What we’ve got here is the kind of conceptual sleight of hand that makes the museum going bourgeoisie feel dangerous for an afternoon. Lucky Dragons (Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck) dragged peace itself into SFMOMA and roughed it up, reverse engineered it like they were hot wiring a stolen Cadillac for good intentions. They took the UN Charter, born in the museums original building back when we still believed in collective salvation, and tore through it looking for something salvageable, something that might actually work.
“In 1945, representatives of fifty countries convened in the War Memorial Veterans Building — SFMOMA’s original home — to draft the United Nations Charter, imagining a global system of government designed to produce peace through consolidated power. During the month of October, we will work towards reverse engineering the technologies of peace — treaties, protocols, symbols and systems — in order to learn from what has already been invented, to repurpose and re-contextualize, to create new possibilities for interaction, and to fix existing bugs.”
Lucky Dragons
The whole operation comes across like someone trying to debug humanity’s operating system. There’s “The Pattern,” this labyrinth you walk through to process your own bullshit thoughts, supposedly achieving “Positive Peace,” which sounds like something from a corporate wellness seminar but turns out to be about actual structural justice. Then there’s “The Tangle,” a gorgeous mess acknowledging that peace isn’t some static nirvana but constant management, endless vigilance, the Sisyphean grind of keeping the knots from reforming.
The cynic in me wants to dismiss it as museum sanctioned radicalism, art that pretends to danger while remaining perfectly domesticated. But there’s something rawer here, more desperate. It’s performance art that knows performance won’t save us but tries anyway, acknowledging the futility while refusing to shut up. Peace as perpetual failure, perpetually attempted. Not redemption, just relentless, stubborn work.