Quite a Cozy

My own guerilla art output has been a bit meager lately, and so I figured I'd share a link to this piece that I enjoyed reading about recently:

http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/27/news/economy/crocheted_bull/

I feel like I've seen or heard about guerrilla knitting with surprising frequency recently, but this piece, by New York based artist, Olek, is by far the most visually and critically interesting and impressive.  In brief: she knitted a cozy for the Wall Street bull:

It sounds like the piece didn't survive very long before park's caretaker unceremoniously removed it.  It's a pity - I'd like to think that work with this much obvious care and craftsmanship, even if unauthorized, would give some pause to those charged with destroying it.

Message in a Bottle Project

I recently met the instigator of Message in a Bottle Project.  She, and the occasional collaborator, make small collages, paintings, and drawings which are then left in various public or semi-public locations to be found by whomever happens to chance upon them.  She leaves contact information on the back, and encourages the finders to get in touch and let her know when and where they encountered her artistic dispersions.  As she describes it on her blog:

"Our intent is seated in release, discovery, fun, exploration, stories, and connections between strangers. We like to think of MiaBs as movable, three-dimensional graffiti objects. "

Speaking of her blog, I stole this image off of it.  It is one of my favorites of the MiaB pieces, although there is certainly no dearth of lovely samples:

The way that the cloud-form's colors echo the colors of the room, and how all of these elements inform the figure with his slumped far-away posture is really arresting and poetic.

Here are a few more examples of the aesthetic:

The project shares the playful art-in-unexpected-places ethos of my Shell Game project, but the two take very different paths when it comes to follow-up. While MiaB encourages contact and explanation, Shell Game works hard to preserve anonymity and mystery. Although I don't want to leave contact info in my work, I think the move works well for MiaB. I like keeping my clothing alterations difficult to explain, but I think that the MiaB project is served by an awareness that when one has found a "Message", they have found a discrete part of a more intricate and expansive whole. But maybe Shell Game would be served by that as well?

Top Five in Five

After going to see Miranda July's 11 Heavy Things Installation currently showing in Union Square, I thought to myself, "That was nice, but it wouldn't quite rank among the top five art exhibits I've seen in NYC in the last five years."  Which of course inspired me to reflect upon what the top five art works/exhibits that I've seen in NYC in the last five years would actually be.  Here they are, ranked in what I feel to be their order at the moment.

5) Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum:  Mueck employs the mechanisms of movie special effects production to make incredibly life-like figurative sculptures.  Though intensely impressive from a technical angle, what really drew me into Mueck's work was how he played with scale to make me experience my own figure differently.  A huge sculpture of a woman lying in bed, for example, brought back vividly the feeling of being a child crawling into bed with my parents, simply because of how it's scale related to my own.

Ron Mueck (Australian, b. 1958). In Bed, 2005. Mixed media, 63 3/4 x 255 7/8 x 155 1/2 in. (161.9 x 649.9 x 395 cm). Private Collection

(Photo from BrooklynMuseum.org)

4) David Byrne's Playing the Building, presented by Creative Time: Byrne's building-as-musical-instrument was smartly conceived, a great way to experience the battery maritime building, and fun to play/watch.

3) David Hockney at Pace Wildenstein: Hockney may have come to prominence in southern California, but East Yorkshire sure seems to agree with him.  His large landscapes were lively and gorgeous in person, in a way that just can't be captured by a website.

2) Marina Abromovic's The Artist is Present at MoMA: Not only was it thrilling to have a chance to participate in an Abromovic piece, but the retrospective itself really fleshed out (sorry, couldn't help myself) my understanding of Abromovic's work.  I appreciated the chance to see others performing her earlier works, although I know that that aspect was actually detrimental for some.

1) Antony Gormley's Blind Light at Sean Kelly Galery: The only piece on this list that I went to go see multiple times, Blind Light offered a simple gesture, an interactive room-sized glass box filled with dense white-lit fog, that created a complex and indelible experience - exploring the human experience of vision and space - as well as an aesthetically beautiful object.

(Photo from oobject.com)
Now, this list may well deserve a place in the ranking of the top five most self-indulgent posts I've ever written, but still, if any of those works show up in your neck of the woods, check them out...

Key to the City: Part One?

