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Heidi Nagtegaal: Redirecting Traffic (Hastings between Heatley and Hawks)
Heidi Nagtegaal is an energetic
Vancouver artist whose work incorporates the solitary focus of craft and the
performative aspect of the social. Whether by playing a crochet-beard-masked
“Bad Santa” at a local gallery’s fundraiser, making colourful medical syringe
cozies, opening her home for an ongoing series of exchanges as part of The Hammock Residency or giving away
handmade headbands and bracelets at various events (almost everyone I
know in Vancouver has been “headbanded” at some point over the last few years),
Nagtegaal’s work is playful in execution but deadly serious in motivation, with
neither pole battling for supremacy in terms of message.
Critical
of Vancouver’s “World Class City” aspirations and public space being
hijacked for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Nagtegaal installed herself on a
Sunday at the intersection of Hastings and Heatley, wearing a reflective
store-bought traffic flagger’s jacket with four hand-made pylons crocheted from
orange caution tape. Setting herself up, she briefly redirects traffic out of
one of the city’s many “Olympic Lanes”—the curbside lane reserved during the
Games for buses and officially sanctioned Olympic vehicles. Car traffic
calmly obeys her and is diverted around Nagtegaal as people carry on with their
days: it’s no big deal in a city that has had to get used to traffic and
transit delays, detours, and road closures—all to accommodate the Olympics
rolling into town and setting up shop. Nagtegaal continues for 10 minutes until
an unmarked police cruiser rolls up, and the performance ends with some
explaining to do and no charges laid.
For
the record, I missed seeing this performance. As a matter of fact, most people
did; the documentation was simply posted to Youtube and spread among peers via
social-networking sites such as Facebook and Tumblr. It wasn't supposed
to be a spectacle at all, simply a brief gesture, a small refusal that changed
the flow of the city, if only for a few minutes. One could question
whether this act was an effective form of protest, but considering the
programmatic and media-friendly skirmish between Black Bloc protestors and the
police had been intended to give capitalism a heart attack (or something) a
week earlier, with the usual street battles and window-smashing-as-photo-op
tactics, both events point to a broader crisis within the Left: one that
requires some serious regrouping and rethinking in terms of message,
methodology and effectiveness.
In
this case, subtlety wins out. Protest marches featuring badass revolutionary
posturing have become de rigeur
spectacle: self-congratulatory for the participants while alienating the
general public, and, in turn, misrepresented by the media as the issues are
lost amidst the bluster. Whether it was the artist’s intent or not, Redirecting Traffic highlighted codified terms of dissent and asked what else
was possible.
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