While we wait for the next news from 911 Media Arts Center--in the standoff developing between an incensed membership and a defensive board--let's see what's new in the rest of the art world.
My favorite story lately on the wires (thanks, as usual, to www.artsjournal.com) is about British artist Andre Stitt, who has canceled a performance in which he planned to kick a container of takeout curry down the High Street in Bedford, England. And, in a not-insignificant detail, he was going to wear silver platform boots. Apparently this project, called White Trash Curry Kick (and meant as a kind of commentary on boisterous weekend behavior), created more popular interest than the city thought it could handle. I'd like to invite Stitt to kick some curry down Broadway.
On the home front, artist Stuart Keeler de-installed his sculpture Nomads the day before the show opened in the King County Art Gallery. The sculpture was a large rectangle created out of stacked wooden pallets and nearly filling the gallery, with only 15 inches around each side for viewers to squeeze through. The idea, Keeler said, was to invoke a kind of pilgrimage, where part of the ritual included circumambulation. Pallets, too, travel all over the world, bearing our worldly goods, emissaries of globalization.
But as Keeler was loading his pallets into the gallery, people coming in and out of the Smith Tower noticed a funny smell. It turns out that the wet wood was beginning to dry, and releasing mold spores into the air; by the end of the day, people were complaining.
"It was a jungle smell you couldn't miss," said Jim Kelly of King County's Office of Cultural Resources. An air tester came in and verified that the spores in the air presented a health hazard. (A fire marshal also noted that the work was too close to sprinklers.)
What makes this story good is not the conflict over what, exactly, constitutes the art in moldy wood; it's that Keeler resolved the situation in a way that created an almost better conceptual work. The gallery now features a video of the artist taking apart the work, and a tape outline on the floor of where the work was--with a few shards of wood left from the move-out. This evokes the remnants of a sacred object, more powerful in its absence than its presence could ever be.
