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Critical look - David Bonetti reviews "The St. Louis Projection" on F2. David Bonetti writes about art and culture for the Post-Dispatch. Critic David Bonetti E-mail: dbonetti@post-dispatch.com Phone: 314-340-8351
How do you make a silk purse out of a sow's ear? In the case of "The St. Louis Projection," a video and audio projection by media artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, you go to the public library. Originally conceived for the Old Courthouse, the projection was rejected by the National Park Service over issues of content. The work, which will conclude its three-night run on Sunday, features taped personal testimony from those who have lost loved ones to crime and those in prison convicted of committing murders, as images of their moving hands are projected on the facade of the St. Louis Public Library's central location.
A little background. Wodiczko, an internationally recognized media artist who teaches at MIT, was commissioned by Washington University to create a high-profile work for the celebrations surrounding the groundbreaking of the university's $56.8 million Sam Fox Art Center. The projection would also be the centerpiece for "Critical Praxis for the Emerging Culture," a symposium on the intersection of technology and culture held on campus this weekend. Together, the new art center, which will house a media arts center when it is completed in 2006, the symposium and the projection were intended to signal to the larger world that Washington University and St. Louis were ready to participate in the new culture being created internationally based on the latest technology. That new culture has generated great economic growth wherever it has taken root.
And then the National Park Service, which oversees the Old Courthouse as part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, threw a tub of cold water on the enterprise. Frank Mares, the park's chief of museum services and interpretation, decided that the project, which addressed the culture of violence in the local community, did not meet the Park Service's guidelines. Every national park has a specific mandate. The mandate of the Jefferson National Expansion Park is, not surprisingly, national expansion , and although, according to Mares, the mandate has itself expanded over the years to include racism, religion and immigration as legitimate subjects, it has not expanded so broadly...