Friday, April 3, 2009

New Project: Post-it Books

I'm not sure what I'm calling this project yet. I've been provisionally going with "post-it books", the provision being that this is less a title and more the most basic unit of description I can come up with.
The project is another in the art-in-unexpected-places vein. I am taking books from the library, writing stories that are parasitic (or maybe symbiotic) to the book in question, and inserting these stories into the library book via post it notes.














The first story I've written/inserted is intertwined with Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage, in that much of the "plot" of my story revolves around the circumstances surrounding two different people reading Murno's book. Munro's short stories are largely explorations of the relationships between people, so the story I wrote for the occasion is also relationship-centric .

This project, aside from the quasi-guerrilla-art appeal, has the fun bonuses of requiring that I read lots of library books, write lots of assignment-like short stories (stories that begin with a "site" rather than a plot) and practice drawing Times New Roman.  You can find a scan of my addition to Alice Munro's book here.


10 comments:

  1. Um, this is brilliant, and I wish I'd thought of it.

    Are you recording these pieces in some way, like keeping copies of the post-it stories and notes about where they appeared, or will all be lost if anyone takes the post-its out?

    If I ever found one of these, I would be stoked beyond belief.

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  2. This is so neat! One of the things that amazes me about these projects (the widgets on the clothes and the post-its -which i invented, in case anyone asks at our ten year reunion) is that you don't get instant gratification. That is to say, you never get to see how people react to it when they see it, let alone ever find out if ANYONE sees it. I guess that is the art in it though - that the viewer projects and anticipates, when actually, nothing has happened. Perhaps, even the artist may be completely satisfied with just ending the process upon the item's return to a public forum. Maybe its as simple as that, and the art is in the contrast between just that and the projected outcomes that we imagine.

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  3. Moreover, the project is actually entertaining. So many art projects are a reflection of the state of a society at a given time. Yours on the other hand arguably is doing this as well, but also gives an element of INVOLVEMENT in the art. It's as if we are reverting back to our youth and are secretly co-conspiring a prank with you. It definitely makes me feel like a participant in the art, rather than just an observer. But thats from the perspective of viewing this blog, which I'm not sure if you anticipated being part of the art.

    On the other side of it, the eventual discoverer of the art would be experiencing something that had happened in the past. But how long into the past? 5 years? 20 years? Last week? What was going on in the artists mind? What is this about? All of this is the art itself.

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  4. the art has a potential then, to span an unknown length of time. Perhaps an individual 3 generations away make come across your post-its. Maybe someone next week. The project has the potential to become timeless.

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  5. surlygrl - Thanks! Yes, I have the complete story that I inserted into "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" as a word document, with the text formatted into little post-it sized batches (complete with intended page numbers), that I used as my "model" for drawing the text, as well as a PDF of scans of any pages that included notes, which I made just before returning the book. I'll post the later, If I can ever figure out a way to attach a PDF to this blog.

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  6. JPS - Yeah - one of the most common comments I get when telling people about "Shell Game" is that I should put some sort of email address or other calling card in the clothing I return so that I can get feedback or track what actually happens to my pieces, but I think it is better to have what happens to the clothing after it leaves my hands be a mystery. Not only would any sort of email address or other tracking method stray too close to advertising/branding for my tastes (which would rather undermine large chunks of the projects point), but I think a lot of the fun of the piece is, as you said, projecting or anticipating any of the numerous and diverse possible narratives that take off once the clothing is returned.

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  7. Is the book any good, btw? I've been wanting to read Alice Munro for a long time, but never get around to it.

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  9. It is good. I reccommend. It is not, however, so good that I had a difficult time coming up with something to add to it, which is an issue I've been running into with the next library book on my docket: "And Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris. I found it so tightly plotted and themed that I wan't coming up with anything I wanted to insert. I was telling a friend, though, about how it is mostly written in first person plural, with one deviation into third person, and she suggested that I use second person for my post-its, which I may actually do.

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  10. Do you speak another language? If you were bilingual, it would be interesting to read a book that has been translated into english from a language you speak fluently. The your story would actually be a re-translation back into the original language based only upon the english language in the book. Kind of like a literary telephone game!

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