Memorial Day II: Phase Two

Sunday, June 3, 2007: The ceremonies will begin at 2pm in the Winnemac Avenue alley right where it opens onto Carmen Avenue. (Here is a map.) There we will dedicate my personal plaque and have a champagne toast. The rest of the journey is as follows (by car or by public transport, depending on resources):

Corner of Berwyn and Ravenswood Aves: Heather Riordan ceremony
Corner of Paulina and Grace Streets: Richard Fox ceremony
Lincoln Park Zoo entrance: Brian Lobel ceremony
DePaul parking lot on Sheffield Ave, just north of Webster: Edward Thomas-Herrera ceremony
Corner of Fullerton and Albany Streets: John Pierson ceremony

We will wrap things up with a postmortem/snack at Lula Cafe.

Formal dress. However you choose to interpret that is fine by me.

Unsolicited testimony; unexpected sex change

Woo hoo! The plaques have been made. And they look so... so... legitimate. Here's a teaser:

They're black brass; the engraving is gold. Delightful. Don't you want to attend Phase Two?

The wonderfully-named Rex M. Tubbs at The Engraving Connection turned my order around at lightning speed and didn't question just what in the heck I was up to. Thank you, Rex, even though the shipment was addressed to "Richard", not "Rachel." I guess that's what I get for meticulously spelling my last name but assuming my first name translates fluently over the phone.

Memorial Day II: Phase One

This is an excerpt from the email I sent out to approximately 30-odd people (as opposed to 30 odd people, although I'm sure some of them would cop to being a little odd):

With your input, I will be creating a series of plaques to install throughout the city. The plaques will "commemorate" events in people's personal lives that occurred on the spots at which the plaques are installed. ...

By the end of the day on Monday, May 21, send me a short email explaining where you would want a plaque installed in the city, and what happened on that spot. Also include the date that it occurred. It can be anywhere within city limits. Ideally, it would be a place that isn't completely obvious (i.e., wouldn't attract immediate unwanted attention and be taken down by The Man or other authorities). ... I will (with your help) cull a short text for the plaques from your emailed stories.

I will pick five plaques from whatever people send me and have them professionally made. Further installations may be done, though, after this particular round of the project is over.

The plaques will be installed in a non-invasive fashion -- easily removed from questionable surfaces if necessary.

The response was delightful. Not only did a great deal of people immediately write back, but I had the pleasure of sifting through their stories -- funny, sad, wistful, odd (!), and intimate.

As an added bonus I'd given the email the subject line "You're beautiful", in attempt to shamelessly flatter recipients into lending me a hand, so imagine if you will the warm feeling of opening up your Yahoo! account and seeing a slew of "Re: You're beautiful"s in my inbox.

A big thanks to everyone who responded. As I said in the email, I hope to be able to do another installment of this project sometime in the near future, once dissertation is dissertated and I've taken a few deep cleansing breaths.

Memorial Day II: Some background

In college, my friend Jenna and I played a game wherein we decided which on-campus object or place we would "dedicate" to ourselves upon graduation. Like most campuses, ours had the usual quota of Memorial Benches (and Wings and Halls and Statues and Libraries), erected and plaque-d in honor of the Somebody Q. Moneybags who had donated to the college, or the Class of Xty-X who'd ponied up enough dough to be remembered ad infinitum. So we asked ourselves: Where would our plaques go? What would serve as the perfect marker for our (unfatal) passing?

It is clear to me now that we played this game with a mixture of defiance and terror. Defiance against the insanely wealthy and the bronzed kowtowing that ensued whenever they snuffed it -- why couldn't we, the students who struggled penniless and work-studied through four years of academia, why couldn't we have that kind of eternal reward? Sure, the rich might be responsible for the college's very backbone; its dorms and halls and quads of green, but we were its heartbeat. We deserved just as much reverence. Engraved, if you please.

And terror because hey: it was senior year. Soon we'd be ejected into the real world, armed with Humanities degrees that virtually ensured our ongoing poverty. If we had to plunge into the ocean, we at least wanted a guarantee that our big-fish status would be recognized forever by future inhabitants of our beloved little pond. Proof that we'd mattered somewhere.

At any rate, the ground rules were simple: Choose an object (or place) that nobody would think of memorializing. None of the usual benches or buildings or flowerbeds. Something or somewhere that would take one by surprise. (And, perhaps, be less likely to attract the attention and outrage of campus administration, were the project ever to come to fruition.)

