Street artists hold protest performance at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary

Street artists hold protest performance at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary
January 4, 2011 | 6:24 am


Censorship or sensitivity? The debate rages on.

A crew of street and graffiti artists, together with a handful of war veterans, gathered Monday night in the dark, empty parking lot of MOCA's Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo to stage a guerrilla protest performance against the museum's director, Jeffrey Deitch. Cloaked in knit caps and heavy wool scarves in the cold night air, the 20 or so self-described art activists huddled near the museum's expansive north wall, projecting laser graffiti out of the back seat of a silver VW Passat with a laptop perched precariously on the roof of the car.

The group of artists -- which included respected Chicano artist/Vietnam War veteran Leo Limon as well as Joey Krebs a.k.a. The Phantom Street Artist -- took turns tagging the museum wall using a handmade laser graffiti gun created for the event by artist/computer programmer Todd Moyer. A specially designed computer program animated the light-graffiti so that it looked like dripping paint as it hit the wall.

The MOCA wall has been blank since Deitch had Italian street artist Blu's antiwar mural whitewashed from it in early December. Deitch had commissioned Blu to paint the mural; but after it was completed, Deitch became concerned that its provocative imagery of coffins draped in dollar bills would be offensive to some in the neighborhood as it was adjacent to a Veterans Affairs hospital and a war memorial to Japanese American soldiers. The incident sparked heated, and sharply divided, opinions that continue to rattle many in the art community.

"All of us political poster artists have been a little outraged," said artist Karen Fiorito. "It shows how corporations and private institutions can control the dialogue in the public forum."

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