I'd heard rumors about Paul Ramirez Jonas' Key to the City - excited murmurs from other artists - before I read any of the press about the piece.  The idea - public art piece/scavenger hunt/award ceremony hybrid - is a fertile one. Here is how Creative Time, who sponsors the piece, describes it on its website:
"One to one, one at a time, all of the time, thousands of keys will be bestowed by thousands of people on thousands of citizens for thousands of reasons that deserve to be recognized. Keys to cities are traditionally given by a mayor to a hero or dignitary, symbolizing that they can have free entrance to the city. This new Key to the City belongs to us, and is awarded among ourselves. And with this new key, we gain an opportunity to step back and reflect on common space in the city. For not only does the key open up specific sites, but it can also make us aware that the city is a series of spaces that are locked or unlocked."

What this boils down to is that if you go to Times Square with a partner and perform a little ceremony, you can get a key that opens a variety of locks with a variety of results, and a little passport-like booklet showing where to find these locks.  

Key to the City kiosk in Times Square (Photo from ArtObserved)

I went to get my key the week after the piece opened.  I didn't have any friends available at the time that I wanted to go, so I decided I would just head to Times Square, and draft a stranger to participate with me if necessary.  I didn't end up having to work even that hard.  Upon asking a volunteer if she knew of anyone else in need of a partner, she matched me up with a woman who was already partway through the line. Score!

Flora, my recently acquired partner, was very personable, and we passed the forty-five minutes or so that it took to make it through the line by chatting.  She ran in-house catering for an advertising agency, and had read about Key to the City in the New York Post.  She wasn't a big follower of contemporary art, but had a friend who was, and so had recently been to the Whitney Biennial.  We compared notes, and talked of the city in general.  It was a nice venue for getting to know a stranger.

When we got to the front of the line we read the ceremony script, exchanged keys, signed the register, and said our goodbyes.  So far, the piece was living up to my expectations: it created a reason to go somewhere that I wouldn't normally venture (Times Square), and a new and interesting social situation.  

The actual deployment of the key, however, has been less successful.  It took a couple of weeks before I made it to the first lock. Many of the locks are located places that involve time constraints.  The one at Gracie Mansion is only available on Wednesdays, and I ended up in that part of town on Sunday.  I was near the site at Cabinet Magazine on a date it was open, but too late in the day.  My time and location finally aligned in DUMBO, where I went to the site in a locker at Gleason's Gym.  

When I arrived at the Gym, I told the receptionist that I was there for the Key to the City.  She asked if I wanted to look around for the locker, or have her tell me where it was.  I looked uncomfortably at the array of large men boxing intently throughout the space, and asked her to just tell me where it was.  She pointed me to the opposite corner of the room, and I made my way past boxing bags and rings and people ignoring me.  The locker unlocked to reveal boxing gloves and other gym accouterments, along with a box full of a bunch of copies of a small magazine related to the sport.  Next to me a few trainers were looking at pictures on a computer and chatting.  I pondered what they must think of a person making a pilgrimage to their gym unlock this space.  I made a half-hearted gesture of touching a few of the objects in the locker and then left quickly.  I was disappointed that the locker contained exactly what one would expect it to contain.    The appeal of the locked door is that there could be anything behind it.  And anything surprising would be of interest.  But my visit to Gleason's did not feel like an award or an adventure, just like being a tourist in a place that is not an attraction.

I'm still optimistic that some of the lock sites that operate differently may be more engaging to me.  For example, the key is supposed to allow you to turn on and off a lamp-post in Bryant Park, which sounds fun, and perhaps some of the boxes that are in more artistic locations will have more artistic contents.  If I manage to visit any more sites, I'll 'part two' this baby.

Maps and Cookies

Wandering the internet, I came upon fakeisthenewreal.org, where artist and urban planner Neil Freeman has posted some lovely and intriguing mapping work.  I think my favorites are Streets Centered, Street Gradient, Contextual Calendar, and Symbolic Alphabet, but really, it is difficult to choose.

And, and in line with my love of playful art projects in public space, Jane McGonigal is writing out the myth of sysiphus, in cookies, one word at a time, all over the world.

The Artist is Present: An Appropriatly Exhaustive Account of Staring at Marina Abromovic

When I learned that Marina Abromovic was doing a performance piece at MoMA, I knew I had to go see it - to go participate if at all possible.  Abromovic is one of the few performance artists whose work I've bothered to know and respect.  When I first learned about her in art school, I was particularly arrested by this image,  from Rhythm 0, a piece where she provided a table of various implements, then stood totally passive for six hours, allowing the audience to decorate, pose, and abuse her:

For her current piece at MoMA, Abromovic sits in a chair, and museum-goers take turns sitting across from her.  The edict is to be silent and still, simply gazing at one another, until the museum-goer decides to leave and the next takes their place.  Abromovic stays seated in this way from open to close, every day for months. Here's a link to where you can see a live feed of Marina Abromovic's performance, whenever MoMA is open.

