Book by Krutika

Published by Art in Odd Places New York, NY www.artinoddplaces.org ÂŠ2013 Art in Odd Places All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole, or in part, in any form, without written permission from the author and/or publisher. Edited by Juliana Driever Catalog Design by Krutika Harale ISBN 978-1-300-93814-9 Cover image: Rob Andrews, Union Square Clean. Photograph by Elliot Hypollite Unlimited edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Map of 14th Street

Preface

Ed Woodham

Desire Lines: An Introduction

Rituals on 14th Street

Street Life

Relocating the Aesthetic

Ritual Humanity, Capital Presence

MUTUAL THINK = BEAUTY

Artists & Projects

Juliana Driever

Kalia Brooks & Trinidad Fombella

Victoria Marshall

Adam Brent

Ernesto Pujol

An exchange with Linda Mary Montano and Juliana Driever

179

Artists Biographies

191

Contributor Biographies

195

Photo Credits

197

About

199

Acknowledgements

202

Public Programs

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ED WOODHAM 14

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) was created in response to the constriction of public space and personal civil liberties in New York City and beyond. In the years after 9/11, there was not only an official crackdown on rights to public space but also a greater nervousness around legitimate public action, and the historic rights and freedoms of civic metropolitan space became freighted with concerns about permissions. AiOP’s tenet has always been to find the aperture between regulations, to work legally and rightfully to reclaim – through thought, action and dialogue – the spaces that still belong to us. Over time, we have worked with a diverse group of artists on this goal, culminating in AiOP’s annual thematic festival along 14th Street each October. In 2011, protesters of the Occupy Movement at Zuccotti Park, drew further attention to the importance of public space, reaching global awareness just a few weeks before the AiOP: RITUAL festival. In an interview during that time, I expressed my parallel aspiration for RITUAL, explaining my hope that “[…] the repetition of these [rituals] will create a ripple effect in the collective consciousness to wake up our complacency. […] A tall order, I know.”

Union Square Clean, Rob Andrews, 2011.

I am profoundly grateful to the Art in Odd Places team of staff, artists, curators, writers, designers, volunteers, and supporters who made time in their busy lives and brought their many talents to this project. It is only through the generosity, dedication and inspiration of these people that this festival was made possible. May we continue to protect the sacred nature of art through rituals in public spaces everywhere.

Ed Woodham Founder and Director Art in Odd Places 9

JULIANA DRIEVER 10

DESIRE LINES: AN INTRODUCTION I have been occupied by a nagging thought: Art in Odd Places is a misnomer.

Tree Kisses, Mary Ivy Martin, 2011.

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is not a project concerned with the marginal or the odd. It is not, as the moniker suggests, concerned with spaces that are off the beaten track, or secret or inaccessible. Rather, AiOP is about the surprising inclusion of creative gestures in seemingly unremarkable places, sites that are familiar and pedestrian and used ritually by the New York City public everyday. It is about taking the world â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the real world and all of its phenomena â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as the locus of serious inquiry, response, and participation by the diverse denizens of a busy Manhattan thoroughfare. Besides, with certain contemporary currents turning away from the white cube exhibition paradigm and toward a more socially-invested, community-based art, public projects like that of AiOP are increasingly becoming commonplace. This, then, begs a larger question: does AiOP refer to literal peculiarities of site, or does it subtly call out the uneasy relationship between the rarefied art world and culture-at-large? For the uninitiated, AiOP is an artist-led, wide-angle experience of the 14th Street corridor. As a thematic annual festival, and as an exhibition in public space, AiOP takes a singular concept as its starting point, and then turns out its many subjectivities over the course of two weeks each October. For the 2011 iteration of the festival, a working concept of RITUAL was the focal point for over sixty projects that were installed or performed at and around street level. The significance of RITUAL, and its supporting themes of ceremony, habituation, myth, obsession, superstition, and liturgy, is universal. We all partake of personal routines, some of which are completed without much reflection, and others with a great amount of intention and deliberation. RITUAL highlighted this shared experience through a process of de-familiarizing individual habits 11

with a program of diverse and temporary projects enacted by an ad hoc creative community. As it does every year, AiOP: RITUAL offered its participants a chance to step outside of their own routines and cycle through an exploration of repeated public and private activities as they relate to and disrupt the civic superstructure of 14th Street and the spectrum of its social patterns, economy, and history. It has been noted in the often-cited work of scholars like Claire Bishop, Miwon Kwon, Gregory Sholette and others that there are many different approaches to publicly-sited art. The example of the dated “plop art” model, in the tradition of autonomous objects used to beautify or enliven a given locale just by the simple fact of their presence, has been overturned in recent decades in favor of an artwork that responds to its surroundings, and prompts its audience to also partake of an exchange with any number of contexts embedded within the site: environmental, sociological, political, and economical. AiOP typically runs the gamut of these so-called socially-engaged projects, asking the viewer to become an active participant in the art experience. And, activity is indeed one of the characteristics of AiOP. A moving target by design, the festival is generally carried out without securing official or formal permissions, instead emphasizing the idea that public space is our space, an arena where creativity can flourish freely as it yields to 14th Street’s constant flow of human activity. Performance art is a feature in the festival, and not simply because the nature of its context is such that it requires constant movement and non-obstruction, but perhaps also because the work adapts itself to the experience of the urban individual as one of perpetual motion. New York is undoubtedly a walking city and AiOP caters to a pedestrian audience. Complied in 2013, almost two years after the fact, this volume is meant to document and extend the projects and ideas presented for RITUAL, providing an enduring platform for the many voices that have been drawn into the festival’s orbit. Among the contributions to this catalog, co-curators Kalia Brooks and Trinidad Fombella outline their vision for the festival, and offer an intellectual foundation for the concepts that 12

were presented. Victoria Marshall, Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Parsons The New School for Design, wrote about her collaborative project Grid Scenes, and its relationship to her research on urban ecology. Adam Brent, a member of the BroLab collective, and Director of the BFA in Integrated Design at Parsons The New School for Design, relates a narrative look at the individual encounter with AiOP and the personal sensation of participating in its spectacle. Placing the many forms of ritual squarely within a social and human context, performance artist/social choreographer Ernesto Pujol shares a poetic meditation on the creative habit and an empowering call to decentralize the contemporary art community. Rounding out this collection of essays is a penetrating exchange with Linda Mary Montano, a pioneering figure in contemporary feminist performance art, and the festival’s keynote speaker. Over sixty artists working in a great variety of media contributed to RITUAL. Some, like Rob Andrews, have considered the sacred, religious aspect of rituals. Andrews’ work, Union Square Clean, brought forty figures blanketed in black cloth to the southern edge of Union Square, where he and others ceremoniously washed their feet. Similarly, Lawrence Graham-Brown’s Gimme Bak Ma Clothes! had the artist in the position of a liturgical figure, with his performance involving ritual gestures of cleansing and blessing with the use of natural materials like lime, rum, and cinnamon. Others have approached RITUAL in terms of its implication of repeated or habitual conditions. Mary Ivy Martin’s self-made ritual for the work Tree Kisses took the artist from tree to tree along 14th Street, peppering them with brightly colored lipstick kisses. Dressed as the “Gentleman of 14th Street,” performance artist LuLu LoLo provided yet another angle on the concept of ritual, offering subtle commentary on gendered social customs, while Jacolby Satterwhite took the idea to a metaphysical level and personified an incantation for a virtual fantasy world through a roaming performance/screening in Public Disco Announcement. So what, then, can one make of the oddly-sited character of AiOP? Is it odd that we find contemporary art bumping up against our workaday 13

existence? Though I admit to enjoying the ambiguity of the label, the space of the street (especially one as trafficked as 14th Street) is itself far from odd. In this way, “Art in Odd Places” is best understood as a spotlight cast upon varying attitudes about where art can take up residence.

A Tip of the Hat on 14th Street, LuLu LoLo, 2011.

We have all seen and walked along those meandering, organic paths worn into grassy areas by the repeated strain of foot traffic. These paths are called desire lines, and they are evidence of the human want to find an alternate route, away from the angular lines of concrete sidewalks. This self-directed wayfinding serves not only as a practical social trail, but also as a symbolic action; a subtle act of resistance, of carving out individual intent beyond an established path. AiOP: RITUAL offers up a similar kind of prompt, asking those who are part of its consciousness to take part in the plodding of a track that stems from their usual habits and routes. Walking from the neighborhoods of the East Village, to the high capitalism of Union Square, and on to the far west side’s Meat Packing District, RITUAL saw the making of new metaphorical trails along this familiar terrain, eroding a new awareness in the collective understanding and use of the space.

KALIA BROOKS & TRINIDAD FOMBELLA, CO-CURATORS 16

RITUALS ON 14TH STREET Art in Odd Places 2011: RITUAL featured a wide variety of actions, participatory performances, theatrical presentations, public installations, and small and large-scale interventions, all of which revolve around the concept of ritual.

El Santero: Seven Days Seven Nights, Alejandro Guzmán, 2011.

A ritual is generally defined as a series of established actions that are carried out in private or public spaces, by individuals or by groups, for their spiritual, social, or political significance. The artists in AiOP 2011: RITUAL tapped into the everyday significance of these habits, and continuously integrated these practices in their work to explore a broad range of issues in contemporary life such as politics, culture, religious beliefs, notions of individuality and community, the endurance of the body and the fragility of life, the relationship with nature, among many others. The collective character of the public setting offered by one of the busiest arteries in New York City as the context for the festival opened up the possibilities for the ritualistic interactions between artists, objects, and people along 14th Street. The street’s daily environment was transformed by secular and sacred activities, and the relationship and reaction of the people attracted by the festival’s ephemeral events. A new sense of place and time, inherent to the concept of ritual, confronted passersby as they flowed through the sidewalks, subway stations, and storefronts during their everyday commutes and spontaneous visits to the neighborhood. The projects were different each time as they were informed by their nomadic qualities and the varying interpretations of the spectators as they traveled through the street. Artists creating pilgrimages brought new importance to particular places, shrines were created as sites of worship, and the public witnessed miracles. Reenactments of past events based on the collections of oral history, the use of symbols, the exploration of 17

traditions and myths, and the use of magic and astrology were key to some of the artists’ work. Another group of artists created impermanent situations that were reminiscent of childhood and familiar events, worldly rituals that refer to identity politics, queer culture, dominance and submission, were experienced as organic and transcendental happenings.

From kissing trees to making wishes, from healing souls to dreaming in a park, from washing feet to praying to the sky, the artists transcended the borders of the everyday space. By ritualizing actions and highlighting the different realities that coexist, the projects of AiOP 2011: RITUAL manipulated impressions, satisfied emotions, created effects, and most importantly transformed - not only the surroundings in which they positioned their work, but also the audiences they engaged, and who became fundamental to the ritual itself.

Cocoon, Sherry Aliberti, 2011 and MASKI, Geert Vaes and Juha Valkeapää, 2011.

The use of the body was central to artists who touched upon life and death, real and spiritual borders, love affairs, human relationships and the connection to nature. Through music and dance, walks, palm reading, and the use of masks, wigs, and spraying perfumes and scattering ashes, some artists evoked mundane obsessions, venerated popular icons and rejected and criticized aspects of today’s social values.

VICTORIA MARSHALL 20

Grid Scenes trance performers passing the Relax Center on the south side of 14th Street near 6th Ave.

