Monica Raymond, Notes on “Collateral Damage Noted”

I've been trying to catalogue creative means of dissent, symbolic actions that move beyond the protests that became typical and stereotypical during the post-1960s movements for rights and justice. Here's a good example of how artists continue to engage the political without disappearing into harangue.

Monica Raymond, Notes on “Collateral Damage Noted”

On Memorial Day of 2005, I took part in a performance conceived by Tom Plsek at the large open plaza in front of Boston City Hall. “Collateral Damage Noted” was to be a sound meditation on the civilians killed in the Iraq war. The latest reliable figures place this total at almost 25,000, he wrote in his call.

Plsek’s idea was that musicians would stand in a circle and sound a note for perhaps ten or twelve seconds,then pause, averaging three to four long notes a minute. Each note was to represent the life and death of an Iraqi civilian. By his calculations, if a hundred musicians did this for an hour, we would have made enough notes to account for the Iraqi women, children, and non-combatant men killed till then.

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