readable than some civic street signs.  Without knowing of the installation, we as participates identify sites that successively glance at you like a subtle look from a dealer wanting to confirm you are the next coke client and all those walking on the sidewalks of Main Street find themselves where the visible transactions are made. The gallery is the part of the city with detailed architecture that fronts a growing economic border that at ground level the street became an original work of art, then performance art as the signs were taken down in protest to protect agendas.   

The signs that identified parts of Main Street as a Farmer's Market for narcotics also carried researched targeted criticism of Mayor Villaraigosa, activist Alice Callahan, Mike Antonovich, and LA CAN (The  Los Angeles Citizens Action Network) suggesting that they are empowering the problem rather than finding sound solutions. Also targeted was the ACLU,  and was reported in the LA Times today that a compromise was reached with the city allowing Skid Row arrests to be made, yet tolerate  overnight camping as legal on designated Los Angeles sidewalks from 9 pm to 6 am. Containment is a solution that Los Angeles has back to after a full  circle of time and expense yet the works by McDowell may have had more impact  than special interest groups, BIDS and social services in focusing the issue  of narcotics victimizing residents. Residents of either the lofts or the streets.

   

  Art.blogging.la connected with the artist Richard McDowell, via Bert Green who himself wrote on the compromise reached between the ACLU and City of LA:

   

     

While that might sound like it is in defense of the homeless, it actually empowers drug dealers who prey on homeless and pose as homeless to do so. What is now a mostly downtown problem will soon be exported city-wide by well-meaning but clueless westside activists who are unaware of the effects  of their policies as they have manifested downtown.

 

The additional commentary, responses and working titles by all bloggers makes for a crowded theatre with it's audience talking back to the screen. What is intriguing is many of the groups targeted would normally have the support of artists or anyone using the "street cred" of guerilla art. But the signs expressed a response that has very little tolerance to those using the streets of LA as the retail storefront of drug trafficking. In an artists statement, McDowell states:

There are a lot of people suffering out there. The signs were  intended to be apart of the artwalk as an installation to promote public awareness on a much bigger issue.  One that no one seems to be addressing, and that is the tremendous, and overwhelming amount of narcotics being consumed on the streets, and under the guise of homeless.

 

The timing of placement was during the Downtown Arts Walk at the opening of art season and the simple signs brings up topics of ranging from censorship of thought to victimization of the homeless.  It presents institutions who rely on reputations of integrity, and themselves are critical of  political hypocrisy, may be causing some of the alienation of people. And  as blogger 5000 notes,  finding out the intent of an individual's narrative  may cause a change in perspective.  This is something everyone in the who is committed to create Los Angeles as community can practice.