Artist's Installation Diary
back to Elevator Project / Tom Moody main site
September 28, 2002. I have two exhibitions coming up in October, and plan to use this weblog as a kind of "show diary." (I'll try to make it as entertaining as possible.) I've been leasing a studio in Jersey City since I joined the diaspora out of Manhattan a couple of years ago, and although I'm giving up the space soon, I couldn't resist participating again in the Jersey City Artists Studio Tour, which the burg puts on every year to enhance real estate values--I mean, showcase all the creativity in the community. Ironically, the city government has been pressuring my landlord to get rid of his artist tenants because we're "non-conforming users" under the zoning laws, and I should be boycotting the tour because of this. However, since I'm vacating anyway, I won't get on my high horse about the city's TOTAL F*CKING HYPOCRISY. Anyway, the dates are Saturday and Sunday, October 5-6, 12-6. If you're interested, take the Newark/Journal Square PATH to Grove Street and they'll have maps at the station. More on this as the date nears.
I'm also participating in The Freight Elevator Project 2, curated by Ombretta Agrņ, which opens October 18 in connection with the D.U.M.B.O. Art under the Bridge Festival (click here to see the e-card). I'll be installing a large temporary piece in a freight elevator at 50 Washington Street in Brooklyn, which will stay up for the three days of the festival. I plan to create a 5 X 14 foot "wall molecule," and one of my challenges is how to attach strips of pre-cut, computer-printed paper to the elevator's supersmooth, aluminum-clad walls. Yesterday I went in at 4:30 pm to do a test, mounting several strips of paper using different brands of double-stick tape. My plan was, since they close the elevator for the weekend, I'd hang the strips on Friday evening, then come back Monday morning to see what was lying on the floor and what wasn't.
I'd supposedly cleared all this with the DUMBO festival organizers and the building management, but it became immediately obvious once I got into the chaotic environment of the building's VERY busy end-of-the-week freight delivery schedule that no one had a clue what I was doing. The "test strips" must have looked like art, because they aroused immediate commentary and implied threats from the construction workers, delivery men and custodial staff who were coming through on the average of one every five minutes. I mean sh*t, these were just white strips and circles of paper with the words "TEST PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE" in generic block capitals, but for the half-hour I was hanging them I felt like Robert Mapplethorpe.
It wasn't too encouraging seeing boot prints three feet up the sides of the elevator, as if some testosterone-crazed nut had been in there for the previous three hours jumping up and down pretending to be Peter Parker. Equally troublesome was the quartet of construction guys, knocking off work and heading for attitude adjustment hour, who all felt like they needed to weigh in. The one with the thickest neck looked at the strips and said sarcastically, "I'm not even going to say anything," and then said: "You know, that paper's going to be up there for about an hour." "Yeah," said another, "See these boot prints? Wait'll that guy gets in here." They all had a hearty yuck. It was like being back in gym class. Anyway, I hung the strips close to the ceiling, above the control panel, in a kind of grid, thinking it might fool someone into believing it was a template for some new controls. One artist got on at the 5th Floor, where they have studios, and studied the strips intently all the way to the ground floor. (The finished piece won't get that much sustained attention!) And yes, like an idiot, I'm going back over there Monday morning to see if anything survived.
Photography is going to be a problem, because there is no way, even with the wide angle lens, to frame the entire 14 foot length of the wall. Also, the walls are super-shiny so the light is super-uneven (but only in the camera--in person the three overhead fluorescent panels provide almost gallery-like lighting). Also, I'll have to disable the flash, since it creates laser beams bisecting the image. Below is a head-on image; the piece will occupy most of the wall where the test strips are hanging (see upper right).
Back to the Jersey City Artists Studio Tour: the Jersey City Reporter came out yesterday, with a spread on the tour. My name was listed under "N" (along with about seven other Ms) but they got the location right on the map. My studio is Number 17 on the tour map. The city mails out balloons (leftover from the Mayor's last campaign, I noticed) which we're supposed to hang outside our studios, along with a big number. This week I'll be test-driving the spheres and struts I'm using for the elevator piece by installing them vertically in the studio--a kind of practice run for the DUMBO event. (Here's how they look oriented horizontally).
October 4, 2002. I spent the last two days installing Molecular Dispersion (Vertical) in my studio in preparation for the Jersey City Artists Studio Tour tomorrow (Sat-Sun, Oct 5-6, 12-6 pm, maps at Grove PATH stop, I'm Studio 17, come on down!). It took 9 hours to put up, but I took a lot of breaks, trying to figure out what the thing was supposed to look like. Oriented vertically, it's less the bramble it was in my apartment and more of a failed dymaxion shape. I say failed because the polygons don't "close" the way they do in a true geodesic structure. The piece is only an illusion of a sculpture (it weighs about a pound, all of which is held up with pins), so there's more opportunity for fun and games: pseudoEscheresque spatial gags, struts that just kind of stop in midair, and passages assembled for no reason other than that they make nice color combinations. Because the piece is vertical, I had a devil of a time keeping it from being anthropomorphic. The "dispersion" in the title is a coy reference to the postminimalist Alan Saret, who made "sprays" of painted chickenwire that were very theoretical back in the day (early '70s) but look rather forlorn now in museums. I think my piece looks forlorn, too, and it's brand new!
