Sometime between midnight on Monday and very early Tuesday morning, a disgruntled so-and-so stood in front of White Flag Projects with a can of whitewash and a paint roller. Then, they proceeded to vandalize a 13-foot banner of Ryan McGinley's photograph Zachary, specifically painting over young man's nude flanks with white paint. White Flag's director, Matt Strauss, says the paint was still wet when he arrived later that morning. He didn't call the police, though he says if it happens again, he might consider it. The banners, he says, "have sparked conversations before. And people people have felt comfortable expressing their dislike of things that have been out there. But there is a huge step between that and destroying the thing, and depriving everyone else of the opportunity to even see it."
The banner, which promotes the exhibit Coconut Water, had only been up for a few days (the show opened Saturday). Strauss was shocked; "I really thought I was playing it safe with this one," he says. The closest anyone's come to defacing White Flag's banners was in 2009, when a passerby pulled out a knife and threatened to cut down the one for Destroy All Monsters: Hungry For Death, which featured the visage of Charles Manson. "I invited her to talk to the artist, who was there later on that day, and just had a conversation with her about it," Strauss says. "And It wasn’t just Charles Manson, it was Charles Manson with this quote about love means never having to say you’re sorry. It was a fully developed artwork by Destroy All Monsters, and it was a significant thing—it wasn’t something there for the sake of provoking." (Someone also once stuck a googly eye on Greg Stimac's Bison Silhouette. "But that came right off," Strauss says.)
He also wonders: why white paint? Why didn't the person use something interesting, like turquoise? Creative paint colors or no, the act seems audacious enough to suggest premediation.
"It has to be a person who’s pretty heartfelt to commit a crime where you have to get out of your car, buy paint…the whole thing," Strauss says. "Someone would have to be really burned up about it, wouldn't they? My theory is that it was a housepainter who had the paint in their car, was up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning driving to work, saw this thing, didn't like, it, jumped out of the car with a roller….we looked around for a roller. I mean, you’re going to get back in your car with a wet roller? The whole thing's pathetic."
McGinley, whose work hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., The Whitney Museum, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, and on the High Line in New York, indicated through his gallery that he would like the defaced banner to remain up through the run of the show, though White Flag offered to reprint it. Strauss wonders if it might've not just gotten vandailzed a second time, anyway. He's curious about who did it, and why, and thinks it's interesting in context of St. Louis' conflicted history with public art, including the outcry against installing Henry Moore's sculptures at Lambert Airport in the 1950s.
"The ironic thing about this particular one—of all of Ryan McGinley’s photographs, these are easily the most conservative, classical works he’s ever done," Strauss says. "The other sad part, it really encapsulated the themes of the show in terms of portraiture and object-ness and all of these kinds of ideas that we have going on inside...that artistic communication is completely defunct now in favor of this other commentary about what kind of reaction St. Louis seems to have to public art that it doesn’t like."
Looking at the comments below the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story about the vandalism, public reaction to the artwork, as well as the vandalism, ran the gamut. One reader quoted David Hume; another accused the gallery of destroying its own art for publicity. Several evoked the right to free speech. The first commenter, whose Facebook profile image featured the slogan "Straight Pride," complained it should be illegal because "children live in the neighborhood."
"Maybe there's a psychological distance that locally is more closely felt than other places, where for some reason, because it’s public, because it’s outdoors, because there’s this forced interaction with it, the sense of ownership and the sense of entitlement to interfere with it is greater," Strauss muses. "Or is it just the opportunity is there? Because you can’t walk into a museum and easily deface something. But you can sure go out into the middle of the night and paint domino dots on a Richard Serra sculpture."
Still, he says, the multiple defacements of Twain did nothing to harm Serra's career, and Henry Moore did just fine after St. Louis ran him—or his sculptures, anyway—out of town. Perhaps it bodes well for McGinley. "All those other artists have been canonized," Strauss says. "So maybe it’s a good sign for him."
Coconut Water runs through June 15; you can see McGinley's original print of Zachary inside the gallery, along with works by Peter Hujar, Richard Kern, Linder, Sven Lukin, Win McCarthy, and Ricky Swallow. White Flag is located at 4568 Manchester. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call 314-531-3442 or go to white-flag-projects.org.
