Big Time Questions No.4

Your Young Team Management stuff looks like more crazy fun rather than art. How would you classify it?

I would classify that as crazy fun. Unfortunately that project seems to be pretty much deceased. It was the product of a very specific trio of friends and a very specific environment. The spirit is still there, but it's hard to maintain separately. On the other hand, the "activities" we did (i.e. the bird bridge, the guinea pig, the raft, etc...) I would classify as art. My idea of art is anything that transcends the "everyday" art is (or should be) the anti-mundane. So in that sense, I felt that all of that stuff that we were doing was very much in that spirit. There was a huge argument in one of my art history classes at school about Duchamp's "Fountain" and as to weather or not it was art. It was surprising to me how many people were insisting that it wasn't. I pointed out that it already is, weather they like it or not, because it was being discussed a thousand miles away a hundred years later. No one argues or even talks about any old urinal, but "fountain," now that's something! Weather you think it is stupid or not is irrelevant, even though it's a mundane object, it has been made grand by Duchamp, and there's no fighting it.

Two of my favorite "art" pieces, I don't even know who preformed them, but they are magnificent enough to have been propagated to me and from me on, so they must be pretty good. The first one: This guy set up on top of a dividing wall that didn't quite reach the ceiling in a museum . He had some basic provision and maybe a pillow. He couldn't see anyone down on the floor and no one could see him, but he stayed up there for like 36 hours or something. Now many people would argue that because he had not effect on his environment, he didn't actually do anything, but that's the point. Regardless of his effects, he WAS part of that environment for that amount of time. His presence is inseparable from that particular museum for that particular amount of time. There is no way we can know if he had no effect. There is no way we can say that it's not art. It's something. Which made me remember an important designation for my definition, art is something deliberate. It can be arbitrary past a point, but there must be deliberate intent at some point in the process. A leaf that looks like Jesus (or someone else with a beard and long hair) is not art. But if you cut a leaf to look like Jesus, or you find one and sign it, or place it somewhere, I would argue that it has now, officially strayed into the realm of "art".

My other favorite piece of art is this: A man apparently went out to a particular field every day for months and months dressed in a black and white striped shirt. He would blow a whistle and throw out a bunch of bread and feed the pigeons, which would grow in number each day he did this. The months passed and it came around to the first day of football season, a man in a black and white stripped shirt walked out into the middle of the field and blew a whistle, hundreds of pigeons swarmed the field, and had to be shooed away before play can begin. I love imagining one guy sitting in the stands doubled-over laughing, and being the only person there who knew what the hell was going on. I love that he spent all that time operantly conditioning the birds to respond to the striped shirt and whistle. I think that is one of the most perfect pranks in history. Now here's another interesting angle to this story. I only heard it third hand. Who knows at this point what the actual details are, or even if it actually happened at all? And does it even really matter at this point because the story is still going, and has a life of it's own now. Now what's the difference between art and urban legend. This is the realm I like to traffic in with the "activities" we do/ did with YTM.