STREET LIFE On March 22, 1811, the three Commissioners of Streets and Roads in the City of New York submitted a plan, called the Commissionersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Plan.1 It was a grid pattern for Manhattan Island that cut through and filled in rocky outcrops, hillocks, depressions, and streams. The dimensions and alignment of the grid were designed as rectangular blocks, with the narrow end facing the water. This facilitated both the flow of water from the island into the river, and the movement of goods transported by boat into the city. On April 1, 2011, as part of the Art in Odd Places (AiOP) Festival and in collaboration with Harmattan Theater2 and The New School,3 a performance titled Grid Scenes4 marked the two-hundred-year anniversary of the Commissionersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Plan on 14th Street; the first street of the grid that runs between the Hudson River and the East River. Two groups of twenty students, professional actors and dancers moved toward one other very slowly at sunset, carrying hand-made lanterns and making simple sounds with simple instruments. One group, on the 1 2 3 4

The three Commissioners were: Gov. Morris, Simeon De Witt, and John Rutherford. http://harmattantheater.com/ Harmattan Theater http://www.newschool.edu/ The New School http://vimeo.com/63431191

The cast of Grid Scenes is: Victoria Marshall: concept, producer, director; May Joseph: director, choreographer; Brian McGrath: concept, theorist, trance performer; Dil Hoda, Tibetan bowl; David Van Leer, Tibetan bowl; Yihuan, tibetan bowl; Ying, Tibetan bowl; Carmen Boyer, trance performer, lantern design; Monica Hofstadter, trance performer, lantern design; Deniz Ayaz, trance performer; Fiorella Arenas, trance performer; Destiny Bundidge, trance performer; Chiara Cavalleri, trance performer; Emily Chen, trance performer; Clair Chung, trance performer; Margaret Dessau, trance performer; Lisabeth During, trance performer; Dannia Ghalib, trance performer; Khadeejah Gray, trance performer; Emilee Hefflefinger, trance performer; Ariel Herrera, trance performer; Sabina Huh, trance performer; Mark Jensen, trance performer; Clara Kim, trance performer; Diane Kim, trance performer; Natalie Kim, trance performer; Pamela Jane Mendoza, trance performer; Annie Park, trance performer; Zachary Smart, trance performer; Melis Tatari, trance performer; Kimberley Tate, trance performer, Sofia Varino, trance performer; Geoffrey Rogers, stage Manager; Corey Scott, web design; Tom Soper, video; Joshua Kristal, photographer; Lu Lombardi, photographer; Pete Kearney, photographer.

north side of 14th Street moved from Fifth Avenue to Sixth Avenue, and turned the corner heading north. The second group, on the south side of 14th Street moved from Seventh Avenue to Sixth Avenue, and turned the corner heading south. From seven o’clock until eight o’clock in the evening, passersby walked through the groups, stopping, pausing, and taking photos. Others waited, watching quietly and some joined in. The goal was to create a new urban ritual through slow movement and ceremonial aura in the hustle and bustle of a Friday rush hour at one of New York’s busiest intersections. It is also the urban campus of The New School, and for this reason we felt comfortable to play with it.

Grid Scenes was developed in a class called Cinemetrics5, which challenged students to move away from designing with mechanical representational systems and into more open-ended ways of drawing and making using digital media. Another way to say this is that they were encouraged to “lose perspective;” to leave behind the construction of projected perspectival space. In doing so, there is a movement towards “finding duration” by stopping, sorting, and assembling the less certain world of moving digital images.6 Students used their own everyday rituals on and around 14th Street as their research site. Art in Odd Places later created a forum for them to perform this new ritual. The experience interrupted the rhythm of lectures, discussion and homework, and grounded them in the accumulated life of 14th Street. Fourteenth Street also marks an uptown-downtown borderland in Manhattan. In 2008, as a half-loved, under-claimed and contested street, AiOP Director Ed Woodham found it fertile ground for a new festival. Grid Scenes, in turn, was strategically located in the blocks between Fifth Avenue and Seventh Avenue as they are another type of borderland between the two main business improvement districts that claim several blocks of 14th Street as their own.7 RITUAL in this way 5 Cinemetrics was taught by Brian McGrath, with Jean Gardener, Jose DeJesus,

and Victoria Marshall. 6 Brian McGrath and Jean Gardener, Cinemetrics, (London: Wiley-Academy, 2007), p. 15. 7 http://www.meatpacking-district.com/ Meatpacking Improvement District Authority http://unionsquarenyc.org/ Union Square Partnership

was a moment of intense attention, an excursion into lived space, which engaged the ongoing flexibility of the grid to accumulate new types of street life. Many creative practices located outdoors and in the street fall into the realm of street art, which are artworks that make a material or artistic use of the street.8 These micro-practices are often imagined as prototypes of macro-strategies, or mini-rehearsals of macro-statements, that speak to change as a relational space between many scales. This nascent movement was recently identified and shared in the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 U.S. pavilion exhibition titled Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good (of which AiOP was a participant).9 Art in Odd Places not only brings various street art practices together for the delight of a random encounter by a pedestrian on 14th Street, it also brings groups of artists from all over the city and the world together for the duration of the festival. The effects of AiOP’s brand of “permitless” street art are important to understand. Each artist selected from the open-call application process is encouraged to design his or her work in such a way as to not need a permit from the city.10 When all of the works are viewed as a set, such as in this catalog, they provide a measure of the lower ceiling of the rule requiring official permissions. The works make this visible by inventively playing in the interval, thereby revealing a type of urban design model embedded in the festival idea. The highlighting of this rule by AiOP creates a creative compression in the street life of 14th Street. In addition, when taken to other cities, such as Sydney or Greensboro, the often-moving boundary of where a rule makes a difference can be compared. Public space as a fixed territory, such as a block, garden, park, plaza, subway, or street can also be understood as something more temporal, lived, and experienced. For example, consider the difference in sociability 8 Nicholas Alden Riggle, “Street Art: The Transformation of the Commonplaces,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68:3 Summer 2010 9 http://www.spontaneousinterventions.org/project/art-in-odd-places 10 For example a Street Activity or Parade Permit, or a Musician or Performer Permit.

Urbanization intensifies and ages in patchy and complex spatial patterns, with changes in biodiversity lagging behind or moving ahead in similarly fragmented ways. Taking a walk along 14th Street, we pass a massive cogeneration station, rows of tenement houses with small back yards, high-rise residential towers above shopping malls, schools or subway lines, and all of this intermixed with retrofitted department stores, theaters, factories, banks, parks, and railway lines. Ecosystem Scientists describe this open-ended and non-equilibrium urban process as the ecology of the city.11 Art can help people understand these multiple trajectories, new juxtapositions and integrated forms in an immediate and sensorial way. It can reveal, reflect or translate, and it can add or remove meaning or value. In this way AiOP also has an ecological effect. The Manhattan Grid was actually designed for the horse and carriage. Today on 14th Street, cars and trucks are increasingly sharing the street with artists, commuters and their bikes, dogs with their owners, trees and their stewards, shoppers with their stuff, students with their friends, and everyone with cell phones connected to satellites, sensors, and each other. This is all happening in the clumsy mix where each of us is negotiating the political project of what type of globalization we want. Our streets are still transportation corridors, however they are also borderlands that hybridize old and new urban ecologies in important ways. They are also incredibly public, where many individuals, groups and institutions often claim a street corner as theirs. RITUAL with its ceremonies, habituations, myths, obsessions, superstitions, and liturgies added to this accumulation and offered a much needed urban ecosystem feedback device, one of its many innovations. 24

11 STA Pickett et al, “Integrated Urban Ecosystem Research,” Urban Ecosystems, vol 1, 1997, p. 183–4.

Grid Scenes trance performers with lanterns, headlights, illuminated signs and street lights at sunset.

of the stroll, promenade, ramble, commute, parade, ceremonial worship, or protest. Each has a duration and quality of publicness, which sometimes overlaps or has different meaning for different people in different positions of power. The spontaneous intervention or temporary clustering fueled by AiOP is an example of this second public space model. It is a curated duration that “fits” into the territories created by the Manhattan Grid such as Union Square Park and more recently, The Highline.

ADAM BRENT 26

RELOCATING THE AESTHETIC Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is a reminder that art is not a privilege, but a context, and we are all asked to participate in launching new models of urban art every fall. AiOP explores the potential of art and its transformative properties in the street looking at the immediate urban landscape as the classroom, gallery, and museum. AiOP’s reading of action in urban space as qualitative and sensorial ultimately contributes to, critiques, and assesses the quality of the human experience.

Smiley Bag Project, Nobutaka Aozaki, 2011.

Anyone who has ever lived in New York City knows the sensation of finding oneself in an improbable place: tuned in, alert and somewhat uncomfortable. Immediately following this feeling is something improbable and unexpected; that “aha” moment that has you saying to yourself “That’s why I am here, for this.” This experiential break in reality is, in sum, Art in Odd Places. Our city does not hold normal hours and neither does AiOP. For ten days in October, 14th Street gets that much weirder, with AiOP reminding us that there is always the present and the immediacy of now. Mark it on your calendar and if you happen to be up all hours of the night, you are in luck. At any given moment 14th Street may find something projected on its sidewalks and buildings, or at once quietly invaded by a durational performance that a single pair of eyes will never see through to completion. In October, the two-and-a-half mile-long artery known as 14th Street will pump out something else into our collective consciousness, taking different breaths and breathing out different life. Whether jolting us via a visual shock or subtly nudging us out of our daily routine, AiOP presents those traveling along 14th Street with a gift relocated from the galleries and museums and sent straight to the senses. Like the 2011 theme, to experience this not – so – outsider event 27

is to be part of an exclusive ritual – in the mix, echoing and amplifying its strange chorus. This is not street art inasmuch as it is art set to the street. AiOP 2011: RITUAL kicked off with Linda Mary Montano’s Glandathon Workshop at Parsons The New School for Design. Like Linda’s actionable lecture and performance, RITUAL was participatory and mostly drawn in a range simultaneously capturing the rawest and subtly refined aesthetics. AiOP is accessible to a point that you do not have to process it because it so closely reaches the completed experience that Thomas Dewey outlines in Art As Experience. The art of AiOP offers a recurring pattern, igniting an interaction between us and the world. The outcomes are a combination art and labor that can only come from 14th Street’s challenging landscape. Props arrive on subways and are painstakingly staged in advance. The art in Art in Odd Places is tediously prepared, rehearsed, assembled, and then repeatedly reassembled. Accepted artists and designers have no choice but to risk failure with so much uncertainty. Some projects frame urban beauty and others spotlight decay. But what is amazing is that we have the chance to see the doing and making unfold in the world’s largest studio, New York City’s urban terrain. Again, it is labor. It demonstrates the will to move beyond reaction and uniquely cast itself onto the city. It cannot exist without reflection, and its reflection yields the most unique of aesthetics. Through its artists, AiOP explores new notions of chance, temporality, ritual, and ephemerality, and by design it cannot help but find itself woven into the fabric of New York City. Pitching the spectrum of performative and active works of art that invite the spectator to participate, it authors a complete experience. I like that AiOP is still something so many have not come across in their routines, or even remotely expect. It is a special burst into our reality, making that moment more precious than rare. Urban furnishings set to bomb multiple blocks, or performances rooted in identities, cultures, or politics, are all served with parity. For those of us lucky enough to work between the rivers along 14th Street, this annual swell of art can only be seen as total rupture in our everyday experience. 28

Upbraiding Tradition, Flora Choi, 2011.

AiOP’s Founder and Director, Ed Woodham, is the best type of New Yorker – relocated but built to be nowhere else. Like Ed, AiOP is determined to give away something that seems too big to naturally accept. We may resist some gifts at first because we are hurried and impatient, moving on our way. But with this type of art, we become wound up in the flow, and we are connected by its being dependent on our being there. Ultimately we become the moving aesthetic, and therefore momentarily art. How often does something come out of thin air to present everyone with a truth that states anyone can live out art from inception to fulfillment? This is indeed very generous. 29

ERNESTO PUJOL 30

Speaking in Silence (durational simultaneous performances in 12 sites), Ernesto Pujol, City of Honolulu, Hawaii, 2010.

