TEMPORARY PUBLIC GALLERY
This public intervention sets out to complicate, and possibly poeticize, matters concerning public space, public art, privatized commercial space and the politics/censorship behind the regulation of these spaces by renting a billboard in Ho Chi Minh City in order to curate non-commercial images in public space.
This public artwork began with our interest in how the visual elements of a landscape not only reflect the socio-political changes of that locale, but can have an affect on it as well. We wanted to see how we could contribute to this affect in the rapidly changing landscape of Viet Nam.
As all visual elements in the landscape, from public art to advertisement, are controlled through different censorship bodies, public art in Viet Nam has been limited in the last few decades to marble sculptures in the park and some old propaganda signage attached to various walls throughout different cities. But the landscape has been shifting from having more propaganda to now having more advertising, while public art remains innocuous, inaccessible, and limited by these censorship bodies.
With a grant from ArtMatters Foundation, The Propeller Group attempted to circumnavigate these limitations, trying to locate a loophole in the system by renting out advertising space to curate artworks in public; challenging notions of public space, advertising, and public art in Viet Nam.
Below is a document [excerpts from proposals and mock-up images sent to ArtMatters] of the attempts to get permission for the images. After many failed attempts the project was never realized.
ATTEMPT 01: ADVERTISING THE ADVERTISEMENT: MYPUBLICWEBSITE.COM
The Propeller Group [TPG] have rented a billboard space for 3 months beginning in June 2010 in a centrally located area of Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. The Propeller Group are aiming to create a public art project that uses this physical shelter/space as a jumping off point to a larger project that will exist on-line as a portal for public art submissions for the same space. The first billboard image will be a simple graphic or image with a call to submit, possibly a short phrase and a URL of the project’s online manifestation, for example, mypublicart.org [see image below]
TPG will work closely with San Art and other art networks to ask designers, photographers, conceptual artists, etc. to submit images, designs and artworks for this billboard space. All submissions will appear on the website and open to the public.
TPG will ask for the participation from Viet Nam’s Ministry of Culture, the governing body that approves, regulates, censors, all artwork that have a public aspect, to be the panelists/judges of this project. Out of al the submissions by local [and possibly international] artists, designers, photographers, they will then choose their favorite submission; the submission that would best fit this public context in their eyes. The image will then be printed and hung as a public art piece in this bus stop shelter [Image 2].
The website will allow viewers to vote on their favorite billboard submission as well. Base on the billboard submission with the most votes, this will be submitted to the Ministry of Culture to be approved to be the second image to be realized in physical form, i.e. i.e. the submission that would best fit this public context in their eyes. The image will then be printed and hung as a public art piece in this bus stop shelter [Image 3].
After the rental duration of the bus shelter has run its course, the website will exist online as a public exhibition and homage to all the artwork that was submitted. This becomes the public work, encompassing all submissions and all the discussions and forums that have happened in regards to this project as well as more general discussions about contemporary and public art in Viet Nam.
We aim to create enough visibility for this project both inside as well as outside of Viet Nam in order to continue the project in more than one location.
ATTEMPT 02: MOVIE POSTER NARRATIVES
The Propeller Group has rented a bus stop shelter billboard beginning June 1, 2010 and ending on August 31, 2010. Playing with ideas of narrative and wanting to utilize a visual language that’s familiar to general audiences, TPG will create a series of 3 billboards that take the form of “movie posters”. These three movie posters together will create a narrative, as if they were themselves storyboard frames from a movie.
Playing on the idea that we have familiarized ourselves with movie poster language, specifically, how a movie title, and image and a tagline, could work together to spark the creation of a narrative inside the viewer’s imagination.
The “imaginary” film, entitled “The Lost Monument” features a young girl as the main character and tells the story of how this girls’ imagination helped her to discover a civilization that had been lost for thousands of years that was sitting beneath the current city.
ATTEMPT 03: PERSONAL HISTORIES AND PUBLIC SPACE
Billboard 1: Tuan Andrew Nguyen
I have been helping my grandmother get her VISA to the U.S. It was a grueling process for her as well as for me, with all the paperwork, medical check-ups, going back and forth to the embassy, etc. She may or may not be leaving. My family feels that the chances of her leaving are high.
My grandmother is a poet. One of her first poems was published in the newspaper in Ha Noi when she was 16. She’s 89 years old now and constantly, albeit jokingly, talks about death as a positive alternative to leaving Viet Nam. But ironically, even in death, she would be leaving Viet Nam. I would like to work with her to find an old poem she has written or work with her to create a new poem; something about coming and going.
I would like to make a billboard out of this poem. To be hung at the bus stop shelter, a place where people sit and wait to come and go. A bus stop that sits near the backpackers district, a place who’s population changes almost completely on a daily basis. An ode, a poetic farewell, from my grandmother, to Viet Nam.
I would like to make a short documentary about this poem, about my grandmother’s last days in Viet Nam, and about the billboard.
Billboard 2: Phunam
My father was a photographer during the Viet Nam war. He worked with journalists from CBS. He had made a film a few years before the end of the war where he combined actual documentary footage and setup narrative footage to tell a story of several individuals and how they navigated through the war. The film was banned.
I would like to make a billboard to advertise a link where viewers could go in order to download the film for free.
Billboard 3: Matt Lucero
I have also been thinking of interviewing my father and grandmother. She is turning 91 this year, according to my aunt as she can’t remember exactly what year she was born. But for a billboard project, I think I would want to do something as a collaboration between me and my father. As you guys know he was in the American War in VietNam and I would like to approach this project as a letter from him to Viet Nam. It is a touchy subject and one that would probably come under scrutiny from the MOC depending on the content of the letter of course. Essentially a really personal project on how each of us relate to Viet Nam.
I am thinking of something as simple as pictures of his hands and the text over the billboard, or just text, or some other image juxtaposed with text.
