luminous
stacked traffic cones, daylight shows through
hours later, another stack, another kind of luminescence
traffic cone dreams
well, i think about traffic cones daily pretty much, over ten years i think, at the beginning wondered if it was silly or serious and if i'd still think they were interesting down the road - eventually have come to the conclusion that you can say they embody the paradox i see in the nature of everything - so the answer would be "yes" (silly/serious).
anyway this past week cones very high priority art-thinking. want to make a proposal, trying to distill so many projects (want to do) into one or a few (really want to do, more than the others) - it's been a very valuable exercise. what do you really want to do? what does an hour feel like, a morning feel like, a day feel like? if you say "i want to be an astronaut" that means much of your life spent studying math? or what? i don't know. but i bet it means very little time actually spent in space. if i want to make art, which i do, and it's going to involve traffic cones, which it usually does, what will my role be? painter? photographer? that is a big part of how i think. not just "i want to see this work" or "i want this art to get made" but "can i make this work?" and "what would i have to do to make this work? is that what i really want to do? is that the kind of artist i want to be, the kind of life i want to live?"
so i'm almost there. three projects could throw self (and hopefully others would want to be involved, or at least be willing to help) into, will figure out how to present to non-erik-humans over next fourty-eight hours or so.
in the meantime, let me tell you this: my sister-in-law had a dream in which i had made an experiencial art piece involving traffic cones. very much in line with some of the concentrated brainstorming i've been engaged in this week. now there's definitely a coincidental aspect, i babysat for my niece last saturday, and went and had breakfast with them, my brother and my mom today, and she knows i'm really into traffic cones, so i'm not saying "oh man we have this powerful psychic link." but i think it's neat that those things are connected in her mind at a non-waking-state level, and that she was dreaming about below and above cones, which is where the breakthroughs have been coming for me. i do find it an auspicious omen that she dreamed i had some sort of connection involving arranging experiencing traffic cones in an aesthetic manner in a very public place. i believe this will give me confidence to submit a very achievable, unique, and exciting proposal.
also in the real world (was going to say "back to the real world" but let's face it dreams exist in this universe, this is part of the paradoxical nature of everything, dreams exist but they don't exist right?) there have been some very unique cone arrangements in midtown. here are two examples from a wednesday morning stroll. mentioned recently that there had been a sudden influx of yellowish-greenish cones in manhattan, here one is seen bound near some of its orange cousins:
and in central park, these cones seem destined to disappear, begging the question, when we walk around, or play frisbee, anywhere, how much of the earth beneath our feet contains, in addition to rocks, dirt, and worms, submerged traffic cones?
gift conduit
steph's uncle in california has an avocado tree. her pepere brought some avocados to maine. steph brought some to nyc and gave me this seed.
part of spring planting, people will see it in a piece of art. then i'll give it to someone with a yard, maybe christine or eugene/joann or jong/tim or toby or...
chess is happening
nathaniel used to live up the street when we were four, now he lives a few blocks away
steph i see all the time, christine i used to live upstairs from - i like it, a photographer and a glass sculptor painting on a chess board, for a video camera, using a timeclock
camcorder view
lucy (neighbor, first time meeting) with-and/or-versus ron
ron makes a move
brush and edge of board
walking = synchronicity
training for kisokaido, speed is not up, endurance not there, so have been taking the subway less. well, you see a lot, when you walk, things you wouldn't notice otherwise. but there have been several encounters over the past few days which - it's tough almost to say how bizarre (in a good way) it feels - ok no point in going on, just what happened - so, wednesday, 2.4 mile stroll:
meet les for coffee (intentional) and it turns out this is another person who lived in tokyo in the late nineties, who lives here now, not so strange, but get this, is really into traffic cones. has exhibited traffic cone art before.
do you know how many times i have asked another person "do you consider yourself to be one of the foremost experts in the world on traffic cone aesthetics?" not once, i don't think. to have the answer be "yes" and illustrate an obvioius appreciation a few minutes later as we happen across a particularly special cone and utter the words "sublime" - ok that was quite unexpected.
next evening finally heading up to meet ira for coffee on way home from location one (8.6 miles walking for the day):
and hear "erik" and there, in a large vehicle, are aaron and satoko - so the thing is, i don't see ira often. and i pretty much never see aaron and satoko. but i met them all at pretty much the same time, back in the day, and they belong in that temporal clump in my mind, those people i knew at that time, like susan and kanji and matthew and keiko - really, to see them a block away from meeting ira, after all this time, was a big connection-hammer.