RITUAL HUMANITY, CAPITAL PRESENCE Cycles are the dynamic of Nature, which, devoid of cycles, is unsustainable, even as a fenced garden. Rituals are the dynamic of human life, which, devoid of rituals is lost, even within walls. Historically, in terms of the animal we call human, ritual took the place of instinct, the instinct that once allowed us to survive in Nature. Yet, rituals remain based on instinct, whether humans are conscious of this fact or not. We ritualize what we need, we ritualize what we must do, in order to remain inspired, directed, organized, functionalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;healthy. We perform humanity through ritual. We ritualize in order to survive the urban jungle, the normalizing dream of our industrial fathers. Ritual is instinct civilized. If civilization rides on repression, then, it needs all manner of rituals for its performers to function within its unnatural ecology, the ecology of the subliminal, the ecology of impossibly disconnected goals. Modernity costumed the ape. Ritual is the costume of basic instinct. We have thus transformed instinct, feeding it religious, social, political and economic fantasies, dressing it in esthetics, to continue to perform instinct in cities. Ritual is not what believers do, what the conservative, the unintellectual, the sentimental, and the insane do, what actors, artists and dancers do.

Ritual is what everyone does everywhere all the time, day and night. Because the body needs protection: the body seeks the comfort of familiarity and the assurance of safety. Moreover, the minute it finds them, the body begins to create muscle memories about them. Our muscle memories alone repeat gestures and retrace steps, routes, creating choreographiesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;urban rituals. Yet, no conversation about ritual is complete without the mention of the unmentionableâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; spirituality. The contemporary art world, which prides itself in its secularism, a residual late eighteenth-century revolutionary position, loves to hate spirituality. Yet, the rest of the world engages it. Indeed, if art is to engage the world, it cannot afford to dismiss the spiritual as material. But what is spirituality in the twenty-first century? Spirituality is every gesture filled with the human spirit. Spirituality is all gestures imbued with the human drive to fill the now and the forever with meaning beyond material achievement. Spirituality is the hallmark of contemporary performance art. Therefore, to continue to dismiss spirituality harks back to a dated twentieth century modernist prejudice that was part of the insecure white western fantasy of progress, but that is increasingly anti-global and archaic. The human spirit everywhere seeks to survive through repetition, like Natureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cycles, because the human spirit is nothing but an expression of Nature. That is why all human efforts at dualism fail. That is why the polarization of good and evil, virtue and sin, saint and sinner, light and dark fails miserably. Because, within a cyclical system, where birth is followed by death, gain by loss, and joy by pain, where everything is recycled, there can be no wiser private or public gesture than revisiting, reenacting, and reconsidering. That path constitutes the wisdom of the performer and the witness. Performing rituals is a sign of enlightenment. Disrupting obsolete rituals is a sign of enlightenment. Creating new rituals is a sign of enlightenment.

In the end, our survival will depend on our acknowledgement of rituals, our reclamation of rituals, our creation of rituals, our performing of rituals most basic. And because the hands and feet of the city have cracks and crevices, in spite of its tight face; and because the torso of the city has a soft underbelly, in spite of its steely visage, the city has no choice, no matter its private and public security forces, but to experience countless rituals in odd places. Millions of daily and nightly rituals in all places constitute the true body of the city. Rituals also give us back the gift of Time. We think we know time, particularly in the age of hand-held electronic devices that beep and tweet as we text and chat in â&#x20AC;&#x153;realâ&#x20AC;? time. Nevertheless, time, true time, the nature of time, has never been more elusive. Museums and festivals should re-train, re-present and re-define a next generation of artists as ambassadors of Time. Traditionally, the role of revealing time in its purity was conveyed through images and objects that required slowness, stillnessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;contemplation. There is a performance history that slowed ritual gesture or speeded ritual gesture, revealing the theater of the human condition, making us more aware of the performances we create and parade as lives. Time is not a void waiting for human brilliance, for the human introduction of perfection. Time is not the empty space between human gestures, or the duration of human gesture. Time is, without us, and we have fallen out of step with it, out of its true flow. We have substituted it with something measured and fast that we time, that we judge, that we call timing. Cities are filled with racing performances. The only ones who seem outside these urban races are artists as citizens, public intellectuals, cultural workers who seek meaning for our individual and collective lives, who refuse the race and seek to reveal ritual and time, seriously or playfully but always humbly, in the public sphere.

A city is a notion, a collective effort, a public contract. To fill a city with performances that seek to evidence what we forget or deny about our ritual humanity, and the true flow of time, is potentially propheticâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; another taboo word. But even when not everything rises to the level of prophesy, let us say that such a cultural event is promising amidst the general bankruptcy common to the end of empire. During the end of empire, as during all great transitions, some will go about their greedy art business-as-usual, seeking to make money the old market way; and some will profess nostalgia, generating and supporting all manner of nostalgic cultural products. I prefer the dynamic urban tribe that performs mourning, because individual and collective mourning is the beginning of agency. Because, while they perform the need to mourn individually and collectively for the American capital wasted for the past one hundred years, confronting failure, feeling and releasing emotion, they are creatively growing food on empty lots and rooftops; creatively exchanging materials and skills; creatively developing alternative energy sources; creatively reporting on these beehive efforts. They are engaged performers. They have stopped being cynical by jumping ship, seeking other degrees than an MFA, breaking the bubble of artists performing before artists, daring to visit the provinces, daring to work with conservative communities, daring to perform before mainstream audiences, promoting a more democratic contemporary culture beyond museum walls everywhere. Every hour, day, week, month and year, an artist arrives to New York City. Every hour, day, week, month and year, an artist dies in New York City. But we only read about the red carpet entrances and exits. Generations of artists are replaced, imperceptibly. It is not new. However, we have never faced these many artists in the history of the globe. Dense New York is, de facto, a city crowded with artists. Sadly, it is no longer a city for artists, as it is increasingly unaffordable for the self-employed. We need to decentralize the art world and repopulate the provinces with contemporary artists. Kansas, the first state in the nation to eliminate all arts funding, whose art commission was defunded 34

by Gov. Sam Brownback, needs art immigrants. In the meantime, while the wagons are assembled, New York is a city inhabited by the largest majority of visual and performing artists cultural history has ever witnessed. And while it is happening at a time when labor unions are embattled nationwide, the presence of such a hitherto never experienced amount of unorganized artists constitutes an untapped capital, a wealth of creatively educated professionals shockingly underutilized. However, recognizing this untapped capital of creative people, in New York City or elsewhere, is not about expanding the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exhibition spaces, but about expanding the presence of artists in all the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s committees, boards, projects, and public spaces. This is not about making more art; this is not about funding, creating and installing a greater percentage of visual art in public places. This process needs to be unburdened from the anxiety of making more art. This process is about inviting artists to become part of non-art making processes city-wide, at all levels, thus turning them into interdisciplinary processes, turning the most common and invisible of urban processes into cultural processes through the participation of artists. The dualism of Man vs. Nature, of Art above Nature has failed. Someone needs to take the risk of imagining the future, of performing the future, no matter how embarrassing it is to be considered the totally uncool town fool. It is good to experience a festival that seeks to evidence our humbling human rituals, to experience time outside the timed, and to find and harvest true capitalâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a festival that feels like the future.

LINDA MARY MONTANO 36

MUTUAL THINK= BEAUTY Glandathon Workshop, at Parsons The New School for Design, Linda Mary Montano and Edith Raw, 2011.

An exchange with Linda Mary Montano and Juliana Driever

Linda Mary Montano: I start first with my eyes closed, and then with a general breath of fresh air to my mind and your mind, and my mouth and your mouth, and then to whoever is going to read this, to their mind and to their mouth, so that they can repeat any of it in a way that’s helpful to them. OK, I’m ready. Juliana Driever: Where are you right now? LMM: I’m sitting on the sun porch of the house that I grew up in, when I moved here when I was six, in Saugerties, New York. In an easy chair. JD: What do you hear? LMM: I’m reading Kay Larson’s book on John Cage, so I’m really teaching myself to hear better, and of course Pauline Oliveros is the queen of hearing and she always inspires listening. I hear the ceiling crackle a bit, but that triggers a feeling like: I had coated it – the flat roof – I had coated it last summer and when am I going to have to coat it again? So, the hearing led to thought, but I like hearing best if it just leads to sensation and not thought. JD: Is everyone an artist? LMM: Absolutely. Because everyone has a left and a right brain, and everyone has access to the right brain, which is the brain of freedom, and the brain of awareness, and the brain of presence, and the brain of spaciousness, and the brain of no space, no time, and whoever plays in that right brain and then brings it over to the left brain to translate it into form, is an artist. Everyone loves playing in that right brain, one way or 37

another, and so we all share that title “artist.” JD: How do you feel about insider/outsider designations? LMM: That’s a good question. I’ve come up with a theory that the artist has seven hats. It’s going to be a short poem, essay, thought. It’s about this possibility for us as creators to put on the hat that allows us different opportunities: the opportunity to dream, to intuit, to need to create and then the opportunity to market, sell, get noticed, create rituals of inclusion, schmooze, make big art, find a patron, be stabled in a gallery... these are all examples of the different hats artists can wear. Outsiders don’t want to wear a lot of these hats. Insiders do. JD: How are rituals about control? LMM: They’re about controlling the need of the mind to know and think. What rituals do is catapult sensibilities over to the right brain, which is not about hurry, worry, thinking, planning. Sometimes rituals include endurance, or scent, or overwhelming visuals, or movement out of the box of everyday. The purpose of ritual is to not so much to control the left brain, but to un-control it so that there’s a swimming through the corpus callosum over to the right brain. JD: How are rituals about anxiety and loss? LMM: I’ll just tell this story. I’m reading the Cage book and he was interested in telling stories, so I’m inspired to tell one also. I lived parttime in the 90’s at Ananda Ashram, where my meditation teacher… Oh, I’m starting to cry. [Pauses] Great man, such a great man. [Pauses] My meditation teacher was really available for any question we had and there were always guests at the ashram. All kinds of people came though because he was the Guru’s Guru. What do they say in academia? The teacher’s teacher? He was a master teacher and all other Gurus wanted to come to him. Once, there was a holy man from India who had a Hare Krishna bag, which hung around his neck. There was a mala in the bag and his hand was in there, fingering his beads. You could hear him 38

chanting his mala, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, over and over and over. I had lots of questions, and I remember asking: “Why is he constantly in mantra?” And, my Guru said, “He was driving a car and killed a child.” So he was using the ritual of repetition to face the dragons and the hell-hole of the left brain and of the thinking mind. So, ritual does many things. It draws deep, deep connection to the primal, to the intuitive, to the quiet, to the primitive, the cave man, to the dark, to night, to vibrational frequencies that are very, very, positively powerful. It’s like a garden. Ritual is a garden that can grow extremely powerful flowers. JD: How do you judge success and failure when art and life are one and the same? LMM: Often, my art is better than my life, and if I’m not learning from my art, I don’t call it failure, I just say I have to make more art to make my life better. JD: To me it seems that in the rare case a contemporary artist does approach religion as a subject, there is usually a distanced relationship to it, with the use of irony or critique. How does one create a sincere and authentic religious artwork as in a contemporary art context? LMM: I think that need for apologizing for being ironical is ending. Apology is ending. What’s happening is that we’re sorting out the audience according to taste: some viewers are brave and publically admit that they are drawn to religious art and that’s new because previously it was verboten to be smart, Avant and still be in the religious art camp. I have another story. I went to a Catholic college, and my mentor was an incredible/radical nun, Sister Mary Jane Robertshaw, and she cured me of anorexia and craziness by giving me full freedom to make art and sculpture in her college classes. When I went on to graduate school in Italy, where I got an MA in Sculpture, I was making crucifixes and recognizable religious art, seriously. Then, I went on to more graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and I got really jaded and shy and ironical and blasphemous in that I started thinking like a 39

