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October Exhibition Diary 7. I spent a few more hours in the freight elevator at 50 Washington installing my wall-piece yesterday (see details and map below). The elevator never sat still for more than five minutes. The building has 10 floors, fully leased, mostly with commercial tenants (artists are the exception; they're all corralled on 5). Deliverymen bring boxes in; workers bring boxes out; and all day long it's garbage, garbage, garbage. The 8th Floor is the powerhouse tenant: a company that makes low-cost plastic items such as carry-all bags, videocassette cases, and so forth. The owner appears to be Indian and his employees African; the latter were constantly getting on the elevator with dollies hideously overloaded with boxed merchandise, grunting back and forth as they try to maneuver motorized and non-motorized handcarts through the door. One of them looked to be about a hundred years old--I thought maybe he was the other guy's Dad. He got the job done, but just barely. (The UPS guy, who knew everyone in the building, made fun of them to me: "Those guys moan and groan at each other and you don't know what the fuck they're saying.") Another place makes IKEA-type furniture; I saw a number of disassembled bedframes go through the elevator. As for the trash, after doing this project I feel like a pop-abstractionist version of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. (At one time the Official Artist of the NY Sanitation Department, this eco-conceptualist is famous for her piece Touch Sanitation, where she shook the hand of every garbage truck driver in NY.) I asked about the trash at 50 Washington: it supposedly goes out three times a day, but a couple of maintenance guys never stopped getting on the elevator with garbage. Even after 6, when the DUMBO art tour had officially begun and visitors were sprinkling through, one of these guys was still wheeling his plastic tub on and off the elevator. By 3:00 pm, I had reached the stage of making my piece where I needed to get back from it, so I could see the whole and add or subtract struts. Instead of the sculptures that Barnett Newman complained about bumping into when backing up to look at paintings, I kept putting my feet down on bulging, refuse-filled plastic bags.
I did get a non-stop stream of commentary from elevator users yesterday. The knuckleheads who gave me a hard time a few weeks ago came back through ("Look, it's the tape-test guy!") but were actually complimentary (for guys) when they saw the piece. One of the 9th Floor employees gave me a full blown interpretation: "It's an elevator molecule... See, you got metal, plastic, electricity, oil (?), the whole elevator is here in this molecule." In fact, I got a mostly enthusiastic reception until the NY art-erati started coming through (and I'm one of them so I can say this): maybe the poker-faces expected more bells and whistles? Another elevator in the building is draped in sepulchral black cloth, backlit in red light, and pulsates like an enormous beating heart. I can't really compete with that.
October Exhibition Diary 6. Worked from 6:00 pm to 1:00 am yesterday installing phase one of the elevator installation. That freight elevator is truly the alimentary canal of 50 Washington. Boxes come in on dollies and bags of garbage go out, all fricking night long. The custodial staff, both Albanian, were split on the merits of the piece. One thought it was nice and the other was completely baffled. "What is it?" "Atoms. Molecules. What everything's made of." "You ask office?"