[placed] quarter on a train seat
[placed] permanent marker at a bus stop
[placed] tennis ball on a park bench
Placed is an ongoing project I conceptualized as a series of open ended gifts, left anonymously in public spaces. I've been leaving quarters on the train, permanent markers at bus stops, and tennis balls in the park. These are everyday objects left where they are likely to be found and their placement is documented casually, if at all. I've selected objects that would be enticing to most people. Not everyone stops to pick up a nickel or a dime, but few people will ignore a quarter. The objects can be used in a number of ways. In a sense, the quarter is the most open ended, but even a tennis ball or a permanent marker could be used with great variety. The objects are all valuable enough that they're worth picking up, perhaps even just a little bit exciting to find.
Placed is a project very much about not knowing. I enjoy wondering what happens after I've left each thing. I think about whether anyone will be drawn to pick an object up, but then also about how it might feel to find these things and what might become of them. I imagine someone feeling lucky when they find one of these, not in any profound way but in a slight, almost immeasurably small way. Spare change might just go in a pocket, lost in a sea of more change, but it might be consciously saved or spent. A tennis ball might be found by someone like a kid or a dogwalker and played with. A permanent marker might be used for graffiti or a handwritten note. These are just a few possibilities amongst a great many.
Placed began with the title "minute gestures." It consisted as the following text:
minute gestures
brief, anonymous interventions
9 quarters were left on 9 seats on the train
4 haiku's were written in 4 piles of melting snow
3 tennis balls were placed on 3 park benches
5 drawings were made on the beach
2 permanent markers were left at 2 bus stops
1 handwritten letter was slipped into a then unpurchased newspaper
Originally I had no intention of documenting this project. I saw it as existing mostly based on a promise. As an ongoing list, one would read phrases like "9 quarters were left on 9 seats on the train" and the rest would be left to the imagination. It was also designed as a machine to create ideas. I've been experimenting with photo documentation as a way to give just a little bit of illustration, to stregthen the bridge towards thinking about all the possibilities the project suggests. I've been avoiding polished documents, instead favoring the camera built into my cell phone, which is less obtrusive and keeps the project more spontaneous. I believe that the photographs themselves may create more unexpected possibilities as the project continues to unfold.
1 comment:
Ah yes, the urban stroll as delightful treasure hunt, all that magical beneficence promised by weak ties and anonymity. How yummy! You really are a true representative of the creative class!
But wait a minute, didn't you declare in class that your tastes incline toward much darker fare? Who the hell are you?
I recommend that you re-read once more your Meyer Schapiro. To wit: "It is remarkable how many pictures we have ... of informal and spontaneous sociability, of breakfasts, picnics, promenades, boating trips, holidays and vacation travel. These urban idylls ... presuppose the cultivation of these pleasures as the highest field of freedom for an enlightened bourgeois detached from the official beliefs of his class. In enjoying realistic pictures of his surroundings as a spectacle of traffic and changing atmospheres, the cultivated rentier was experiencing in its phenomenal aspects that mobility of the environment, the market and of industry to which he owes his income and his freedom. ... As the contexts of bourgeois sociability shifted from community, family and church to commercialized or privately improvised forms — the streets, the cafés and resorts — the resulting consciousness of individual freedom involved more and more an estrangement from older ties; and those imaginative members of the middle class who accepted the norms of freedom, but lacked the economic means to attain them, were spiritually torn by a sense of helpless isolation in an anonymous indifferent mass." From "The Nature of Abstract Art" (orig. 1937), reprinted in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (New York, NY: George Braziller, 1979), 193.
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