October 16, 2002. The Jersey City studio tour came and went and now I'm gearing up for the elevator installation in D.U.M.B.O. this weekend. I'll post a building map and directions tomorrow. I was a bit disappointed in the turnout from the five boroughs for the JC tour, but it was fun. I probably had a couple hundred visitors through my studio in two days, and got some interesting responses. Casual viewers don't seem as put off by the use of the computer as typical "sophisticated" collectors who shop in Chelsea; most seemed comfortable with my hybrid of the machine and the hand. A lot of viewers thought the new molecular wall-pieces were painted frescos, to which I can only say: yay! Someone commented that they resemble the interconnected spheres and struts of the Atomium in Belgium. Big difference between my work and '50s atomic art: with mine the pseudoscience is right up front.
Thanks to everyone who came or emailed. I greatly appreciate your support!
October 17, 2002. As I've been mentioning, I'm doing an installation in a freight elevator in D.U.M.B.O. (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass), Brooklyn, as part of The Freight Elevator Project 2, curated by Ombretta Agrņ. The elevator project is under the auspices of the D.U.M.B.O. "Art Under the Bridge" festival, a three-day event of gallery openings, open studios, and performances. Here's how the curator describes my piece: "In Molecular Dispersion (Elevator Kit), Tom Moody has assembled a 70-foot-square lattice of molecular spheres and struts drawn and printed on his home PC. This 'kit' consists of several hundred individual pieces, put together improvisationally within the elevator site."
See http://www.dumboartscenter.org/festival/ for more information and a DUMBO map. The Elevator Project is described under "open studios." The Festival's (and elevator's) hours are: October 18-20, 2002, Fri 6-9 pm and Sat/Sun 12-6 pm. Below is a map showing how to get to my elevator. I hope you can stop by over the weekend.
October 18, 2002. 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?"
October 19. 2002. 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 21, 2002. I installed my piece Molecular Dispersion (Elevator Kit) in the freight elevator at 50 Washington in DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass) NY on Thursday and Friday. The piece was open to public viewing in connection with the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival on Saturday and Sunday (Oct 19 and 20). Lots of people came by both days, as they wandered around the fifth floor touring the open studios. In my previous post I described installing amidst the chaos of a normal busy day in the elevator; the contrast between that experience and my weekend experience was marked.
On Saturday and Sunday, the building's management decided for crowd control reasons to keep my elevator frozen on the fifth floor with the doors open, while allowing other elevators to service the floor. This was nice because it kept the work on "permanent" view. But it was also not so nice, because the art was no longer in a functioning, workaday environment. People either entered, pushed buttons trying to get to other floors, and left in frustration; or saw the explanatory text on wall outside, realized it was an art show, then gave it a quick look from the doorway. If they'd been using the elevator, they'd be immersed in the environment for however long it took to get to their floors, and they'd see the art full-on, with the depth-effect (such as it was) of the simulated 3-D molecule floating on shiny metal. From the doorway, seen at an angle, glare and wall-smudges are more pronounced and the depth was lost.
Nevertheless, some people were curious enough to enter the space for a better view, from what I could observe standing in the hallway talking to friends, which kept me in a good mood. If I happened to be in the elevator talking to someone, however, it created an interesting social dynamic. Seeing us in the lift, people would assume it was working, and walk in and push the buttons. When one of us inevitably piped up to say "It's not working," about 6 out of 10 visitors got huffy. At least four type-A personalities actually said, with sneering sarcasm, "So what are you doing in here, just hanging out?" When I said "It's an art exhibit" I either got the hand-over-the-mouth "I'm so sorry" reaction or the eye-rolling "Well la-di-fucking-da."
There's an awful lot of free-floating hostility out there; two of the friends I was talking to (one of whom had recently exhibited in a public space) discussed with me how art becomes a lightning rod for all that anger. Of course, anything that smacks of conceptualism (or presumed superior posture on the part of the artist) just generally pisses people off. Not guessing I was the artist, a couple of guys read the text aloud in pretentious voices and then loudly dissed the work, while their girlfriends giggled appreciatively. But that kind of reaction was the exception--when all was said and done, the piece was too brightly colored and "fun" to really hate. (Some people expected more of an elevator-filling spectacle, to which I can only say, I'm sorry, I think this particular type of structure would have diminished the more it surrounded you--one wall was enough!)
In any case, the project was an adventure. Thanks to curator Ombretta Agrņ for including me in the exhibition and bringing tours through each day. Also, big shoutouts to James, Gregory, Claire, Ross, Deb, Matt, Jim, Sarah, Alex, Linda, Dave, Mike, Janet, Brian, Cory, and anyone else I might have missed that came by. Jim took some nice pictures with his Danger hiptop and posted them while he was in the elevator; the sheer immediacy of that publication I find mind-blowing. I also like the way he shot them, in a kind of "descent into the Microverse" montage. I'll have some more pictures up soon.