that's a lot - finding out you share something in common which is exceedingly rare (traffic cone appreciation), running into old friends after ages - ok so the next day walked over 6 miles, here's some of it:
and along the way start calling people, because yeah i'm in training, physically, but have put the taking tons of photos for the collages trying to match things i see up with elements of hiroshige's prints on hold for a little while, as think harder about video etc., and want to do chess, in the park, this weekend (tomorrow actually) because all of a sudden the weather is warm and beautiful.
so i call rob. and he doesn't answer. which happens, right? and i keep walking. and twenty minutes later, there's rob. on a bench. by the river. in intense conversation with whatsername. (of course he didn't answer his phone). after the other stuff this felt distinctly weirder than maybe it merits. on the other hand, he works about three blocks from my apartment and we never run into each other in midtown. now i'm down in tribeca and call him and he's not there and i keep walking and hey, there's rob, down here in tribeca, while i want to talk to him.
oh and whatsername, by the way, our first conversation ever, here's how it goes, pretty much:
me: do you paint?
her: yeah, i do.
me: do you like chess?
her: it's my favorite game.
ok so how many girls have you ever asked "do you play chess," first meeting ever, friend-of-friend, and they say "it's my favorite game?" frankly this has never happened to me before. i hope she will participate in the chess project. really.
so this would be plenty of synchronicity. plenty.
so i'm standing there trying to recover from the "favorite game" she paints and plays chess and i was trying to see if rob wanted to paint on chess boards together, and i hear "erik?" and there's allison. the deal with allison is, i really never have contact with her, and surely part of the reason for that is she has lived in austin for the past year, but i did actually email her a few days ago because i couldn't find owen's email address. she emails back she's in a uhaul returning. but this is by the river, days later, unplanned, me having stumbled across rob, and met the chess-loving girl who paints, and here's allison with her dog -
so this blog really my purpose is to keep track of art projects, if anyone wants to know how i think or what i do, it's not all instinct but a lot of it is - anyway not about personal blah blah blah necessarily right? not "you'll never guess who i ran into at the grocery store today." but so much of this, these people, i want or wanted to involve them in these projects - i mean, the reason i was meeting less was because he had written that using black and white paint (chess project) sounded interesting - yet he's into traffic cones. and traffic cone observation is definitely going to continue to appear, in various forms, in my art, as it has for about a decade. nothing to do with chess, very relevant (especially with the lmcc open call mentioned a few posts ago).
one last map, today (6.8 miles):
nothing too weird happened, i mean alisa who lives in georgia called and we want to collaborate so maybe chess is a first step for us, she's in town, but maybe the holy-moley this feels a bit surreal this particular coincidence, maybe that's over for the moment.
excited, though. i mean, what more do you want? i figure i know maybe 500 people in the world - ok maybe it's a lot more than that - still - in just a few days - to see these particular people, at these goofy times... just awesome.
looking forward to chess tomorrow.
walking over video
wouldn't that be cool? want to make it and want to do it. in the meantime can imagine.
http://www.eriksanner.com/es_blog_2007/art_mini_proposal_070418.pdf
legal
the chess project, that's the one i got a grant for. which involved applying for a grant. so the foundation of this project is split. there were the years of vaguely wanting to do a chess project, involving other people, and painting on chess boards. then there was the descent into bureaucracy and paperwork. well, thank you lower manhattan cultural council for helping me buy the paint and the chessboards, and presumably that endorsement of this project by an institution will make it easy to get permission to do the things in the park i want to do -
ok long story short started the contracts urged in last year's volunteer lawyers for the arts bootcamp, i mean, i want to avoid any possibility of misunderstanding or displeasure right? so vla recommends contracts if you're collaborating, so today i started writing a bit about what some of the issues are (i want to be able to use this footage, basically, and i want the work to stay together as a body of work, i think, although that's something which will likely change as the project evolves)
anyway here's the beginning of what i'm going to ask participants to look at and hopefully agree to, hope you enjoy
http://www.eriksanner.com/es_blog_2007/chess_legal_stuff_beginning_070417.pdf
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