(in) visible cities day three

(in) visible CITIES DAY THREE

Report and photos by Jeanne Randolph

Heavens! the doors to the Kensington Building are heavy, but the invisible blogger is tougher than she looks. And she looked at JoJo Protectress of the Normal, smiling and dainty at the welcome desk in the foyer. JoJo welcomed me gently, as I am certain she welcomes normal people who have work within or meetings to attend in the building. Their ride in the elevator will need an introductory reassurance, and JoJo Protectress of the Normal will succeed at such.

Lorri Millan holds open the door to the performance LIFT. Lorri, as we have come to gleefully anticipate, is wearing an irresistible outfit, a scarlet elevator-operator uniform. It is so brightly crisp and innocent I restrain my tears. How jaunty is the red pillbox hat complementing her mischievous face!

Up all the way to the 18th floor and down I rode, leaning against the back wall basically staring at Shawna Dempsey as she recounted stories about various forms of falling, dropping, foolishness and remembrance.

When the LIFT would stop necessarily as beckoned to the 3rd or the 9th or any destination floor, the people waiting would instantly realize this was no ordinary elevator crowd. The baby waiting in the stroller began to wave, as his mom instinctively pulled the stroller in reverse. The puzzled guy in the pale plaid shirt shifted his shoulders. The elevator operator leaned her perky head out and encouraged them “Come in, there’s plenty of room.” The mom said she’d wait, as our crowd squeezed against the sides to accommodate the puzzled guy. He smiled self-consciously.

Shawna, in her power dress and sheer stockings, spoke softly, even though her outfit was not too dissimilar from Sarah Palin’s type, so intimidating that womanly curves do not connote kindness. Yet her uniform for success couldn’t cancel the effect of dreaminess as Shawna’s intonation rose and alighted recounting her tales.

After my exit from LIFT, I turned back as the elevator door glided shut. The numbered lights above the door eventually lit at floor 18, and then – and then not again. LIFT left possibly sideways to the space of imagination.

A document was taped to the Kensington foyer’s glass wall, Nhan’s print-out of a website about advertising in elevators, emphasizing the “captive audience.” The advertisers expect us captive audiences to succumb to the Stockholm Syndrome. I recommend that we all carry permanent black markers so that, before our symptoms paralyze us, no advertisement anywhere will be secure from ridicule. Choose whatever brand of marker you please, but don’t leave home without it. 

Nhan’s Heyseeds shrine at aceartinc is built using books as bricks, the approach to which includes mirrors adorned with fake flowers hanging on one wall, and on the opposite wall, unpretentious, direct questions written in “mirror-writing” on sheets of paper on the opposite wall. The questions are frank and simple, but cannot be accessed without the mirrors; all this a re-enactment of the “hall of mirrors” that politicians and businesses construct with their weasel-words and press releases. The mirror I held revealed the question “Is it shameful to have the homeless in the city?” On the other side of the monumental book-edifice, there was a video document of a Viet-Namese ritual, beneath which the slips of coloured paper on which we visitors could leave our own handwritten notes.

Later that same evening the invisible blogger attended Jessica Thompson’s presentation about her soundhack projects all over the world.

Jessica’s presentation made my spleen curdle. In my opinion the way Jessica represented her work made the work appear to pander to childishness, suburban self-centredness, and exploitation of good natured people. The way Jessica’s work was presented gave the impression that her interaction with digital technology is smug and uninspired.  

When an object, device or event lacks ambiguity, ethics and ambivalence the audience becomes, as the Black Power activists once cautioned, “A Chump.”

After fleeing soundhack I entered the Witches World all-encompassing installation at Plug-In ICA: FASTWÜRMS’ HOUSE of BANGS and BLOOD + SWASH. Read all about it all you will, if you don’t wander a.s.a.p. into this insanely ethical and brilliantly pullulating homage to ordinary work and surreal pastimes, your heart and mind may shrivel like cankerworms in a jar of polski ogorki. “I guess my hair is too short, too thin and too fine to mess with,” I said to Kim Kozzi, of FASTWÜRMS. Kim advised that shaving a patch in the shape of hammer and cycle would be a disaster. So, I sat with my arm held in the hands of Dai Skuse, of FASTWÜRMS, which, in this topsy-turvy den of everyday love and hex wonder, was not metaphorically so different from Dai Skuse being held in my arms – At BLOOD + SWASH skin is the medium of respect..... “How about a Woodlands’ style poison-blood-spitting-fanged-turtle-on-heroin tattoo?” I asked.