Two audiocassette tape recordings were removed from an art display at the Boulder (Colo.) Public Library. Both were included in “Kitchen Diplomacy” by Mary Golden, part of the “Peace Offerings, Winter Solstice 2002” show held at the library. The first tape, removed earlier in the month, was a recording of Golden reading a New York Times column by William Safire criticizing the Homeland Security Act and warning that it could lead to the government snooping into citizens’ public and private lives. The second tape, a reading of the Bill of Rights, was discovered missing on January 16, three days before the show was taken down.
Golden said in the January 17 Boulder Daily Camera that someone who didn’t want others to hear diverse opinions on civil rights suppressed her work’s message. “My initial inclination was to make a new tape,” Golden said. “But I thought it was a stronger message just to put a note up there to tell people it has been censored.” Her handwritten note read, “This tape was stolen by a censor who did not want you to hear it.”
This is the second time an art display has been vandalized at the library. In November 2001 Bob Rowan removed 21 ceramic phalluses from an exhibit. “El Dildo Bandito,” as Rowan referred to himself, said that the theft was to protest the library’s sponsorship of erotic art, the same time as it refused to hang an American flag in the building’s entrance. He pled no contest to theft charges in May 2002 and received a one-month deferred sentence that bans him from the library.
There is no apparent connection between the two thefts.
Posted January 27, 2003.