“professional artist,” not like me. So I stopped doing what I probably would have done had I not gone on to this particular graduate school because I was afraid of being laughed at, or I was shy about my Catholicism. Simply put, I stopped making religious art. Ironically, I’m now back in the Catholic church and thinking of re-doing the Visitation which is the one of Mary embracing Elizabeth and they’re both pregnant. I’m also making a video about the fact that there are no women priests in the Catholic church. So, I feel pretty balanced now, and unafraid and ashamed that I dropped it all for bad reasons. I wanted to be included and I didn’t want to be a traitor to modern art, and now at 71, I’m doing what I have to do, and I don’t care if it doesn’t fit into the insider’s view about what can and can’t be done. Plus, I feel that door has opened and if it’s good, no matter what it looks like, it’s good. Intelligence has changed and critique has changed, and the male model of taste and belongingness has changed so that artists now have more personal goals and more courage to establish their own aesthetic identity, and choose their subject matter according to their taste and needs. JD: What is the creative purpose of humor? LMM: My only take on that is that in American Indian dances – and I’m not sure if it’s every dance, because I’m not a student of that cosmology – but I know from having gone to these dances with Pauline Oliveros and Jerome and Diane Rothenberg, that there’s usually a Heyoka, or sacred clown included in their rituals. The reason is that when they go into heightened states, of the vibrational frequencies of the sacred, there has to be a sacred scapegoat to absorb the collective subconscious of the viewers and balance out the intensity of beauty and truth. You’ll notice in Tibetan Buddhist rituals, they’ll look around, they’ll laugh, they’ll joke with each other. The sacred is so intense that you have to break it with reality, with laughter. JD: What is an odd place? LMM: I think what is happening is that more and more people are being 40

introduced to expression of the creative, then what evolves is more and more layers of exposing odder places: the internet, YouTube – and, what are those, flash mobs? I would just mention two things. One: the beauty of the way Ed Woodham worked with and encouraged his mother, who was ill, by providing drawing materials for her. According to Ed, she produced magnificent work. This is an example of an “odd place,” where true art is happening. Also, artists are teachers of: “Try this and look at this, and open your mind to this.” When the public then learns how to do what we as professional artists do – meaning we do it more than someone else, so we can call ourselves professional, but everyone is an artist – we sense: “Oh, our way of working with this concept is done! Let’s find an odder way of working.” Sometimes, the odder place is our own bedroom, or own bathroom, or our own getting lunch and maybe nobody sees that odd place. But, artists are ingenious at finding ways to keep our right brains happy. JD: Do artists have a different set of responsibilities, when working privately and when working publically? LMM: Again, a story. We’re addicted to our freedom. We’re addicted to our, “Look at me, mom!” We’re addicted to our, “I am so original and unique, and smart, and courageous, and wild and crazy.” We’re the bad kids. We’re the active ADDs. If we’re not putting on the hat of responsibility, and accountability and transparency, then we’re really bad kids. And, is that a good thing or that a bad thing? I don’t know. I don’t know if we’re supposed to have that hat of accountability and transparency on. I just know that I’ve been bad and I wish I had that hat on in my work a couple of times when I made art or performances that shocked me or those close to me or the audience in a way that was dangerous and very hurtful. We have to find places where we can be totally safe and free and expressive. Do we have to involve others at the expense of their mind, health, life, feelings? I don’t think so. JD: Surely there’s room for forgiveness in all of that. LMM: Yay! A quick story. I did a piece talking about sex, while under 41

hypnosis. I was hypnotized, talked about sex publically in the video, walked around with a black wig on, and it was very, very sexual. The video was about how I felt about having sex but I was showing this publically while my husband was in the room. I went home, and right now I can cry about it because when I went home I realized that he was hurt and confused by my public disclosure of my sexuality. I needed couples counseling. I didn’t need to make that piece. But, I was thinking art. I was not thinking life, or his feelings. JD: What is your creative habit now, and how has it evolved through all of these things? LMM: I wait for the intuition to tell me to stop. But, I continue in a vein, in a way, in a subject matter until I get messages to bring a close to that research. For many years that research was being my dad’s caregiver, and I just went into that completely. I did use my video camera, but only as a shield because I couldn’t look at him. It was too painful. I didn’t say, “Oh, lets make a video about this.” What happened in the end was, I did make a video, but it was more of a tool of mourning and not as a work of art. It was more life than art. Right now, I’m getting messages to stop producing videos, and it’s heartbreaking because I really love doing it. But, I have to listen to my voices. Maybe there’s something I’m being called to other than this way of expressing myself. But, before I completely quit, I’m making a video that’s making me very happy, so I’ll end happy. It’s called Nurse Nurse, and I’m doing a – not parody, not irony, not spoof, not an attack – of me in a nursing home as a bad patient, and then an angel appears and shows me how to accept being in a nursing home. Then I become a “good” patient! I’m really excited about it because as an aging performance artist, I have found subjects close to my situation and real life issues. All of my videos are free on YouTube because after Occupy Wall Street, I thought I cannot continue without making everything free. My video, Mitchell’s Death, is not available on YouTube, but is at the Video Data Bank, along with the one about my dad, Dad Art, which is really a two-and-a-half-hour performance/video about friendship, sickness, old age and death. I perform along with this video and always feel open to come to different sites to share this experience. Pretty 42

much everything else is available to all. It’s a good feeling to open the floodgates and forget about charging money for my work. But, maybe some day nobody will be able to see my videos online! Hmmm. Authors once thought that books would save their minds and thoughts forever, and now where are books? Hundreds of years from now the internet as archive will teeter into oblivion as well! Oh well, impermanence is impermanence. JD: How does your presence, your body, create a space for your art? Is that a main site of your work? LMM: It’s becoming more so as it ages. I realize that it was always there, but now that it’s really there, with its spasmed neck, with is aging, it’s becoming more of an instrument as I age because I have to really, consciously use it now. But now that it’s calling to me more for attention in a life-like way, I do things differently. For example, I would never watch a Pina Bausch movie, but now I’m thrilled to see her incredible practice because it’s how my body is now needing to move. She has mentored the permission of life likeness that I am having to imitate because of aging. As my body spasmed with Dystonia, I did Mother Teresa performances, which were a response to the aging of a performance artist’s body. JD: Are you interested in creating an artistic mythology about yourself? LMM: How do you define mythology? JD: In this instance, I am thinking about the idea of creating a story in the way, for example, Joseph Beuys created a mythology about himself and used it as a conceptual backdrop for his work. LMM: I’m more interested in the real world stuff that has accumulated around my work and I need it to be archived in a safe place. So, I’m just thinking much more about getting my work out there for research purposes and I’m not thinking about my legacy. And, I’m thinking about real things like how I have a sculpture show that has to get out – because that is one last show on my bucket list – and I have an archive that has 43

to be sold, and I have these videos that have to be safe somewhere, and I have Mitchell Payne’s (who was my husband) negatives that have to go to the Center for Creative Photography, where his work is archived. Old people start thinking like this: “I’m going to give the silver to Kevin, and the Japanese screen to Karen.” It’s more real time, real world, real stuff, thinking and not, “Linda is an example of a traumatized PTSD, she’s a functioning anorexic, a Catholic who was a nun, and she saw herself as a chicken, and then became the Chicken Woman, and thinks she’s a healer now.” It’s not that. I’m not focusing on legacy, but stuff. That doesn’t interest me, but getting the stuff out does. JD: So, it’s not about the building of an artistic persona or identity that’s important to you now, but the “stuff,” the material products of your creative life. LMM: Yes, the stuff I can touch. The paper, the books, the theses people have written. I leave the left brain legacy to others. I have this stuff to deal with, and I am also called to protect my right brain by curbing my desire to make things and curbing my desire to be an insider or an outsider. I’m at the point where I need to stop the genius artist game. Too much can be not good for the brain. JD: It must be difficult to make the transition from performance, and not being object-oriented at all, to now start thinking about the object, what’s being left behind; to think about the relic. LMM: Yes, absolutely! I’m so glad you said that. Because what I am forced to do is what I am not. I’ve been wondering why I’ve been feeling so inundated. And, it’s because of this stuff. Because my initial thrust as a performance artist was simplicity and nothing: no stuff, no alliance, nothing. Just me performing minimally, with the atmosphere of Arte Povera, and then suddenly I’ve magnetized tons of things, and papers and videos to myself. JD: And, dealing with that stuff is very burdensome.

Glandathon Workshop, at Parsons The New School for Design, Linda Mary Montano and Edith Raw, 2011.

LMM: Exactly, and then the art of de-cluttering and un-hoarding one’s legacy is what I’m really dealing with. JD: Right, and how does one pare it down to what is sufficient. LMM: Absolutely. The internet has helped a great deal because we’ve got the website up and the videos on YouTube, and again it’s like hunger. You have to become a Mayor Bloomberg. Is that his name? Bloomberg? You have to say, “No more 32-ounce Coke for me.” And, that’s what I’ve said. No more video for me. I’m too obese. I’m too art obese. I’m too fat in my art. I’m trying to strip myself down before I don’t have the mental propensity to do that – to find homes for things that would be good for others, and to make an art of that. I want to perform my archive, lay it all out in a museum and sing it, sing my archive until it is totally all sung. And then stop. 45

ARTISTS & PROJECTS 46

Cocoon was a ritual in honor of the sunset. Traveling from the east side of Manhattan on Avenue C towards the Hudson River Park on the west side, the Cocoons journeyed across the island to gather at the Sunset. The liturgy began at sunset and was open to all to participate.

SHERRY ALIBERTI 48

COCOON

Daily Portage was a series of modestly sized quilted works displayed in the windows of businesses along 14th Street. This project concentrated on the daily ritual of carrying garbage to the street corner. Andresen used detritus from individual businesses along the 14th Street to quilt small, intricate works that recombined the discarded items into something more contemplative. The works were then displayed in the same locations from which the materials came.

SCOTT ANDRESEN 50

DAILY PORTAGE

Smiley Bag Project was a participatory art project. Pedestrians were invited to sit as models for the artist as he drew their portraits on the smiley faces of common take-out plastic bags. Smiley Bag Project was inspired by sidewalk portrait artists that inhabit tourist sites like Times Square.

NOBUTAKA AOZAKI 52

SMILEY BAG PROJECT

Forty individuals cloaked in black fabric gathered in Union Square, where public was invited to clean the feet of the figures with Andrews. This performance was an act of communion. Of preparation for prayer. Of sublimation. Of sharing. Of acknowledgment of difference, but also of sameness.

ROB ANDREWS 54

UNION SQUARE CLEAN

Over the course of this daily performance, a single garment was scented with perfumes (one for each day) and worn by the artist while walking the eastwest corridor of 14th Street. During these routine walks, Barbee collected fragments of language from found literature, popular culture, and conversation on the street. Based on historical relationships between prayer, perfume, and poetry, Barbee composed a litany for the title of each daily performance. After the performance, the garment was crystallized in a solution preserving, but abstracting, its form.

JULIA BARBEE 56

BEFORE/AFTER SCENTING NEW YORK

Nonetheless is a solo performance created after exhaustion. When things get tough, you get frustrated, exhausted, and you question everything. Even though you fall down, you find a way to stand up, born again from your ashes, like a phoenix, and walk out of that mindset into a new, brighter self.

KORHAN BASARAN 58

NONETHELESS

Get Lost! Was a project that restored NYCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Metropolitan Transit Authorityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subway maps, signs and place names, to what they may have geographically looked and sounded like prior to colonial intervention in 1609. Documented through photography, these restorations based on 18th-century cartography and toponymy erase 400 years of accumulated history, place names, neighborhoods, and subway lines, returning Mannahatta to its original green spaces, streams, ponds, and shores the Lenni Lenape Indians once inhabited. Inserted back into the subway system in guerrilla fashion, these restorations provided viewers a brief window into another time, inviting them to get lost and re-discover the greatest city in the world.

DANIEL BEJAR 60

GET LOST!

Caitlin Berrigan & Anya Liftig often use food in their work as a driving force of desire and social allegory. In this collaborative performance, they explored the obsessions, myths, and terrors of motherhood through an act of comic cannibalism. Amidst unsuspecting midday lunchers and farmers market shoppers, the two young and upright mommies coddled, pet, kissed, licked, and ultimately devoured life-sized babies cast in fudge and cream.

CAITLIN BERRIGAN & ANYA LIFTIG 62

ADORING APPETITE

Based on religious sticker stamps purchased in the church shop of the Monastery of the Magnificat of the Mother of God in Québec, CA, Bogaert created a series of portraits of contemporary icons. For example, Bogaert scribbled on a stamp of Mary – the mother of Jesus - resulting in a spitting image of Osama Bin Laden. Seated at a lemonade stand, Bogaert invited bystanders to witness the stamps’ transformations and gave the public the opportunity to buy the original stickers and new icons for twentyfive cents each.