I arrived on site (in the atrium on the second floor) at about 10:35AM - five minutes after MoMA opened. There was a line, but not a long one - about fifteen people.  However, with a piece like this, length means very little.  Rumors moved up and down the line of a previous visitor who had sat for seven hours.  How quickly the line would advance was going to depended upon how long visitors sat, and how many people dropped out after it became clear that this was not a speedy endeavor. 

Detailed account of the experience after the page break:

The Genre Explored

I happened, quite by accident, upon this website the other day:

http://www.postitnotestories.com/

Which contains a collection of stories illustrated by Arthur Jones with drawings on post-it notes. This piqued my interest for what else is being done in the post-it note genre. A few google searches revealed:

http://www.keyholemagazine.com/sherrie-flick/post-it-note-stories

http://www.rictus.com/post-it/

The emphasis for both of the above seems to be on post-its as a way of limiting word count, and perhaps as a way of disrupting the feeling of preciousness that can make writing difficult.

And here's a visual post-its piece at UCSC that uses the sticky squares as pixels:

http://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~inio/dk/

Here's a really odd office supply website (there is a version of lolcatz done with chairs that I kept finding in various connected pages) that has posted a nice collection of mosaics made out of post-its.

http://blog.shoplet.com/office-supplies/post-it-notes-art/

Oh, and wait, here is yet another cool Web Urbanist post that has quite a few nice examples of Mosaic type works:

http://weburbanist.com/2008/01/24/more-unusual-art-from-everyday-materials-16-post-it-note-pranks-sculptures-and-murals/

I have yet to find any pieces displayed or referenced that seem very close to my post-it note books in concept or execution, which makes me happy in that way that I probably should try to rise above or something.

So As Not To Entirely Loose The Habit

I'm in the midst of drawing up the post-it notes for a Sarah Waters library book, have somewhat stalled in my endeavors to write the text for a story to add to a really unimpressive Mercedes Lackey novel, have a pair of American Eagle jeans waiting for additions inspiration to percolate, and haven't touched a palette knife in weeks. Since none of this is very post-worthy, I'm going to stray from my own work to offer up a few links.

Here is the work of Rebecca Campbell - probably my favorite contemporary painter.

Campbell grapples with beauty and transcendence, without straying into the cheesy or maudlin.

And here is an article from the New York Times that I read today - the renegade cabaret it describes seems nicely in the spirit of some of the guerrilla art I've linked to before.

Links Undermining My Creativity

Recently, still unsure of what to call what I've tended to refer to as "my more performative pieces", I started looking up some of the words that were at the edges of my vocabulary - words that I had a sense might apply, but had no strict definition for - like "guerrilla art", "shopdropping", and "culture jamming" .

After doing some reading I've come to the conclusion that the most applicable word for my recent non-painting works is "shopdropping". The real discovery, though, was how little I've known about guerrilla art. I could probably have only named (0r pseudonymed) three or four guerrilla artists, and the only shopdropper I knew anything about was Banksy.

Turns out there is quite a vibrant and diverse world of transgressive art projects going on around us. Two sites I found particularly explore-worthy were shopdropping.net and weburbanist.com (which casts a much larger net than just guerrilla art, but has good "intro to" articles on many subsets of the genre).

While tooling around shopdropping.net I came upon the work of Zoe Sheehan Saldana, and my stomach turned over. There are few responses when I talk about my work that I like less than "oh, that sounds like so-and-so's piece...", and Zoe Sheehan Saldana's Walmart shopdropping piece comes way closer to my Shell Game than anything I'd seen before (and predates it...doubly blasted). She bought clothing from Walmart, made exacting facsimiles with impressive sewing skills, put the tags from the legitimate items on the one's that she'd constructed, and then slipped her douplicates back into the store, for people to buy without ever being the wiser. I've since consoled myself, though, by focusing on the many ways in which her work differs from mine. Her work is more technically demanding and conceptually rigorous, but mine is more, well, fun? I'll stop being petty any moment now.

The one other artist introduced via my shopdropping.net reading that I wanted to mention is Hang Nguyen, whose Planting Seeds made me smile, and after so much reading on anti-corporate, anti-conventional, anti-etcetera was refreshingly sweet (but you know, still in a transgressive way).