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New Bulldozer Alarm!

出版	Art Practice, UC Berkeley, 2022-09-08
主題	Art / General
ISBN	9798218423285
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=2IC90AEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋The first week of August 2022 saw UC Berkeley's renewed attempt to claim People's Park for a student housing development. Photographs circulating of this clearing have a lot in common with historic visuals of protestor and police clashes at this site dating back to 1969. There are also new kinds of images from this altercation-of felled trees (42 in total), piled up logs, sawdust in the air, and pictures showing the disappearance of the tree canopy which provided shade to the unhoused people living in the park.Residing close to People's Park, and curious about this tree cutting during a heat wave, 233 (Ramon Blanco-Barrera), a Spanish visiting artist in the department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, set out to learn about the history of this park. To this end, Blanco-Barrera interviewed students, faculty, activists, neighborhood groups, and houseless people living in the park to understand the historical and contemporary context of this location. As a socially engaged artist, Blanco-Barrera's artwork blurs the line between object making, political activism, community organization, and pedagogy, and over the period of a month, he strategically built a platform to collaborate with the various constituents at People's Park. The outcome of this dialogical art process is the work New Bulldozer Alarm!, which is a monumental sculpture and a public intervention with photographs, drawings, texts and videos that instigate conversations about the event. By intervening architecturally at the park, New Bulldozer Alarm! exposes the multiplicity of contexts-the social, political, urban, and environmental forces that shape this site. With the help of the community, the artist wrapped a towering backhoe in blue tarp, embellished with gold bows and ribbons (UC Berkeley colors). At the request of the community members, the artist suspended a swing from the neck of the backhoe, turning it into a play structure. This wrapped monument transforms construction machinery into playground equipment, rendering it useless for excavating soil or tearing up the earth. The piece is a "gift" back to UC Berkeley to critically and poetically underscore the shortcomings and potentials present at this site. Text by Asma Kazmi & Jill Miller, Curators.