© Copyright Oraib Toukan, 2007

1.    Public art is a tautology. It exists only in so far as the parameters of our own weight in space are not challenged.  And because they are, public art only exists as fractions of attributions we give to the meaning of the words public and art.  The problem is that the word public cannot be defined without the private and art cannot be conferred without art itself.

2.    In the absence of both historic and cartographic representations of the city in the Arab world, and the omni-presence of national (and/or sectarian) secret intelligence, the confines of public and private realms are even further blurred and complicated.

3.    The word public is that which pertains to ‘the people’. ‘The people’ come to connote class much in the same as ‘the street’ comes to connote monarchy.  What is more certain is, that which is not public is private, and what is not private is public.

4.    Web search the word private and porn sites like private.com are enlisted one after the other.  The use of public space privately can perhaps be deemed, pornographic.

5.    The lure to public art is understandable, even crucial, dogmatic, and fun: Demographic characteristics of art openings that beg to be challenged. Unusual locations and cityscapes that beg for unexpected and surprise encounters with projects, objects, and events. Work that is looking to provoke ‘the street’, or be made by it.  Or processes that are looking to break introverted studio-based practice to community based ones.

6.    Oddly and coincidently the word democracy has also been added to this list in the further lure of ‘democratizing’ art and art spaces by, in theory, engaging the public to participate in the creation of spaces of freedom.

7.    Perhaps, likely, the push to public art may just be another ploy of transforming the white cube experience into yet another experience for artist, institution, and audience alike. 

8.    Power aside, the gallery might actually be a street experience.  Strictly speaking, it’s public, it’s free, and some gallery staff may even get irritated by its pedestrian leg.  Museums are supposedly working so hard at mending the gap with the public, that some have become entertainment hubs that feel more like fish markets at dawn than the supposed contemplative spaces they once were.  Perhaps art has become so ‘public’ that criticism has/will be evaporated to its thinnest film of cloud yet, in what has become Plato’s gymnasium of academic sampling.

9.    Power cannot be put aside.

10.    Like public art, revolutions are orchestrated on the street.  The artist uses art to empower the public. If the public reacts to the work, then the public has become empowered.  If the public is empowered then the artist symbolizes power. The artist is therefore a hero.  A hero can then dictate.  An artist is a dictator.

11.    On April 9, 2003 Saddam Hussein’s statue was torn down at Sahet Al Firdos in Baghdad.  Just a year before that, the 12-meter high public statue had been commissioned to artists and erected in a public square in honor of Saddam Hussein’s 65th birthday.  In an event carefully stage-managed by the US army and aired on public television Saddam’s statue was pulled down by a tank.  This was to become the iconic moment of the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s reign and the occupation of Iraq.  In our private realms we were therefore watching: an event, a sculpture pulled down by the public, a public icon come down, a commission that was envisioned to become an antiquity of an era, in a public square torn down, and live.  Watching a US soldier mask the statue’s face with an American flag before bulldozing it down with a tank (and realizing he needs to replace it with an Iraqi flag instead) was when this live spectacle became too ironic.  That is the point at which one might have spat at the TV screen and specifically at the tight shot CNN’s cameraman was feeding us of this whole ordeal.  That is the point at which I realized there was no public, and no public space.  It was a matter of perception and attribution; dictated by the power of stage-managing, constructing, and art-directing space itself.

12.    A few months later a Sgt. Major Charles Fuss commissions a sculpture to commemorate the fall of some of the US’s 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit. He envisions the fallen patriot; the soldier kneeling down to mourn before an empty, boot, helmet and rifle with a girl consoling him by his side. Major Fuss asks around for a great sculptor and was referred to a 27 year old sculptor-for-hire who did many of Saddam’s statues in public spaces. The sculpture was finally created by melting bronze busts of Saddam removed from a palace in Tikrit and recast. The artist used a photograph of a real American soldier, 1st Sgt. Glen Simpson, who posed for the sculpture.

13.    In 2001 Halliburton struck a contract for providing logistical support to the US Navy.  A year before that, the company’s Chairman of the board and CEO, Dick Cheney, left the company and joined George W. Bush's election team later to become vice-president of the US. By 2003 the Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) division of the company was providing full maintenance and logistical support for ground operations in Iraq in a multi-million dollar contract.  It used neighboring countries to dock and undock artillery that can only go by ground to Iraq.  One such airlifter was the C-130.  The C-130 was designed during the cold war to support linear combat operations against the Soviets. C-130’s are huge, loud, 4-engined turboprop military transport aircrafts that cannot spiral down on landing but rather fly and descend really low into landing.

14.    My studio in Amman overlooks the citadel. Behind the citadel lies the Marka Military Airport.

15.    Passing objects like C-130s create shadows inside indoor spaces, they reverberate body cells, prompt car alarms of parked cars to sound, and make one reactionary.

'Can U See Me: Monologues in Air', Oraib Toukan, (2007); vinyl, nails, dimensions variable (smallest 25 x 2 meters each). Documentation of a temporary intervention on rooftops in downtown Amman that face the Citadel and Marka military airport. The work was installed on ten commercial buildings.  The arrows could be seen from the city’s many elevations that overlook downtown Amman. The orange vinyl was the same material used to insulate rooftops and mark truce targets in times of war. From afar the arrows run in different directions depicting an almost haphazard schema. Produced by YATF during Meeting Points 07, and curated by Ola Al Khalidi and Samah Hijawi.