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Over the last month, Mack McFarland has been working on a show at PSU’s White Gallery. Ten Foot Pole Drawings is a project in which Mack actualizes the figure of speech: ‘I wouldn’t touch that with a ten foot pole’. He draws unsightly or offensive things such as notorious political or artistic figures, or words like ‘Iraq’ or ‘faggot’ with a pencil attached to the end of a literal ten foot pole. Because the project is durational in nature, (Mack periodically goes to the gallery and works, doing more drawings each week) and he realizes that actually experiencing the entirety of the project can be difficult for a viewer, he has been updating his progress on facebook. His entries chronicle an inspired beginning: ‘Mack McFarland on the streetcar with a 10 ft pole’ and have progressed from there, each week recording a few new drawings. People could keep tabs on the project’s progress and setbacks online. About week into the show someone from the university decided that the word ‘nigger’ was too offensive and told him to cover it up. He graciously complied, but asked to have a formal request written up and sent to him so that he could document his own censorship. As of yet the university has not complied with this request. Facebook hosted some dialogue about Mack’s images and censorship, but there has been relatively little conversation about the work on any other blogs, papers, or even on the campus itself. What we are saying is: while online forums breakdown some boundaries and allow for diverse people to come together in discussion, there also is a risk that the conversation stays within the bounds of a site like facebook. Mack proposed to PSU that they have a public forum to talk about the concept of the work and the concept of censorship but it was shut down. It seems like a perfect opportunity for a public discussion about racism, censoring artists, and the value of political correctness. That is exactly what the work asks for, but instead the dialogue never made it past Mack’s facebook wall. Maybe it’s because people are scared of the word nigger, maybe it’s because there wasn’t that much of an opportunity for viewing at a gallery like the White, or maybe there is a chance that the context of facebook and other social networking sites isn’t quite right for the kind of critical artistic/cultural dialogue we want. Sorry if this has become a bit tangential but it seems like Mack did his job as an artist, putting something out that asked for conversation and we feel like we failed to fulfill our responsibility as viewers to stir that conversation. Forgive us Mack we are trying now. It seems like an online component could have been great for this project, but perhaps we have to question the limits of (seemingly free and democratic) forums like facebook, youtube, and twitter to serve our actual artistic needs.