eyesore

your-garbage-is-my-gold, all familiar with that, just hammered home to me again...
http://www.lmcc.net/art/programs/2007.3.27reconstruction/index.html

third paragraph states that orange cones are part of a disruptive presence. i beg to differ! they are a benign and divine omnipresent source of aesthetic pleasure. by the fourth paragraph they (to be fair, along with many other glorious manifestations of humans altering the planet) are referred to as "eyesores."

that makes my gut sore. i'm a huge fan of traffic cone aesthetics and believe that traffic cones are the closest artifact we have to art, but i haven't proven that yet. if ever an open call had my name on it - well, the obstacle is the same, how to make art about something which is already so close to being art in its own right? ten years of thousands of traffic cone photos and still haven't been able to crack the medium-isn't-the-message puzzle. that doesn't make any sense. haven't been able to find a form which does them justice, is probably what i mean. photos don't really get the coneness of cones. painting is old. i saw a sculpture in chelsea a few months(?) ago in a window composed of chopped up traffic cones but they were just used as raw material to make a rhinoceraus or whatever it was - not an homage, i don't think, to the raw faster-than-thought power of perceiving a lone traffic cone guarding absolutely nothing.

one final source of irritation - don't get me wrong, i'm thrilled about lmcc, what they do, that particular open call specifically, etc. - i guess we're all too close to something, like if you try to talk to a yankees fan about arod maybe - anyway, there is at present a startling influx of yellow traffic cones in manhattan. not orange - yellow. a small percentage of the total but so many of them are new and shiny and so obviously different - balm for my city-sore eyes.