TOM BOGAERT 64

DOUBLE PORTRAITS

Wash/Closely was a nomadic device designed to bring the rituals surrounding the bathroom sink into a public space. Each side of the device was almost identical, with a mirror, washcloth and other items commonly used in personal hygiene rituals. An opening above the sink provided a view through to the opposite side, creating a shared space. The boundary between â&#x20AC;&#x153;yours and mineâ&#x20AC;? then became blurred.

MICHAEL BOROWSKI 66

WASH/ CLOSELY

In oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s daily, intensely urban trajectory, it is easy to disassociate from nature. This performance sought to encourage passersby to contemplate the stripe of sky between the buildings of 14th Street, drawing attention to a completely organic intervention.

JAVIER BOSQUES 68

OCTOBER SKY

And Then I Saidâ&#x20AC;Ś (Bench Stories) was an audio installation that created a space for passersby to contemplate the conflation of public and private. This work required individual participation, and provided a place to collect and listen to personal stories and private connections in public spaces.

SETHÂ CAPLAN 70

AND THEN I SAID... (BENCH STORIES)

Carry Your Burdens was a performance that engaged in empathy through endurance, metaphor, and performance. Traversing Manhattan from west-toeast in the morning, the artists performed at nine destination points: landmarks where a personal burden was shared. At dusk, they returned to the Hudson River carrying one another and the burdens they have embodied. When the performers encountered another person bearing a burden, they stopped to feel, see, and describe it. The duets transcended elements of physical fatigue but also the emotional exhaustion of carrying the burdens of 14th Street.

CORINNEÂ CAPPELLETTI, EINY Ă&#x2026;M, EVA PEROTTA & LINDSEY DRURY

CARRY YOUR BURDENS

Buddha attained enlightenment after forty-nine days of meditation sitting in the shade of the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, India 2,500 years ago. Inspired by this idea, the Bodhi Tree was a sculptural intervention in the midst of the bustling environment near Union Square. The tree emitted the sound of OM at random intervals, in an attempt to bring peace, awareness, and an opportunity for introspection to pedestrians.

PATRICIAÂ CAZORLA 74

BODHI TREE

Passing Time was a social engagement with the process of waiting. Chak passed out wearable objects with cumulative amounts of time spent waiting for mundane activities. This exchange brought awareness to the substantial amount of time spent waiting in everyday life, and questions how one should exist in “the moment of wait.”

JOANNA CHAK 76

PASSING TIME

Upbraiding Tradition was a performative gesture of rejection. This ceremony involved a group of young Korean women who were raised to accept the notion of male dominance within the traditional family structure. The women dressed in traditional Korean white gowns called Sang-boks and tied their hair into Daengâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;gi Meori braids that dragged upon the ground behind them. They walked slowly towards the Hudson River where each chopped off her braid and preserved it in a glass jar as a trophy, or relic.

FLORAÂ CHOI

UPBRAIDING TRADITION

Love Toast Text Haiku was an interactive public performance in which viewers were invited to write a haiku for someone they love and send it via text message to the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cell phone. During the performance, the artist hand-lettered selected haikus onto slices of toast in a meditation on the intersection of new technology and the age-old ritual of sharing bread.

MISSAÂ COFFMAN 80

LOVE TOAST TEXT HAIKU

Have you ever heard God speaking to you? What did he say? What did his voice sound like? Was it like the gentle falling of a feather onto your shoulder whispering into your ear asking you to hear him? The world is changing. There is more noise. We are so busy. We are constantly striving for something. In the midst of all this, how do you discern the voice of God from the rest of the voices in your head, and in the world? God is speaking to you. He has been all along. In a quiet, still voice like the fall of a feather, he calls to you.

BINDIÂ COLE 82

THE SHELTER UNDER THE SHADOW OF HIS WINGS

I Call NY was an interactive social experiment for New York City. With the help of tear-away flyers posted throughout the city, anyone could call the hotline at 832-I-CALL-NY (832-422-5569) and leave a voicemail describing the location and story behind their favorite places anywhere in the five boroughs. Messages were uploaded to an interactive map. www.icallny.com

CONCERNED NEW YORKERS 84

I CALL NY

Make a Wish was a participatory performance that combined real-time interaction with online archives. Participants were invited to throw a coin and make a wish in a mobile fountain activated by the artists. A film of the wishersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; eyes, closed and in succession, was produced and uploaded onto YouTube. Make a Wish both honors a private moment, and created a portrait of our collective yearning.

ANDREAÂ COTE & MICHAEL DRISGALL 86

MAKE A WISH

This project sought to ameliorate the lack of native vegetation found in global cities by culturing lichen on the sides of skyscrapers and other manmade structures. Lichen, a wonderfully adaptable plant, can grow vertically on many porous surfaces. Once propagated, it forms a protective barrier, insulating its supporting surface from harmful elements while serving to lower the cumulative temperature in metropolitan centers. This, along with the ability to withstand extreme drought, makes lichen an almost ideal form of “houseplant.” This project proposed lichen to be planted as a new ritual for the urban dweller.

ELIZABETH DEMARAY 88

LICHEN FOR SKYSCRAPERS PROJECT

Ritual in any form is a transformation: from young person into adult, single to married, unblessed to blessed, civilian to warrior. One common theme across ritual in all cultures is the use of patterns created into and onto textiles, as well as temporary and permanent tattoos onto the skin. Lace denotes ritual as used on wedding gowns, christening robes, ecclesiastical garments and the like. The Tattooed Tailor took these patterns of ritual and superimposed them into public spaces transforming them into ritualistic contexts.

KONSTANTINÂ DIMOPOULOS 90

THE TATTOOED TAILOR

Really Real was a participatory art project based on the ancient pagan ritual of tree veneration: the act of tying small cloths onto a tree to realize wishes, a custom still practiced in many countries today. This urbanized update of the ritual used the fence as a stand-in for the sacred tree where residents and passersby participated by tying a ribbon onto the fence contributing to a collective act of public devotion. Through the act of wish-making, participants literally tied an aspiration to the site, making a personal connection to a public place

DAHLIAÂ ELSAYED 92

REALLY REAL

Moving/Mediations was a subterranean performative gesture that disrupts the daily commute. Through a meditative performance, combined with a pirate broadcast and visual media, the artists sought to create a temporary contemplative space that opened the possibilities of re-engagement with ritual in public spaces. Inspired by the solitary, habitual nature of the subway hurtling through dark tunnels, and rhythmical beeping of the turnstiles, this work suggested the possibilities within social spaces. Having created an interconnection in a network that is fluid, indefinite, and open, this work echoed the artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; embrace of new technologies as instruments for making art as well as the ritual potential within everyday gesture.

MARGARITAÂ GARCIA & XINGLANG GUO

MOVING/ MEDIATIONS

Gimme Bak Ma Clothes! was a performance-based intervention inspired by Thomas Dartmouth Rice, who, in the 1830’s, became the father of American Minstrelsy Theater. This work included the liturgic actions of sprinkling rice on the path of 14th Street in memory of “Jim Crow Rice” and his legacy. Specific rituals of cleansing and blessing involved the use of lime, powder, rum, cinnamon, and other elements, welcoming a new day with shouts of “Gimme Bak Mah Clothes.”

LAWRENCE GRAHAMBROWN 96

GIMME BAK MA CLOTHES!

!Domino! was a social sculpture exploring the manner in which play mediates the link between ritual and identity. Reflecting the recent decision to include domino tables in the Alphabet City Park renovation, Grullón coordinated three games of dominoes running simultaneously in front of the Post Office on 14th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A.

ALICIA GRULLÓN 98

ยกDOMINO!

El Santero: Seven Days Seven Nights was a physical embodiment of metaphysical existence exploring the concrete manifestations of human nature, behavior, migration, consumption, and materialism. Through abstract and representational mediums, Guzmán floated across 14th Street and expanded reality to encompass parallel universes. The work offered insight into shared histories and provoked a larger dialogue of potential progress.

ALEJANDRO GUZMÁN 100

EL SANTERO

101

Harvey Loves Harvey arranged and captured a series of live music performances, along with unrehearsed interviews and the sounds of the street, in the park at 14th Street and Tenth Avenue. The live performance, which took place in the afternoon, was then simultaneously cut to vinyl thirty blocks away at Masterdisk. Video footage of the record being cut, as well as the performances, was streamed online.

HARVEY LOVESÂ HARVEY 102

14TH STREET LIVE

103

Come one, come all! Give us your blind, crippled, and crazy, eighteen to eighty! Please step right up into our golden tent of wonders and witness our CLAIRVOYANT palm readings and HEALING miracles that will turn you from flaccid to massive! We will sell you your wonderfunk dreams, baby (side-effects included).

JUDITHÂ HOFFMAN 104

POTTER’S FIELD FORTUNES

105

Public shoe shining has a quality that is at once provocative, voyeuristic, problematic, and ritualistic. As such, it is an act laden with cultural references to subservience and superiority, otherness, and racism. For the duration of the festival, Hoyer worked as a shoeshine girl dressed in traditional German (Bavarian) garb. “Get your shoes shined and photographed by German immigrant, Alexa Hoyer. Drop off or while you wait.”

ALEXA HOYER 106

JUST A GERMAN SHOESHINE GIRL

107

Ideogenetic Machine was an interactive comic book generator that combined portraits of participants and drawings by the artist into never-repeating, algorithmically generated layouts. During the festival, masked performers handed out clues that revealed how each pedestrian can become the protagonist of his or her personal comic book.

NOVAÂ JIANG 108

IDEOGENETIC MACHINE

109

Flower Bed was a photography-based art installation. It was made up of approximately 600 photographic prints of flowers, mounted back-toback, and installed in the ground at the circular lawn in the park at 14th Street and Tenth Avenue. Each set of prints was made to overlap, suggesting the shape of a flowerbed. The re-creation of an artificial, photography-based flower bed in a public space aimed to surprise the viewer by calling attention to the everyday act of viewing flowers and other plant life in a public park.

DOREENÂ KENNEDY 110

FLOWER BED

111

Pilgrimage was inspired by a very popular tourist pilgrimage in Laos, a cave where ancient pilgrims placed more than 2,000 statues of the Buddha. This work featured a series of 310 figures made from wire and a variety of handmade paper, ornamented with paint and textiles. No two figures were alike and were not necessarily Buddhas. Rather, they were generic spiritual figures left open to interpretation: as spirits, as ancestors, and as a depiction of community.

LAURIEÂ LEBRETON 112

PILGRIMAGE

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An eight-hour dance piece circled the four crosswalks of a city intersection; 630 crossings clockwise, and 630 crossings counterclockwise. Bringing together durational performance and choreographed dance, the work explored the ways that the bodily focus and specificity of dance can animate a unique space and time. The work was designed within pedestrian traffic regulations and basic NYC workday labor laws. “You will like it here, being away and walking.” -Frank O’Hara

ABIGAIL LEVINE 114

BEING AWAY AND WALKING

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As the “Gentleman of 14th Street,” LuLu LoLo strolled up and down 14th Street, attired in top hat, white tie, and tails and enacted the oncepopular male ritual of “tipping one’s hat” as an act of nonverbal greeting, respect, and a gesture of chivalry towards women. Doffing her top hat, LuLu acknowledged the presence of a multitude of passersby on 14th Street, either with the silent ritual gesture or by the added greeting of “Hello” or “Have a Good Day.”

LULU LOLO 116

A TIP OF THE HAT ON 14TH STREET

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One hundred magnets were exhibited on the street. This work celebrated the modern ritual of ”tweeting” on the popular social media site Twitter, from its absurdity to its profundity. Each magnet used an original tweet from New Yorkers themselves. The magnets were free to pick up and take home.

