L.A. street artists release video of MOCA protest
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Downtown LA BLU MOCA Whitewash Protest // 01.03.2011 from jesse trott on Vimeo.
Should you have been doing something sensible last night -- like, say, not hanging out in a deserted downtown L.A. parking lot on a blustery, frigid evening -- then you may be interested in this video. It’s a first-hand account of an L.A. street art crew’s guerrilla protest performance against MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch.
The street and graffiti artists, together with a handful of war veterans, gathered Monday night in the dark, empty parking lot of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo to stage their laser-light protest.
The controversy is now well-trod territory: Some claim that Deitch’s removal of Blu’s anti-war mural is censorship. Deitch says he was concerned the mural’s images of coffins draped in dollar bills might be offensive to some in the neighborhood seeing as there was a nearby Veterans Affairs hospital and a war memorial to Japanese American soldiers.
Cloaked in knit caps and heavy wool scarves in the cold night air, the 20 or so art activists huddled near the museum’s expansive north wall, projecting laser graffiti out of the back seat of a silver VW Passat with a laptop perched precariously on the roof of the car. The artists took turns tagging the still-blank museum wall using a handmade laser graffiti gun created specially for the event.
Click here to read Culture Monster’s full report.
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-- Deborah Vankin
