Freedom for Flags to Flap?
Alvaro Alvillar is a stunning success. How does he know? The cops want shut his work down. Anytime your art scares the police, you’ve succeeded in raising the issue your art sought to raise. The police officers here are dead wrong. Being a police officer means having to accept whatever the world throws at you without feeling or emotive response. You’re there to serve and protect, not be an art critic.
Are the police valuable community assets? Yes. They have a tough job and generally deserve community support? Yes. This however, is a case in which they are their families are not under any threat. Officers and members of the benevolent association however think they should be able to limit what an artist has to say within an art gallery and that’s flat wrong. Even if the art portrayed the police in a highly negative light, they should only criticize it as citizens. Write a letter to the editor. Write your own blog entry. However, International Brotherhood of Police Officers puts the imprimatur of law enforcement behind it and that is unacceptable.
Now, on to the art itself. This is not the first time Alvillar has done a flag piece. He did one last year in Dalton. This piece is titled “Formula for Hate” The pieces are a series of US flags with inscriptions. Read across the inscriptions of the various flags are two questions:”Politically its OK to hate the white man” and “Is it OK for me to hate if Ive been a victim” [sic]. So, through use of the flags, one can surmise that Alvillar is examining his statements and questions in the context of the American field which the flags represent. Second, one can see that he intends the statements as a ‘formula for hate’. Given that, a person might well surmise that Alvillar himself believes that victimhood is not a justification for hate, nor is it politically okay to hate white people.
The questions, however, are ones the permeate our society and might resonate particularly among folks in the city. Atlanta is undergoing a major racial shift. It’s becoming whiter and more Hispanic despite having an African American power structure. We also live in a time when members of any given group have been the victim. Indians, Korean, Serbs, Columbians, New Englanders, Africans, Jews, Syrians, and on and on and on have all been victims because of where they were born, what they look like, or what creed they follow. No one has a monopoly on victim hood and no one has a monopoly on hate.
If we want to be a world class city, it’s time to grow up and accept that a variety of viewpoints are out there. People are going to have to learn to argue these points through a continued rhetorical and reasoned argument. The clash of ideas is important and it’s better to let all the ideas, even the dumb ones face the light of day and stand scrutiny rather than trying to use the power of the state to forcibly remove them.
April 4th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Well, the piece brings discussion, and the discussion doesn’t start and end with “oh, how quaint,” so I have to say the artist did the job there.
April 6th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Its not the flags or the question they pose that offend me…its the fact that it was probably commission with taxpayer money. That being said, his questions do speak to the complexity of Atlanta. After spending the past 10 years living in various US cities, ATL is the only metropolis I can recall where race plays a factor in EVERY decision that is made.