ALBAN LOW 118

TWEET STREET

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Tree Kisses was an interactive performance with nature. After a heavy application of lipstick, the artist kissed trees along 14th Street, leaving a residue of this momentary interaction. The gesture was a small one that may have gone unnoticed by many passersby. While juxtaposing nature and culture materially, Martin performed a ritual of communing with nature through a familiar means. The lipstick imprints left behind were visible throughout the duration of the festival.

MARY IVYÂ MARTIN 120

TREE KISSES

121

The aim of Empirical Immanence was to resist the ubiquity of collective memory in contemporary society. The project placed small, text-based works into the urban environment, which were discovered on an individual basis. The pieces attempted to interrupt the quotidian and allow for personal contemplation.

SCOTTÂ MASON 122

EMPIRICAL IMMANENCE

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Over the course of several processions along Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 14th Street, The Miraculous Artist offered advice and prayer cards pre-dipped in the holy waters of the Hudson River that promised health, prosperity, and love. In exchange for her prayer cards, the artist asked for a gesture of adoration from her worshipers.

CAROLINAÂ MAYORGA 124

THE MIRACULOUS ARTIST

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Goat Walk was a performance that mimicked the daily ritual of dog walking -- only it was not a dog that was walked, but a goat. Goats have been used in many rituals throughout history, and goat walking remains a ritual in countries where the cultureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s livelihood depends on livestock.

MARISSAÂ MICKELBERG 126

GOAT WALK

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This project filled the Union Square fountain with a garland of folded paper. Integrating into the space of the city, the workâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s awkward surface became an accepted conventionalism, as are the acts of making wishes and taking pictures in front of an urban fountain.

ANDREAÂ MOCCIO 128

THE FOUNTAIN OF UNION WISHES

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In this performative work, the artist drew a continuous trail of individual chalk faces on the sidewalk, approximately 8 inches in diameter and 12 inches apart. Beginning at the south corner of 14th Street and Tenth Avenue, and ending at the south corner of 14th Street and Avenue C, the project aimed to make the public aware of how obsessive-compulsive behavior can be a prescribed procedure to show the transient and ephemeral qualities of time.

FELIXÂ MORELO 130

PRESCRIBED PROCEDURE FOR THE OBSESSIVE COMPULSIVE 131

In a project that draws inspiration from an ancient Indian ritual performed by women, Oring “wrote” poetic phrases with finely ground grain on the threshold of Union Square. After making the drawings, which, according to tradition, were done in rice powder as an offering to birds and insects, the artist distributed do-it-yourself packets with instructions on how to participate.

SHERYL ORING 132

OFFERINGS OF NATURE

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This work presents an improvised pilgrimage route marked by a series of 108 cast-earth tsa-tsas. Anyone finding a tsa-tsa was invited to move it, keep it, and post a story. Mindful attention to small features of the urban landscape was a catalyst for experiencing sacred space, and – more radically – for causing it to occur.

JULIE PUTTGEN 134

14TH STREET PILGRIMAGE

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Human Rites was an audio-costumed spectacle including improvisational movement, dance, percussion, crowd interaction, and interruption. Based on the Guaguancó tradition of AfroCuban culture, the artist intended to stir up the energy of the snake: eroticism, death, rebirth, transformation, and the re-creation of the self in service, and ultimately, of community. Interruption is essential to the task of being an artist in this era, since society is so easily distracted and informed by popular culture. Within this construct, Raw’s performance served to remind of one’s own mortality, one’s spiritual link to humanity, and universal law.

EDITH RAW 136

HUMAN RITES

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Tourist-in-Chief was a site-specific installation placed on an equestrian statue of George Washington in Union Square. Washington was transformed into a contemporary monument of tourism with the addition of large-scale props such as an “I Love NY” hat, camera, NYC subway map, and local shopping bags. Tourist-in-Chief was intended to achieve three goals: make a comic reflection of New York’s tourist industry, create a work of art that is enjoyable for all demographics (tourists and New Yorkers alike), and spark public curiosity as to Washington’s role in New York City’s history.

LEON REID IV 138

TOURIST IN CHIEF

139

Stray, Get Found was a collaborative performance work that centered on Joseph Campell’s idea of the “hero’s journey,” a widely accepted narrative arc detailing the many steps a story’s protagonist must take along the path to eventual triumph or failure. In the context of this project, the “hero” was anyone who answered the artists’ call to adventure, and chose to perform artists’ interactive narrative situation. In so doing, participants willingly suspended disbelief, shed themselves of accepted social conventions, and entered into the narrative’s realm of creativity, poetry, and spontaneity. The artists initiated this “call to adventure” via lost-andfound-style street posters, which hung along 14th Street.

RYAN RINGER & JENNY SANTOS 140

STRAY, GET FOUND 141

Satterwhite performed an ambient and mobile screening of his new video series, Drawing Desire, along the 14th Street corridor. In an attempt to transform 14th Street into his skewed, virtual fantasy world, Satterwhite wore screens and a projector on his body, casting virtual space onto the surrounding architecture.

JACOLBYÂ SATTERWHITE 142

PUBLIC DISCO ANNOUNCEMENT

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In Nine Word Walk, pedestrians came across the words LOVE, JOY, PEACE, PATIENCE, KINDNESS, GOODNESS, FAITHFULNESS, GENTLENESS and SELF-CONTROL (known to some as the fruit of the Spirit), in the form of stencil-like panels of reclaimed scrap wood. This physical “text message” was set up, taken down, and repeated along the length of 14th Street, first on the south side, then on the north side, over the ten days of the festival.

GENE SCHMIDT 144

NINE WORD WALK 145

Reflection was an interactive public art installation that explored themes of vanity, de-individuation, and the identity of the NYC commuter. In a city where the size of the population promotes a culture of collectivism and anonymity, our reflections can act as a calming presence, reminding us of our existence in an all-too-detached metropolis. Mirrors, or any kind of reflective surface we rush past during our commute, become the object of our ritualistic need to anchor and distinguish ourselves from the sea of people around us.

LEONARDOÂ SELVAGGIO 146

REFLECTION

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A long trail of fabric was created using textiles inspired by traditional cloth from the diverse cultures in Southeast Asia and scrap clothing found along 14th Street. The length of cloth drew a visual journey through the cityscape as the fabric concealed, transported and wrapped the artist. The performance explored cultural identities, and the politics of space and history on 14th Street.

JACQUELYNÂ SOO 148

CIRCLING SQUARE

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This performance featured a procession traversing east-to-west, and then west-to-east, continuously from sunrise to sunset. During this peripatetic activity, Spiess burned sage to purify the doorway of each building and any individual who wished to be smudged along the entire length of 14th Street. A collaborator drummed, another carried a bowl filled with water from the East River to bless 14th Street by sprinkling drops of water, eventually refilling it from the Hudson River for the return journey

ANNA-KATRINÂ SPIESS

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URBAN PURIFICATION RITUAL

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A wall of cardboard soapboxes were built to represent the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, allowing visitors to place notes containing requests into the cracks of the wall. In a reference to the history of soapbox speeches, the artist removed the notes and read them through a megaphone at the close of the festival. This act transformed a sacred place into a profane one, and turned written word and intimate prayer into spoken word and public speech. The final shape was photographed and displayed along with a photograph of the Wailing Wall.

LIANAÂ STRASBERG 152

WALL

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This shrine was dedicated to the miracles of potential and kinetic energy, and referenced newsworthy items about the nearby Con Edison power plant. Energy Shrine invoked multiple forms of energy including: healing energy, spiritual energy, as well as more conventional forms such as mechanical, chemical, gravitational, nuclear and electrical energy. The location, with proximity to the Con Edison plant, gave an opportunity to examine the positive and negative results of the use and abuse of energy.

SASHAÂ SUMNER 154

ENERGY SHRINE

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All around the globe, groups of people were invited to have a silent conversation with the sky by lying on the ground. This action was choreographed by the artist and then photographed.

ROBÂ SWEERE 156

SILENT SKY #

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Processional Walkway was an intervention that made use of 50,000 red rose petals to create sacred walkways along 14th Street. The walkways transformed the grey pavement into ceremonial passageways that offered purification for the day ahead and elevated the simple ritual of walking down the street to an event worthy of celebration. With this project, Urban hoped to inspire an appreciation for the routine actions that define our lives.

KATIEÂ URBAN 158

PROCESSIONAL WALKWAY

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MASKI was a processional performance, during which participants of the MASKI workshops were invited to wear a mask and partake of a wordless song. The masks enabled each individual to transcend the Self, articulate their unique stories, and result in a communal voice. Eventually the procession brought the individuals together in their mutual, human search for meaning.

GEERT VAES & JUHA VALKEAPÄÄ 160

MASKI 161

Bound (with Clifford Owens) was part of a series of performances responding to the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interest in ideas of relationships, community, reciprocity, and the denial of it. Valverde created performance scores, or instructions, for actions between herself and another person in direct response to the politics of their relationship (be it lover, friend, colleague, mentor). Each performance was a critique, affirmation and/or contradiction illustrating social roles. The video was projected or screened everyday, at different times of the day, for the duration of the festival.

MARYÂ VALVERDE 162

BOUND

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As city dwellers, we develop strategies to protect ourselves from the abrasive qualities of urban life. We put on our game face, our city walk, and develop a thick skin. Even following a daily routine is a type of defense; tracing the same steps every day creates a comfortable buffer of familiarity. In Automaton, the artist wore a literal thick skin, a suit of armor constructed from vinyl advertisements. The armored performer went through the motions of daily tasks, each day walking the same route in robotic repetition: getting coffee, taking the subway, and going shopping.

GRETCHENÂ VITAMVAS 164

AUTOMATON

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Hanging laundry in unusual and inappropriate places is a ritual gesture shared by people around the world – particularly women – and has become a way to generate conversation on the nature of what is private and what is public. Monday through Friday mornings throughout the duration of the festival, a lady in red carried a basket full of white laundry along 14th Street and looked for places to hang it while she talked to people about their lives, their laundry, and their everyday. On the weekend, she revisited the laundry and re-told the stories she heard during the week

LOIS WEAVER & LORI E. SEID 166

COMMIT AN ACT OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM 167

_[of__sky]_ (an illustrated guide to cloud formations), was an interventionist project that was offered on the southeast corner of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue. Activated in the midst of ritualistic morning maneuvers, city dwellers were summoned to break routine, lift tired eyes, and participate in practices of knowing through seeing and doing. In an attempt to witness the effects produced by _[of__sky]_, each edition had a scalable bar code that linked to www.anchoredabove.tumblr.com, where recipients uploaded a snap-shot of cloud formations, seen through re-invigorated perspectives.

CAITLINÂ WEBB 168

_[OF_SKY]_ 169

24 actions in 24 hours began at sundown on the east end of 14th Street, and ended at sunset on the Hudson River, spanning the actions of the street for twenty-four hours. Performances occurred individually, and in one-hour fragments. The actions varied, raging from the cerebral, to the sonic, to the physical, and endurance-based.

GENEVIEVEÂ WHITE & RAFAEL SANCHEZ

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24 ACTIONS IN 24 HOURS

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Everyday, New Yorkers flip fossil-fueled switches. These invisible streams of electrons run our computers, escalators, elevators, fans, and lights. If there is one ritual common among all New Yorkers, it is energy use. Fossil fuels come primarily from solar energy captured by carboniferous era plants and animals. We are burning millions of years of fossilized sunlight in 200 years of industrialized society. This project placed decal images of carboniferous fossils on lighting fixtures along 14th Street, originating at the East River Generating Station.

JENIFERÂ WIGHTMAN 172

BACKLIGHT

173

Birdsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Ear View was a multidisciplinary, collaborative art project about birds and the skies above NYC. It investigated the relationship between man and nature, and how we may have become disconnected from the messages, symbolism, and allegory of our natural world.

ALEXANDRA WOLKOWICZ, JON BARRCLOUGH & ROB PETERSON

174

BIRDS’ EAR VIEW

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For this work, hundreds of people were clandestinely photographed along 14th Street. As a result, 500 collages in the form of tiny accordion books were created and placed inside of clear, magnetic boxes, and made publically available at various locations. The acquiring of a work of art is a personal and exciting process, and the artist asked that the individual discovery and collection of these works be discussed on her blog.

