Daniel J. Martinez, VinZula Kara and West Side Three-Point Marchers, “Consequences of a Gesture” (1993) – image from “One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity”
In July, Martinez, Kara and the Three Point Marchers organized an ‘Absurdist Parade’ which began in Harrison Park (a.k.a. Zapata Park) a predominantly Mexican neighborhood and finished to the north and west in Garfield Park, a predominantly black West Side neighborhood. Residents from each of the two neighborhoods – who do not usually mix – participated in the free come-one-come-all parade. However effective or meretricious as gestures, the street components of both Manglano-Ovalle’s and Martinez and Kara’s projects were successful in that their content was fundamentally uncontrollable. They bristled with the nervous energy of a social event that knows neither its magnitude nor its consequences, until those present take responsibility for the event upon themselves and shape it into whatever they might.
—
Daniel J. Martinez, Consequences of a Gesture, Chicago 1993. (credit)
“Daniel J. Martinez’ work “Consequences of a Gesture” (1993), was one of the events organized as part of “Culture in Action” in Chicago (1991-95), an ambitious series of public projects aimed at a radical re-definition of “public art.” It took the form of a parade developed by Martinez over two years and involving the participation of 35 community organizations and 1000 Mexican Americans and African Americans, children to the elderly. Participants paraded through three neighborhoods: Maxwell Street public market that was removed by the city the following year (1994) to make way for the University of Illinois’s expansion, thus an ode to the market’s demise after more than a century; and to two ethnically divergent areas of Chicago: African-American Garfield Park and Mexican-American Pilsen. For more information on this and recent works by Martinez, see: Culture in Action (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); www.stretcher.org; Daniel Joseph Martinez: A life of Disobedience (Cantz, 2009), www.frieze.com/issue/article/culture_in_action; Exhibition Histories: Culture in Action and Project UNITÉ (London: Afterall Books, 2013), Tom Finkelpearl: What We Made – Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press, 2013).” (credit)