DB Journal entry
Re: The New Sins, Toronto CONTACT Photography Festival public installation
April 28, 2005

I’m on my way to Toronto tomorrow A.M. I am doing a public art installation of The New Sins organized in connection with the Contact Photo Festival which opens on the weekend. I did this installation once before, in Sydney, where I thought it worked very well. By that I mean that I could witness people actually stopping to read the pieces, I could see them scratching their heads or chuckling to themselves, and my name was either so small or so tiny that the work became almost anonymous, an issue that is fairly integral to the work for some of these public things.

I told Malu that my name would be on these, but really really small, and she didn’t understand. If you’ve done something why not be proud of it and let everyone know? They will be in bus shelter lightboxes around the city center. Since most of the time these lightboxes are filled with ads it will naturally be first assumed, unless otherwise announced, that these are ads too. I feel that if it is revealed right away that these are artworks they would immediately lose some of their power to amuse and to puzzle. Nobody actually puzzles over an artwork — by declaring itself art it is allowed to be as wacko, egocentric and obtuse as it wants to be. The excuse is that it is art. So it penetrates no deeper than that. “Oh, another waste of the public's money” or “Oh, those nutty artists” is what many people will instantly think. I would rather keep the arty connection under wraps for at least a moment in order to allow the thing to not be so easily justified or explained.

Probably for the same reason I often do these things in somewhat imitation of the thing that are normally in that place. While these particular ones look more like the paid propaganda of some fringe religious cult, I often design these things to imitate the graphic style of contemporary advertising or signage. So at first it probably gets taken as the ravings of a pastor gone slightly round the bend or as an advertising teaser campaign, as there is no product visible. This, to me, is good. It both raises the question of what normally goes in that space, and why, and what is this other thing, and why. There might, for some people, be a slight disjunction, as advertising platforms become such a part of the visual environment that we don’t give them a second thought. We almost don’t even see them any more — though I believe their images and messages still penetrate. It is the act of them being there, a presence in the street or elsewhere, that is taken for granted to the point to where they become partly invisible. So maybe by making something that is similar, but not quite the same, these pieces and other similar ones will draw attention to the process, the things, and what they are usually used for.

Well we’ll see.