“9A.84.010”
The title, 9A.84.010, comes from a specific legislation, the Revised Code of Washington Title 9A - Washington Criminal Code, Chapter 9A.84 - Public Disturbance, 9A.84.010 Criminal mischief (defined, before 2013, as RCW 9A.84.010 Riot).
9A.84.010, a video installation, presents excerpts of the Revised Code of Washington relevant to the context of demonstrations and protests: Disorderly conduct, RCW 9A.84.030; Failure to disperse, RCW 9A.84.020; Criminal mischief, RCW 9A.84.010; Obstructing a law enforcement officer, RCW 9A.76.020; Intimidating a public servant, RCW 9A.76.180; Coercion, RCW 9A.36.070; Unlawful imprisonment, RCW 9A.40.040.
The legalistic texts are presented on quickly changing, brightly colored screens, making them intentionally difficult to read. The words are interrupted by the synchronized appearance of highly stylized images of riots and police control from Bogotá, the city in which the artist lives and works.
From this perspective, Andrés Martínez Ruiz inquires into the production and massive distribution of images of nonconformity and dissent. He interrogates what kind of images are chosen for a mass circulation and which others are ignored; what the images’ dissemination structures are and who has access to them; what types of narratives are constructed and subsequently accepted; what forms of violence are tolerated; and how these images are then understood in the context of a globalized world.
In 9A.84.010, the images can be read simply as generic representations of the violence of protest. They could have come from anywhere and relate to any protest. Like most imagery created around protest and riot, they are documentary, existing in the form of media photographs of the centers of crowds. The media’s close-up focus on individual gestures of violence as icons of riot creates a kind of uniformity, emptied of context and focused on the generic spectacle of violence. By isolating the violence from its meaning, such images make it easier to police and control protest, blurring legibility and creating bias.
Extending this, the use of legal language in 9A.84.010 illuminates the boundary between what can be seen as abstraction and the construction of what has the potential to be very concrete. Like the disembodied images, legal language has, on one level, the power to define reality, while as pure text, it is almost unintelligible. Belonging in the framework of law however, the text’s supposed legibility is emphasised, setting up a structure that is apparently inviolably specific and targeted at a particular concrete meaning.
Historically protest has been promoted by systems of liberal democracy to hegemonically control any form of dissent. In most cities there is a plan for protests. They are legal in certain areas, for certain people, under certain conditions, creating what can be called a choreography of protest. If the promotion of the idea of protest in a liberal society is a form of self regulation, at the same time there is also a limit between what is seen as a protest and a riot. 9A.84.010 aims to interrogate the legibility of these limits, definitions and ideologies, and how this might be shifting in the present moment.
Bio
Andrés Martínez Ruiz is an artist and poet from Bogotá, Colombia. His work, which inquires into the production and massive distribution of images of nonconformity and dissent, has been included in exhibitions in Colombia, the United States, Argentina, Mexico, Germany and Spain. Alongside working as an artist, he teaches at the Universidad de Pamplona in Colombia. Andrés has MFAs from Parsons, The New School, in New York (for which he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship), and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he also studied for his BFA.