Jenna's answer was by far the best: On the lower entrance level of the campus theater complex (massive auditorium, smaller black box, offices, and classrooms) there was a recessed concrete landing, sheltered on three sides by the outer walls of the auditorium and by a set of glass double doors. Some quirk of this particular architecture caused air currents to get trapped in the landing niche, creating a gentle, constant, swirling vortex of leaves, trash, and general debris.

This, she said, would be her gift to future students and staff. She said she felt it nicely encapsulated her four years on campus. The Jenna Memorial Vortex.

I can't recall my own contribution. I think her choice was so good that I just couldn't top it. Regardless, it was the seed of this project. Thanks, J.

could we have that in English?

Local Disturbances is, ultimately, the practical portion of a project undertaken as part of a Master's degree in Cultural Performance at the University of Bristol.

Some background: I've been part of the program(me) since 2003, but took a leave of absence during the second half of the course, which was a residency at Lanternhouse International, working with the masterminds behind Welfare State International.

When I returned this spring, the degree option had ceased to exist (it is currently 'under development' while the university's Department of Drama is restructured). Also, Welfare State officially disbanded in 2006 after 38 years of existence (Lanternhouse International is now run by a collective of artists very much in tune with WSI's original mission). And my previous advisor had left Bristol. As had his wife, who stepped in to run the program in 2005-06 while he was on sabbatical.

So I suppose I could say that this project is an attempt to prove my very existence, at least in academic circles.

Actually, the folks at Bristol (who, ostensibly, heroically crawled out of the smoldering crater of my degree) have been kind enough to let me finish my studies here at home and advise me from afar. (Thank you, Sara Jane.)

My intention with this blog is to create a repository for the documentation of performances and installations around the city of Chicago (undertaken by myself and a small group of like-minded artists; hopefully, later on, this group will expand to include artists in other cities). The inaugural project, Memorial Day II, will take place in June of 2007 (see here).

The performances themselves will be site-specific and tactical (as defined by de Certeau 1988); that is, operating within a given system in order to defy that system--in this case, the regulated narratives of city space. They will be designed to produce ‘a rearticulation of site’ (Pearson and Shanks 2001: 159; see also Turner 2000).

I have been particularly inspired by this type of performative intervention in the urban landscape: Forced Entertainment's precarious overlay of imaginary history onto a guided bus tour; Janet Cardiff's factual/fictional audio narratives; Industry of the Ordinary’s various takes on boundary, claim, and sporting match; Stephanie Brooks' sly refashioning of street signage. These pieces ask us to perpetually reconsider our relationship (physical and emotional) to the cityscape. They call for a heightened awareness of public space; of the body as both reader and writer of an urban text.

I'm also drawn to the works cited above because they couch intention in humor, playfulness, gentle mischief--where the "pleasure of getting around the rules of a constraining space" (de Certeau 1988: 18) is valued above a dour struggle with the dominant order. As Thompson notes in the foreword to The Interventionists, "Nothing can suck the air around it like political art: so many words, so much ideology worn so transparently on the sleeve, so much certainty, and so little of interest to look at" (Thompson and Sholette 2004: 10). Adam Brooks of Industry of the Ordinary echoes this sentiment in textbook:

I think it's dangerous to pigeonhole any work as political, certainly with a large "P". Daniel Buren said that all artwork is in some way political with a small "p". The very act of making a discreet work becomes a politicized action, but I think that really what we're doing is taking information and subject matter that both of us feel is resonant and it needs in some way to be represented and doing just that: re-presenting it. (2005: 34)

Again I look to de Certeau for some definition: in these projects, urban place is re-presented as space. Where place is stable, distinct, governed by the rules and laws of the "proper", space "is composed of intersections of mobile elements" (1988: 117) and can be modified, temporalized, reoriented. It lacks stability. It contains multitudes. It is a palimpsest -- where infinite histories, memories, stories overlap and jostle and collide and resonate. A grey area. None, and all, of the above.

It is in this slippery space that Local Disturbances resides. For the moment, at least. Who knows where it will be tomorrow.

what's all this then?

Local Disturbances is:

a call for sensible acts of random kindness.

an archive of site-specific performance.

off the map.

a continual muddle of space and place.

an experiment.

messing with your head.

ephemeral installation.

evidence.

diversion.

unnecessary by certain standards.

compilation.

documentation.

living proof.

disruption.

here.


no, wait.

here.