Josely Carvalho Messages to the Public: Turtle News

Turtle News is part of Josely Carvalho’s message is part of her new series, “Diary of Images: She is visited by birds and turtles.” According to Carvalho (b. 1942, São Paulo, Brazil), “This new work is about finding a statehood within myself. . . .  It is about carrying history in the shape of my own turtle shell. . . . It is about the dream of flight. . . . It is about the turtle carrying her own shell through waters and savannahs.” Critic Lucy Lippard states that “the turtle, which lives on both land and water, became a metaphor for [Carvalho’s] hybrid statehood.”

The message begins with images of hands and upside-down feet moving across the screen. Slowly, an image of a small turtle appears and gradually grows very large so that it covers the entire screen. The hands reappear and cover the shell of the turtle. All the while, a text focusing on three elements important to Carvalho runs in a band underneath the images. The text addresses the environmental issue of the destruction of turtles, the personal stand Carvalho herself takes against this act, and the political reality of the tremendous debt in Latin America, which “not even the turtle shell can bear.”

Messages to the Public formed a key part of the Public Art Fund’s long-term commitment to media-based artworks. Running from 1982 to 1990, the show featured a series of artists’ projects created specifically for the Spectacolor board at Times Square.

As Russell Miller from Ohio newspaper The Toledo Blade explained in his article on February 19, 1984, “every month, a different artist presents a 30-second animation on the Spectacolor light board—an 800-square-foot array of 8,000 red, white, blue, and green 60-watt bulbs that dominates the Times Square vista. The spot is repeated more than 50 times a day for two weeks, wedged into a 20-minute loop of computer-animated commercials.

“Jane Dickson, a painter, was working for Spectacolor, Inc. as an ad designer and computer programmer when, three and a half years ago, she first thought to use the light board to display noncommercial art.

“‘I picked that title,’ she said of Messages to the Public, ‘because I thought the propaganda potential from this project was terrific.’ The board, she noted, was regularly used for ‘commercial propaganda.’

“Dickson sought help from the Public Art Fund, an organization based here and dedicated to taking art out of the galleries and placing it in the city’s streets and parks.”

Project Director of the Public Art Fund Jessica Cusick explained, “We’re trying to do art that’s timely, has a message, is visually potent and is trying to deal with the fine line dividing fine art and commercial art.”