Artists are sometimes depicted as impractical dreamers, ‘luftmenschen’ with little practical sense of the world around them—but history is also full of artists like Leonardo da Vinci who was as well known for his engineering as for his art.
The Queens Museum has an intriguing exhibit by a possible would-be Leonardo, the Polish-American artist Krzysztof Wodiczko who created Poliscar, above, as both a physical answer to New York’s homeless crisis in the 1980s and 90s, and as a way of making it visible to the public.
The name is a double pun: On the one hand ‘polis’ is the Greek word for a city-state, often represented in the lives of homeless people by police. It’s also the root for policy and politics, and Wodiczko’s invention intentionally sets out to involve the homeless in politics and policy as actors, not just subjects.
The poliscar shown here, actually Variant 2, is equipped for moving, sleeping and most especially for communicating. In use, it can fold low for sleeping, and unfold into a vertical shape for moving.
It has a loudspeaker, video camera, editing equipment and a microwave uplink, providing the user with the means to communicate, organize, and participate. In Wodiczko’s words, “As long as the voiceless occupy public space, rendering them their voice is the only way to make it truly public.”
While only a few handmade units were made, Wodiczko’s dreams were of fleets of them, providing home and voice for those who had none, and for a mass of people to confront the mass of either indifference or violence with which society meets them. Several variations of that can be seen in his graphite-on-vellum drawings in the exhibit.
In 1991, when New York Police cleared a three-year protest by artists and teh homeless from Tompkins Square Park, homeless encampments appeared nearby. At one, where the poliscar prototypes were brought, a squatter photographer in a nearby abandoned building made these images.
