Pubdate: Thu, 16 Dec 2004
Source: London Review of Books (UK)
Copyright: London Review of Books 2004
Contact:  http://www.lrb.co.uk/index.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1168
Author: Jason Pugatch
Note: Jason Pugatch's Acting Is a Job will be published by the Allworth 
Press in 2006. He lives in New York.

AT ONE TIMES SQUARE

The scaffolding that hugs One Times Square, where the US Drug Enforcement 
Administration's travelling exhibition Target America: Traffickers, 
Terrorists and You is on view until 31 January, brings an added sense of 
decay to the building.

During the tech boom of the mid-1990s, and the accompanying regeneration of 
the neighbourhood, One Times Square housed a Warner Brothers store, which 
sold stuffed cartoon animals, T-shirts and other brand merchandise. Now, 
the upper wooden portions of the scaffolding are plastered with posters 
advertising the exhibition in white letters on a severe black background. 
Much has been made of the return of drugs to tourist-friendly Times Square: 
much less of the aptness of using a building once owned by a movie studio 
to conjure a new view of the war on terror.

A young security guard stopped me at the entrance to the museum and asked 
if I had any metal in my pockets.

I told him that I had a lot of metal in my pockets.

He asked me to take it out, and I explained that I couldn't hold it all in 
my hands.

As he pointed rather sternly to a wooden table behind me, I noticed the 
black wand in his hand, the kind airport screeners carry.

Unloading my camera, iPod, headphones, wallet, keys and several other items 
on the table, and holding my arms out to my side to pass inspection, I 
wondered if this was part of the exhibition. If so, the security guard was 
performing his role with the seriousness of a method actor.

I assumed the exhibition would take the form suggested by its title: I 
would learn about the traffickers, then about the terrorists, and finally 
relate it all back to myself.

I was surprised, then, that the first thing I saw was the front end of a 
wrecked green 1994 Ford Thunderbird, its windshield a web of cracked glass.

The caption says that the man who drove this car is serving ten years for 
running over an Ohio woman and her three children.

He was on a mixture of benzodiazepines, cocaine, marijuana and opiates at 
the time. Cans of Paco solvent, acetone, a bong, a skateboard, a posed 
photograph of a young woman, and a lavender plastic car of the sort a small 
child might ride down the driveway lie casually here and there on the 
platform surrounding the car. Is this a crime scene?

A collage?

I looked for an explanation but there isn't one. The First Lady of Ohio and 
Ronk's Towing are thanked for their help.

The visitor is then taken along a walkway between a full-scale Afghan 
heroin lab and a Colombian cocaine-processing plant.

An audio recording plays from somewhere inside each, in that tricky way 
intended to make you feel you're 'really there' - the way dinosaurs roar in 
natural history museums.

Here, there is muffled foreign speech and other unplaceable noises that are 
only to be heard, presumably, in drug-processing laboratories.

Heroin production, the DEA tells us, has increased since 'the liberation of 
Afghanistan in 2002'. I hadn't expected such candour.

It didn't last. An accompanying note points out the failure of a crop 
exchange programme, blaming the Afghan farmers for a long tradition of 
growing opium.

Photographs of captured drug dealers mounted on foam core and explanations 
of money laundering - the stuff of a civics textbook - make up the next 
portion of the exhibition, blocking the museum's centrepiece from view: a 
tall spire of wreckage, fenced in by plexiglass. Inside the plexi 
perimeter: rubble from the World Trade Center. There's a cinderblock, some 
wires and several pairs of shoes covered in ash - an allusion, I assume, to 
one of the more famous images of the Holocaust. Here was the Terrorist section.

Peter Jennings's ABC news feed from 9/11 is piped in from somewhere under a 
stuffed animal, near some wires and a computer memory board.

Yellow crime-scene tape wraps itself like a yellow ribbon around the top of 
the plexi fence, at waist height.

Upstairs is a child's empty bedroom, empty I assume because drugs got him 
or mom or dad or maybe all three.

In another mock-up, there is a bed with vials of cocaine on the bedside 
table, a 12-bore shotgun leaning at an angle against the mattress.

Fluff has been pulled out of the pillow. Next: a motel room with a handgun 
on the bed and chemicals by the sink. Did you know that a motel room near 
you might be a meth lab? A wall commemorating celebrity addicts - Janis 
Joplin, Jim Morrison et al - and not so famous people who have fallen 
victim to drugs has an invitation from the museum to add photos or 
memorabilia of any friend or relative. There is one contribution. Relations 
of Kyndall Brooke Znidarsic, who overdosed at the age of 23, have taped a 
poem read at her funeral to the wall.

At the end, there are pamphlets on the DEA, a recruitment poster and a 
national guardsman in camouflage fatigues.

Was it all a way to get me to sign up for duty? I rushed for the exit. 
Outside, two homeless people were sleeping, one sitting, one lying, under 
woollen blankets.

Black trash bags rested alongside them.

Inside the exhibition I'd heard other visitors refer to it as 'important' 
and 'educational'. Testimonials on the museum's website offer another set 
of reviews.

Terrence Satchell of Milford, Nebraska sees the exhibition as 'true proof 
that the forces of evil must be actively combated, with or without the 
consent of the French.' Zach Townsley of Ashland, Nebraska asks: 'WHEY DID 
THE PEOPLE DESTROY THE BILDINGS?'

You might think that an exhibition of this kind would attempt to answer 
such a question.

And this one does, in a way. The DEA has put together a nice artistic 
parallel to the policies and practices of the Bush administration. 
Scattered references - a car crash, a drug den, an Afghan poppy field, a 
cinderblock from Ground Zero - are collected together under one title.

Corral enough bad stuff in the same place, and the dots will join themselves.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager