Queens Projects
Fekner's Warning Signs project focused on accentuating deteriorating conditions that dominated New York City and its environs in the 1970s. In 1976, Fekner began to create site-specific temporary ‘word-signs’ using hand-cut cardboard stencils and spray paint on a relentless crusade concerned with social and environmental issues. First seen on the industrial streets and highways of Queens, the East River bridges, and later in the South Bronx, his ‘messages’ were spray painted in areas that were in need of construction, demolition or reconstruction. By labeling the structures, Fekner's objective was to draw attention to the accumulated squalor by urging city officials, agencies and local communities to be more responsible and take action. His first stencil projects, Industrial Fossil, Urban Decay, Decay/Abandoned, Instant This Instant That, and The Remains of Industry were not intended to remain for long periods of time. The projects succeeded when the existing condition was removed or remedied. In 1979, Fekner began experimenting with video and audio, working with Fred Baca on Environmental Stencils 77–79, a grainy, grim black & white 8mm film/video that not only documents Fekner's stencil projects, but is also a bleak portrait of New York City in ruins.
Read more about this topic: John Fekner
Famous quotes containing the words queens and/or projects:
“The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything.”
—Derek Jarman (b. 1942)
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)