Thursday Idea Blog

From the Momentary to the Permanent
(or the coercive use of force in the moment as a stand in for the constant use of force in the everyday)

Throughout of our lives we live under the threat of coercive force. As a basic building block of the relation of the individual to the larger system of capitalism the threat of starvation (a threat of physical violence) for the most part guarantees the participation of the individual in the path of submission to hierarchy and the system of wage labor. From this basic building block, the use of coercive force takes many forms most visibly in the role of the police. As the only public institution with the sanctioned ability to use coercive physical force (violence), police action is the most recognizable form of order maintained through force.
Several project ideas i've been kicking around include a conceptual mass arrest of my fellow students in which the temporary use of coercive force as experienced through the application of handcuffs becomes a permanent representation of that use of force through the record of the photograph. In the process of serialization, the photographs of many students in handcuffs becomes a record of a conceptual mass arrest. Another project takes cues from both street art and my experiences in alternative processes. In this exploration I would use source photographs of riot police gleaned form the upcoming G20 meeting in Pittsburgh on the 23 and 24 of September to recreate life size replicas of the police formations in the form of cardboard cutouts in and around the campus and richmond metro area. The temporary installation of the police into the local environment becomes a permanent record of a physical occupation of space through the photograph. As a body of work the photographs together would become a record of how the police representations change the use of physical and in this case public space to both students and members of the general public.
obviously these need to be fleshed out a bit more than they have been but i feel like they both offer opportunities to further explore the ideas i've been presenting.