We live in a city so loud and active that gunshots are too often optimistically mistaken for fireworks. Respond at the Smack Mellon Gallery was not a fireworks show, as elaborate as it was. It was a wake up call to the justice system that responded with apathy towards events in which officers sprayed bullets at the very citizens they were brought in to protect.
Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Those are just a few of a seemingly endless number of victims. Shot. Suffocated. Shot. That was how they died, at the hands of police officers no less. It’s disturbing to know about the blatant abuse of power by law enforcement officers throughout the country. It’s worse to know that in some cases, they got away with it.
That is why the gun zoetrope at Respond was the most visceral. It put the power of police officers into our hands. Pull the trigger and the cartoon man dies. It was just a matter of whether you could bring yourself to do it: if you could, you were guaranteed cartoon blood on your hands. Now imagine being one of the police officers who were acutely aware of the power in their hands the moment they picked up the gun. Imagine that the man in the zoetrope was a real person. Would you do it?
Call me hypersensitive, but I couldn’t bring myself to kill a cartoon character that represented so many people who died on the other side of a real gun barrel, people whose last emotion was fear. They were people who had to be spoken for by an exhibition in their memory because they can no longer speak for themselves. But I suppose other people could pull the trigger because when you take away the sentimentality of it, at the end of the day, it was just a sculpture. But then you also defeat its purpose. And I suppose that the trigger on the sculpture was meant to be pulled, or else the artist would not have made it interactive, but I hope that anyone who could bring themselves to do it would understand the sculpture’s purpose.
There is no part of me that understands how someone can just kill another person because they had a little bit more melanin in their skin or because they were walking in a neighborhood with a bad reputation. Imagine if we all killed over every little thing that set us apart: the human race would be extinct in a matter of seconds. I fear this is the direction we are headed in.
