AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Across the country, anti-Trump sculptures have been popping up mysteriously. Anonymous guerilla art has a long history in politics. So what should we take away from these new statues? Here's NPR's Andrew Limbong.
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SIMONE DE ALBA: Well, it looks like a new monument downtown...
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: Last week WUSA9, a local news station in Washington, D.C., reported on one sculpture.
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DE ALBA: Looks like a bronze statue of Nancy Pelosi's desk with, well...
LIMBONG: Well, a giant turd on it. And there's a plaque ironically honoring the, quote, "brave men and women who broke into the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, to loot, urinate, and defecate through those hallowed halls in order to overturn an election." In Philadelphia, a statue of former President Trump was placed behind an already existing statue of a nude woman with a plaque quoting his infamous line about grabbing women. And the news station KOIN6 in Portland reported something similar.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A satirical statue of Mr. Trump suddenly appearing this morning on Southwest Sixth opposite a longtime statue of a nude woman.
LIMBONG: This isn't abstract sculpture. You don't need an art degree to figure out what these statues are saying. But there's something going on here beyond the surface-level electoral politics, says Faye Gleisser, associate professor of contemporary art at Indiana University in Bloomington.
FAYE GLEISSER: They're not changing how people are going to vote. That's not really the point. At the same time, I do see possibilities in them if we come to them as questions instead of answers.
LIMBONG: One obvious question is, who put these up? An anonymous caller contacted New York Magazine taking credit for the Philly and Portland statues, saying it was a way to remind people of certain things about former President Trump that had become, quote, "forgotten or numbed or normalized." There's also the fact that whoever put up the poo desk in Washington, D.C., got a permit, which can be read as part of the art. Gleisser wrote a book called "Risk Work." It's an examination of guerilla artists from the '60s or the '80s and how they evaded or didn't evade the carceral state, aka the cops, and filling out paperwork was an important part of that.
GLEISSER: This very seemingly mundane act of having a permit for a temporary installation is actually much more revealing of the ways that artists become theorists of our everyday lives and how space is governed and managed and surveiled.
LIMBONG: But permits are temporary, and so is art. The Portland and Philadelphia statues are already gone. Andrew Limbong, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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