AMY YOUNG 176

FOURTEEN STREET SAINTS FOR AIOP 2011

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES 178

Sherry Aliberti’s background in architecture and yoga inspires her to study the body as a structure. Influenced by Martha Graham and others, a fabric enclosure abstracts the figural form and provides freedom for the performer to become a morphing entity, expressing large gestures and movements for their own personal experience. Scott Andresen is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BA from Hunter College and an MFA from Yale University. Select exhibitions include the Jack Tilton Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, Bronx Museum, and Exit Art. He is the recipient of the Jacob Javits Fellowship and a NYFA Fellowship. Nobutaka Aozaki is an artist based in New York. His recent exhibitions include You Are Here: Projects in (de) Tourism at Hunter College’s Times Square Gallery, Physical Center Brooklyn at Saint Cecila’s Convent (Brooklyn, NY), and Jamaica Flux at Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (Queens, NY). Aozaki earned his MFA from Hunter College. Rob Andrews is an artist and teacher living in Brooklyn, NY. His work focuses on enacting rituals and telling stories using his body and the bodies of others. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and has collaborated with public programs like 40° PHI: Live Art in the Parks. Julia Barbee earned her MFA in Studio Art from California State University, Long Beach. Her work is a process-based study of the visible, ephemeral, auditory, and temporal marks of identity. Scent is the platform for her sculptural performance, experimentation, quasi-anthropological study, and non-representational self-portraiture. Korhan Basaran is a NY-based dance artist and the artistic director of Korhan Basaran and Dancers. His last gala performance I am Korhan, This is My Dance was premiered at the Ailey Citigroup Theater. He is on the faculty of STEPS and Peridance and teaches at DNA.

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Daniel Bejarâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s multi-media practice utilizes intervention, sculpture, and photography to appropriate historical residue as strategy, evoking the past into the present. Bejar received his BFA from the Ringling College of Art & Design and his MFA from the State University of New York, New Paltz. Caitlin Berrigan is an artist who works in sculpture, video, and participatory actions to open a space for confronting uncertainties within the context of social issues. Anya Liftig is a graduate of Yale University and Georgia State University and has received grant and residency support from The Field, University of Antioquia, Casa Tres Patios-Medellin, Colombia, and Flux Projects, Atlanta. In 2010, Tom Bogaert moved to the Middle East where he is working on Impression, Proche Orient, an art project referencing issues relevant to the contemporary Near East society. Double Portraits is therefore probably more relevant to his art practice today than it was in 2005, when it was first performed. Michael Borowski is an artist whose work explores physical and psychological relationships both with and within the built environment. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan, and his BFA from the University of New Mexico. He is currently a lecturer at the University of New Mexico. Javier Bosques was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and now resides in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2008, and that same year participated in a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In his conceptual work, he converts simple interventions into reflective gestures. Brodigy is a collective formed in April 2011 by five students at Parsons The New School for Design. Brodigy formed out of the recognition of interactive qualities connected in their work. The collective is comprised of: Amber Keyser, Caitlin Webb, Julian Donahue, Dylan Entails, and Courtney Moore.

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Seth Caplan received his BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His work explores the intersection of cultural norms, personal relationships and environment. His projects were recently shown at Project Basho in Philadelphia and at the Craft Alliance in St. Louis. Corinne Cappelletti is a Somatic Educator/ Dance Artist who received her MFA from the University of Utah in Modern Dance. As a Certified Laban Movement Analyst, she designs collaborative models for building place-identity through choreography and improvisational performance, such as The New Pedestrian (2007), last brought to Aix-en-Provence, France (2011). Patricia Cazorla is a visual artist working with performance, video, installation, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Her work focuses on ideas of solitude, introspection, and the perception of details within the daily life. Cazorla studied at the Art Students League and Pratt Institute, and is originally from Caracas, Venezuela. Joanna Chak is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. She is interested in the mundane and social norms, and explores these issues through metal and crafts. She studies Art at Parsons The New School for Design and Philosophy at Eugene Lang College. Flora Choi is a sculptor and an installation performance artist. Her current work investigates the cultural traditions within Koreaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s societal construct. She received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In 2008, she was part of a group exhibition show called Up Next, at Deitch Projects in New York. Missa Coffman works primarily in photography and new media. She is known to make art that could also be part of a balanced breakfast. Bindi Cole works in portrait photography, painting, collage, text, weaving, film, performance, sound, and projections that expose the questions most are afraid to ask. Ever since she stepped into the South Eastern Australian Aboriginal arts scene as a portrait photographer in 181

2007, Bindi Cole has kept evolving her trademark style. Founded in 2009 by Kenny Komer, Boris Rasin, and Adam Wissing, Concerned New Yorkers is an artist collective whose goal is to create interactive public art and multimedia information campaigns throughout NYC and on the internet, encouraging New Yorkers to engage in local issues of art, culture and politics. Andrea Cote and Michael Drisgall collaborated on the video installation Cut, presented at PanAmerican Projects in Miami and Rowan University Gallery in New Jersey. Most recently they presented the participatory performance CLAY at the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, NY. The resulting video animation can be seen on YouTube. Elizabeth Demaray knits sweaters for plants, upholsters stones, and fabricates alternative forms of housing for land hermit crabs. She is the recipient of the MOMA/P.S.1 National Studio Award, the Aldrich Emerging Artist Award and the NAFA Award in Sculpture. Demaray is an Associate Professor of Art at Rutgers University. Konstantin Dimopoulos is a performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, and social art activist. His extensive works are grounded in his sociological and humanist philosophy that is based on the use of art as a means to effect change. Dahlia Elsayed combines text and imagery to create narrative paintings and installation. Her work has been shown at galleries and art institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including the 12th Cairo Biennale. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and is based in Newark, NJ. The artistic collaboration between U.S. artist Margarita Garcia and Chinese artist Xinglang Guo began in 2010 when they met at the Bauhaus University, Germany. Together they explore themes of the environment, voyages, and ritual through video, performance and sound installations. They have exhibited their work in Europe, Asia and the U.S. 182

Lawrence Graham-Brown is a cross-disciplinary artist who works in sculpture, painting, and performance, among other media. His work has been presented by: Aljira Center for Contemporary Arts, The Queens Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, The Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Real Art Ways, and the 2008 Shanghai Biennial. Alicia Grullón has exhibited at Mount Holyoke College’s Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, Raritan Community College, Masur Museum of Art, and El Museo del Barrio. Awards include: Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts Art and Law Residency 2010, Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art 2007-08. Alejandro Guzmán lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at venues including: Taller Boricua, AD Projects, Clayton Gallery & Outlaw Art Museum, HammerSpace, Queens Museum of Art, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and Toledo Museum of Art. Guzmán received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Since 1992, Matthew Nash and Jason Dean have collaborated under the name Harvey Loves Harvey. They have never lived closer than 300 miles apart. They explore themes of communication, identity, the transformation of information, and its inherent failures. Judith Hoffman is an artist and amateur mathematician. Her work explores architecture, refuges and impermanence. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute and her BA in Math from Smith College. She has recently been an artist-in-residence at ArtFarm, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Sculpture Space. Born in Hamburg, Germany, Alexa Hoyer received her BFA from Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri and her MFA in sculpture from Tyler School of Art. Hoyer has a permanent video installation at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, and has shown her work throughout the U.S. and Europe.

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Nova Jiang is an artist seeking to expand the evolving definition of public space by encouraging playful, tactile and creative participation. A current Eyebeam Fellow, she holds a Master of Fine Arts from UCLA and has exhibited at festivals such as 01SJ Biennial, Sundance and Sonar. Doreen Kennedy is an Irish artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Her visual art practice includes photography, photomontage, collage, design, and installations. She has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland and internationally. She was awarded a dlr County Council Arts Act Grant in 2010. Laurie LeBreton was a self-taught artist until her early sixties, when she was accepted into an MFA program at the Book and Paper Center of Columbia College, Chicago. Popular religious art informs her work as well as artifacts of other cultures, and especially the aesthetics of Asia. Abigail Levine creates dance and performance works that explore interactions between human bodies and urban environments. Her work has been shown in the U.S., Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, and Taiwan. She has performed most recently with Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, and choreographer Marianela Boán. LuLu LoLo is an international performance artist/actor/playwright. She has written and performed six one-person Off-Broadway plays, highlighting the struggle of women in New York City’s past. Previously, for AiOP 2009: SIGN, LuLu, as a 14th Street NewsBoy, researched, wrote, and hawked the 14th Street Tribune recalling the notorious history of the thoroughfare. Alban Low is a UK-based artist known for exhibiting magnets in public spaces all over England with his merry band of 700 magneteers. Mary Ivy Martin is based in Brooklyn, NY and works with natural materials. Her work confronts a disconnection with nature in daily life. She studied art at the University of Arizona (BFA) and SUNY Purchase (MFA). She has exhibited in New York and Berlin. 184

Scott Mason lives and works in London, England. He earned his MFA at Wimbledon College of Arts, London. Visual artist Carolina Mayorga has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the last fifteen years. Her work is part of national and international collections, and has been reviewed in publications in South America, Europe, and the U.S. Mayorga lives and works in Washington, DC. Marissa Mickelberg is a performative movement artist, director, and producer focusing on anthrozoologic themes in performance. She currently attends NYU, MA Performance Studies, and has performed in collaboration with The American Mime Theatre, Vanessa Beecroft, Sue de Beer, Performa, DUMBO Arts, HERE Arts Center, MoMA, P.S.122, and Deitch Studios. Originally from Buenos Aires, Andrea Moccio graduated from National Fine Arts School Prilidiano Pueyrredón. She studied at interdisciplinary workshop with Christian Boltanski at Fine Arts School in Paris. Select exhibitions include El Museo del Barrio, New York; Metropolitan Collection, Cultural Town Hall Center, Buenos Aires; and The Klemm Foundation, Buenos Aires. Felix Morelo spent his childhood in Cartagena, Colombia, and currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. Morelo is a self-employed artist known for his street art performance, Chalk Faces. He received his BFA in Painting from Parsons The New School for Design. Sheryl Oring’s work includes I Wish to Say, a project in which she has typed postcards to the President from locations across the country. Oring, who has received a Creative Capital grant and a NYFA Fellowship, is an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Julie Puttgen is a painter, teacher, and storyteller with roots in 185

Switzerland (where she was born), Buddhist monasteries (where she trained for three years), travel (of which pilgrimage is the finest form), and various observances for creating sacred-ordinary space in daily life. Edith Raw is originally from Chicago. Her visual art, writing, and performance have been witnessed in Chicago, New York City, and Albuquerque. This performance is dedicated to her blood and spiritual family. All for you. Known for his humorous urban installations as seen throughout New York, London, Berlin, and São Paulo, Leon Reid IV is one of the few artists responsible for introducing sculpture into the genre of street art. Reid earned his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MA from Central St. Martin’s. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Ryan Ringer strives to discover unknown territories of individual and collective being. He is based in Toronto, Canada. Jenny Santos explores the tension between existing opinion and the unstable, shifting play of appearances in daily life. She is an MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts. Jacolby Satterwhite is a multimedia artist. He crosses various media to explore themes of memory, desire, ritual, and heroism. He earned his MFA from University of Pennsylvania, and BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Satterwhite had received the Van Lier Gant, Experimental TV Center Grant, and Toby Devan Lewis Award. Gene Schmidt’s father was a preacher and a carpenter. He put thoughts of God in his head and tools in his hands. Schmidt mostly makes sculpture, but other things, too. About three years ago, he measured the width and length of Manhattan with yardsticks. It’s pretty big. Leonardo Selvaggio is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of identity in male culture, and how the roles of men are changing in our current society. Selvaggio earned a BFA from Rutgers University and is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Interdisciplinary Arts at 186

