Coval Kevin - This Is Modern Art A Play

T H IS IS M O D E RN ART CHA R A C TERS T H E W R I TERS (4 ) S e v e n: A f ri ca n A m e ri c a n mal e , e a r l y 20s J ose Clem e nte / J C : M e x ic a n Am e ri ca n mal e , e a r l y 20s Dose : P u e rto R i ca n A me r ic a n mal e , ea r l y s S e lena : W hi t e f e mal e , e a r l y s
T H E O T H ERS (2-4 ) W hi t e m a le e ns e mb l e pl a y e r, l a te 30s to l a t e 40s M a r c o / P ol i c e o f fi c e r / S e len a s da d / S tudent /
N e ws a n c h o r / R e spond e rs B la c k fe ma l e ens e mb l e p l a y e r, l a te 20s to mid 30s Rhonda / N e ws a n c h o r / S tudent / R e spond e rs /
P ol i c e r e p / P R Contents Foreword This Is Modern Art is a play about a crime committed on February 21, 2010, when a graffiti crew bombed the Renzo Piano Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. The play is about more than just this particular art crime, however. It is also about an ongoing kind of crime perpetrated by the powerful against those in the margins, a more universal history of oppression that takes place through the prescription of what is beautiful. The so-called crime that occurred on February 21, 2010, was visible for a few short hours and carried a steep monetary fine and prison terms, and it forced four young people to go underground and become fugitives. The more pervasive crime has been carried out with impunity for more than a century by our most celebrated cultural institutions and will never be tried in any court of law. In fact, the idea that an elite sector of society is empowered to decide what is considered art, and therefore what deserves to be valued, collected and preserved in museums on behalf of us all, is a widely accepted norm.

This Is Modern Art asks a lot from the reader/audience. It asks us to be outraged by this contradiction and to be willing to ask some difficult questions about the relationship between truth, justice and beauty: Who gets to define what counts as art, and who are always the winners and losers in this decision? When I refer to the margins, I am thinking of bell hooks and her description of the margins as a space where people of color have always been forced to create freedom. The play explores these margins to tell the subterranean history of graffiti so that we can see it, really see it , as an art movement, as a mode of survival and resistance, and as an act of rebellion and revolution. In this way, This Is Modern Art presents graffiti as a diasporic art form much like the blues or jazz. The Greek word diaspora is a combination of dia- (meaning through) and the verb sperein (to sow or to scatter). When one refers to the African Diaspora, it is usually a reference to the aftermath of transatlantic slavery that began in the fifteenth century and continued for almost four centuries.

This Is Modern Art is a play that asks a lot from the audience/reader. The play asks us to admit we are illiterate when it comes to graffitiignorant of its history, politics, and poeticsand that we need to be schooled. Without this background, graffiti is illegible. And to this end, the play is instructive, but also revelatory. Some works of graffiti function as informal popular education, a kind of public commentary and critique that can be easily read by as many people as possible. For example, the word STOLEN spray painted in large red letters across a building that used to be affordable housing and is now in the process of becoming so-called luxury lofts is a lesson about urban renewal and gentrification.

This one-word art crime speaks truth to power and conjures a feeling about what is happening in our cities more powerfully, and certainly more succinctly, than any policy analysis ever could. However, for the most part, in order to decode the tags, make sense of the exuberance of wildstyle or bubble letters, interpret the shout-outs found in pieces and throwups, an expansive visual and cultural literacy is actually necessary. And while This Is Modern Art attempts to make graffiti more legible for us on the outside, the play also makes it clear that we will never truly be able to read what is not by and for us. Graffitis illegibility is intentional. To borrow a term from Eduard Glissant, an anticolonial thinker from Martinique, graffiti is opaque. According to Glissant, this opacity is an intentional form of illegibility that is a mode of resistance against an expectation of transparency and an embrace of the right to not have to be understood on others terms, a right to be misunderstood.

Against the insistence that everything be illuminated, simplified and explained, Glissant suggests that opacity is an adamant response and refusal to be understood on the oppressors terms. This Is Modern Art is a play that asks a lot from the audience/reader. In order to empathize with the lead charactersSeven, JC, Dose, and Selenawe must be willing to privilege the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of these young graffiti artists more than we privilege private property. We must empathize with them as criminals. The plays meditation on criminality, statistics about the prison industrial complex and the disproportionate incarceration of young people of color is not ancillary, but essential to the story. The MUL crew evade the police, avoid detection, tactically equip themselves for a quick get-away, and live on the run.

But criminality is more than just a fact of life for the graffiti artists in the play. It is a political aesthetic and part of what makes graffiti a fugitive art form. In The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013), a remarkable text by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, they propose fugitivity as a mode of survival, a lived space and site of ongoing exploration and study, where black culture is both relentlessly and unstoppably emergent and also constantly under threat of disappearing by assimilationist white cultural forces. Fugitivity permeates the black American experience from transatlantic captivity and the starry night journeys of Harriet Tubman, to the intergalactic flight of Sun Ra during his imprisonment in Alabama as a conscientious objector, to the underground life of members of the graffiti crew. The popular slogan from within the movement Keep Graffiti Illegal might seem somewhat perplexing and even absurd. Why not advocate for the legality of graffiti and make permission walls, for example, an essential part of every urban landscape? The desire to maintain the street form as an art crime and graffitis ontology as an illegal practice can be understood by Frantz Fanons notion of reciprocal recognition, which offers insight into the psychology of oppression.

In Black Skin, White Masks , Fanon provides a brilliant analysis of the rash of criminal behavior in North Africa during Frances occupation of Algeria in the 1950s. Fanon explains what might be perceived by some as savage behavior, but is in fact part of the black mans human need for recognition and as part of his desire for identity, self-worth and dignity. One is human to the extent that one is recognized by the law, and in a society filled with oppression, disenfranchisement, abandonment, and neglect, the full acknowledgement of humanity and integrity as a citizen for some often occurs only when one is subjected to the laws of the state as a criminal. I am not merely here-and-now sealed into thingness. I am for somewhere else and for something else. I demand that notice be taken of my negating activity insofar as I pursue something other than life, insofar as I do battle for creation of a human worldthat is, a world of reciprocal recognition.