5.12.2005

"Offensive and Aggressive." From Adbusters:
Los Angeles' Transport Gallery has featured some in-your-face work: a show by seminal punk photographer Edward Colver called Remember September 10th, featuring an effigy of a lynched Klansman (title: A Well-Hung Klansman), and the traveling show of anti-war posters by the likes of agitprop greats Robbie Conal and Mark Vallen called Yo! What Happened to Peace? But these exhibitions didn't rouse the Los Angeles Police Department the way a one-night showing on April 23 did. With six patrol cars, they shut down the exhibition Mark of the Beast, forcing some 1,000 attendees into the streets, on grounds that it was "offensive and aggressive in nature."

The offending works? Culture-jammed corporate logos.

The LAPD's reaction to Mark of the Beast was spurred by a single phonecall of complaint, according to gallery director Mike Russek, and Transport was shuttered by officers who never set foot in the gallery to see the work for themselves. It's yet another example of the clamp-down on free expression in the United States following September 11, 2001...
Read the full story, which started out here.

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