Columbia College Chicago. Jacquelyn Soo earned a BFA and a Diploma in Fine Art (Sculpture) from LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She has exhibited locally and internationally. Her first solo show was at Your Mother Gallery, showing paintings of strangers’ dreams and collective memories. She is founder and curator for SCYA, an Art Society promoting voices of Contemporary Young Artists in Singapore. Anna-Katrin Spiess’ work can be described as Conceptual Land Art. She creates site-specific projects in wide-open, remote landscapes, where severance from civilization creates distance from the “real world.” Performance and ritual have played an essential role in Spiess’ work. Recent projects focus on addressing environmental concerns. Liana Strasberg graduated from National Fine Arts School Prilidiano Pueyrredón. Select exhibitions include Borges Cultural Center, National Art Foundation, Banco Patricios Foundation, and Caellum Gallery. She has received the Manuel Belgrano Award and the Gunther Award. Sasha Sumner is a multi-media artist who actively engages in an exchange with participants through a variety of media: video/film, photography, new media, music/sound, and performance. Her work examines social interactions and their wider meanings, while also being informed by personal perspective. Rob Sweere is an artist from the Netherlands. He earned his MA from Rijksacademy voor Fine Arts. He has received commissions in Greenland, Netherlands, and Taiwan, among others. He has performed Silent Sky # at least thirty-five times in over ten countries. Katie Urban is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist working in installation, photography, drawing and sculpture. Central to her work is a desire to represent the intangible and provide concrete physicality to emotions, experiences, and memories. She earned a BA in Visual Art from Bowdoin College. 187

Geert Vaes is a Belgian performer/performance-maker who worked for several theatre/dance companies, all over the world. He has performed three times in the Cour d’Honneur for the Avignon Theatre Festival. Juha Valkeapää is a Finnish voice artist and certified translator who has performed over 600 times worldwide. He has been a solo-voice performer, taught voice workshops, and worked in many group-pieces. MASKI is their third collaboration. Mary Valverde received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. Most recently her work has been included in the exhibitions: Variations on Notes, Abrons Gallery, NY; Digression, Hendershot Gallery, NY; and Hairtactics, Jersey City Museum, NJ; among others. Gretchen Vitamvas is a Brooklyn, NY-based artist and camoufleur. Recent shows include Vested Interest at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI and Pathogeographies (Or Other Peoples Baggage) at Gallery 440, UIC, Chicago. Lois Weaver is an independent performance artist, director, activist, and Professor of Contemporary Performance at Queen Mary, University of London. Lori E. Seid is an independent producer for Theatre (off Broadway: Tom Murrin’s Talking Show, Split Britches’ Lost Lounge), Film (documentary: For the Love of Dolly) and TV (Live by Request for PBS). Anchored between red brick houses and the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the ephemeral clouds bow graciously to a blushing turquoise sky. Caitlin Webb’s work seeks to illuminate forgotten radiance existing in a constructed horizon. Webb currently lives in New York and studies at Parsons The New School for Design. Genevieve White is a Canadian artist currently living and working in New York City. She works in video, performance, photography, installations, drawing, and painting. She is a graduate of Parsons The 188

New School for Design, where she received her MFA. Jenifer Wightman is a research scientist specializing in greenhouse gas accounting and life cycle analysis for assessing sustainable bioenergy production systems. She began making science-based conceptual art in 2002. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Alexandra Wolkowicz (New York, NY), Jon Barraclough (Liverpool, England) and Rob Peterson (Shreveport, Louisiana) collaborated on the project, Birdsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Ear View. The collective was formed in 2008, when they learned that thousands of birds fly into skyscrapers during migration season every year in NYC alone. Amy Young is Brooklyn, NY-based artist with a BFA and an MA in Art History. She has twenty-five years of experience creating art. In her work, seemetellme (2010), she created hundreds of pieces of street art and placed them in New York, London, Paris, and Seattle.

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Kalia Brooks (Co-curator) is a New York based independent curator and writer. Brooks is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, a PhD Candidate in Aesthetics and Art Theory with the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, and the Curatorial Fellow with A Blade of Grass in New York City. She received her M.A. in Curatorial Practice from the California College of the Arts in 2006, and was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program 2007/2008. Adam Brent’s (Essayist) work has been exhibited at such notable museums, institutions and galleries as the Islip Art Museum, Bronx Museum for Contemporary Art, Aldrich Museum For Contemporary Art, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Artists Space, Apex Art, Margaret Thatcher Projects, Gathering of The Tribes, Wave Hill, BRIC Rotunda, Momenta Gallery, NY DOT’s Urban Art Program, New York Public Library, and The 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. His individual and collective work has received critical attention from the Village Voice, L Magazine, The NY Press, Art Critical, The New York Daily News, Architect Magazine, Architizer, and the New York Times. Juliana Driever (Editor) is a writer, occasional curator and cultural worker living in New York. She frequently publishes on the subject of contemporary art in both print and online formats, and writes regularly for Bad at Sports. Her experience with publically-sited art ranges from curatorial work on temporary projects like Jamaica Flux (2007) and The Peekskill Project (2006), to advising on permanent commissions for MTA Arts for Transit and New York City’s Percent for Art program. Driever is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Art Department at The City College of New York (CUNY). Trinidad Fombella (Co-curator) is a curator who currently lives between London and New York. She has worked with many museums, galleries and non-profit organizations, including El Museo del Barrio, Guggenheim Museum, No Longer Empty, Local Project and Galería Galou. She also founded Rivington Art and Sara Gris Gallery for emerging artists living 191

in New York City. As Assistant Curator and Exhibitions Manager at El Museo del Barrio, Fombella co-curated the largest-ever edition of the museum’s Bienal: The (S) Files/The Street Files, in 2011. She also organized over sixty exhibitions during her ten years as Director and Curator of Praxis International Art. Fombella has a degree in Architecture and Design from Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina. Victoria Marshall (Essayist) is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Parsons The New School for Design, New York. She is a licensed landscape architect, and the founder of TILL, a Newark based design studio. In 2010 she launched and directed the Urban Design BS Program at The New School, the first undergraduate urban design program in an art and design school in the United States. She recently completed an India China Institute Fellowship. Her current research explores the role of urban design in the emerging field of urban ecology. Linda Mary Montano (Keynote Speaker), trained in sculpture at The College of New Rochelle, BA; Villa Schifanoia, Florence, MA; University of Wisconsin, Madison, MFA, began performing 1970, and addressed concepts of silence and persona morphing, using aesthetic paradigms to induce a spiritual consciousness. She balanced this vision with a questioning humor. Always there has been a need to use art to practice and prepare for life and also a need to transform and transfer life traumas into art so that nothing is wasted and all is recycled. Endurance has been used as a raw material and way to mark time and teach awareness, via vow-taking; it comes from her Catholic training and two years in a convent. Performances, persona morphing, three books: Art in Everyday Life, Performance Artists Talking in the ’80s, and Letters from Linda M. Montano, numerous videos, teaching and residencies at The Art/Life Institute are ways Montano explores her life as a “living sculpture.” www.lindamontano.com Ernesto Pujol (Essayist) is a site-specific performance artist and social choreographer based in New York. He describes his walking durational group performances as the public portraits of specific peoples, silently 192

achieved by revisiting and reactivating their interior and exterior historic spaces, manifesting psychic landscapes; revealing intangibles in the Jungian sense. Pujol recently published Sited Body, Public Visions: Silence, Stillness & Walking as Performance Practice, available through McNally Jackson Books, SOHO. He serves as performance instructor in the MFA programs of Parsons and the School of Visual Arts and is currently developing several new works. For more information, please visit: www.ernestopujol.org For more than twenty-five years, Ed Woodham (AiOP Founder and Director) has been active in community art, education and civic interventions in a variety of media and cultural contexts. An accomplished visual and performance artist, puppeteer, curator and lecturer, he employs humor, irony and subtle dĂŠtournement to encourage and provoke a deeper consideration of the urban environment. As founder and director of 800 East in Atlanta Georgia (1990-98), he turned a derelict post-industrial space into a community arts center, reviving and sustaining both an artistic collective and the local neighborhood in the process. Since moving to Brooklyn in the late 1990s, Woodham has continued his practice, creating a network of artists, curators and sponsors to make Art in Odd Places a signature annual cultural event of the city.

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Michelle Calabro 108, 109 David Canizales 58 Elizabeth Cheviot 48, 88, 89, 98, 99, 139 Juliana Dorna 36, 45, 62, 63, 78, 128, 130, 131, 138, 201 Elliot Hypollite Cover image, 8, 54, 55 Jennifer Jung 122, 123 Joshua Kristal 20, 25 Mariel Victoria Mok 46-47 Cordell Murray 10, 74, 75, 94, 104 -106, 120, 121, 124, 136, 137, 140, 148, 154 -156, 160, 178, 190, 196 Ernesto Pujol 30 Daniel Talonia 4, 15, 18, 26, 29, 49, 52, 56, 57, 59, 64 - 69, 73, 76, 77, 79 - 81, 90, 91, 95 - 97, 107, 110 - 112, 114 - 117, 125 -127, 129, 144, 145, 149, 150, 151, 157 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 159, 161, 164 - 167, 174, 175, 198 All other images provided courtesy of the artist. 195

ABOUT 196

Art in Odd Places (AiOP) began as an action by a group of artists led by Ed Woodham to encourage local participation in the Cultural Olympiad of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. In 2005, after moving back to New York City, Woodham re-imagined it as a response to the dwindling of public space and personal civil liberties - first in the Lower East Side and East Village, and since 2008, on 14th Street in Manhattan. Today, AiOP presents visual and performance art in public spaces with an annual festival each October along 14th Street in Manhattan, from Avenue C to the Hudson River. The festival aims to stretch the boundaries of communication in the public realm by presenting artworks in all disciplines outside the confines of traditional public space regulations. AiOP reminds us that public spaces function as the epicenter for diverse social interactions and the unfettered exchange o ideas. It has always been a grassroots project, fueled by the goodwill and inventiveness of its participants. www.artinoddplaces.org artinoddplaces@gmail.com Art in Odd Places is a project of GOH Productions. Bonnie Stein, Executive Director www.gohproductions.org

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 198

People: Ed Woodham, Founder & Director Lucia Warck-Meister, Festival Producer Kalia Brooks and Trinidad Fombella, Guest Curators Jabari Owens Bailey, Curatorial Assistant Sarah Brozna, Program Manager Juliana Driever, Program Development Vinh Cam, Marketing Director Cesar Jesena, Social Media Director Carey Estes, Website Designer Jorge Garcia, Program Guide Designer Charles Davis, Press Manager Devon Walsh, Administrative Assistant Krutika Harale, Poster and Invitation design Jennifer Jung, Printing Daniel Talonia, Photography Director Victoria Inguanta, Intern Collaborating Organizations: Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), El Museo del Barrio, Parsons New School for Design, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Theaterlab, 14 Street Y, Norwood Club, and Hudson River Park Trust. Sponsors: Rags A GoGo, Two Boots Pizza 199

Donors: Michael Allen, Joseph Alexiou, Alice and Nick Alexiou, Cookie Brindle, Scott Burland, Angela Muriel, and Anonymous. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and with support from the Leo S. Walsh Foundation. Catalog Design Krutika Harale www.krutikaharale.com Special Thanks:Â (in no particular order): Participating artists, all of the artists who applied, all of the volunteers, the AiOP team, Adam Brent, Victoria Marshall, Simone Douglass, Emily Villemaire, Miodrag Mitrasinovic, and Shana Agid at Parsons New School; Nick Battis at Pratt Manhattan Gallery; Carlos Altomore and Orietta Crispino at TheaterLab; Bonnie Stein and Vit Horejs at GOH Productions; Lisa Woolley and Rachelle Koser at Norwood Club; Becky Skoff and Marissa Rosenblum at 14th Street Y; Patrick Sullivan and Casey Burry at Underline Gallery; Lola Warck Meister, Anita Glesta, Alex Kilburn, Sarah Evans, Al and Jack Cascio, Lauren Simon, Georgia Phillips, Henry Liau, Paggie Yu, Karen Jung, Cassandra Oliveras, Ines Aslan, Stuart Kirk, Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Elvis Fuentes, R. Stuart Keeler, and to you.

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