Stop the war on clutter!

There’s so much smugness out there about simplifying and paring down. All those self-improvement reality shows that begin with throwing away all your clothes or all your furniture or both. I have a friend who says that for every new possession you need to get rid of five old things.

And it is very satisfying to go through your stuff and get rid of things. It gives me a great sense of accomplishment to fill boxes or bags with stuff I don’t need and get it out of my life. Such moral clarity.


But lately I’ve been thinking it’s a really easy virtue. The hard thing would be to stop consuming, but paring down or ending clutter usually means buying more stuff.

I propose we try to live by a much harsher moral imperative. Keeping everything we consume, including the packaging.




Forever.

In Artforum

There's a nice piece by Claudia La Rocco about the Movement Research Festival's Recessional up at Artforum.com.

http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=22733

It has a great picture of Mieke's shockingly dirty feet:



and ends with me and Josh talking about dance as visual art:

It’s unclear what sort of bridge results from an event like “Recessional.” But at Rachel Uffner's gallery down the street, an alluring synergy bloomed between Josh Blackwell's whimsical works on paper depicting colorful items of clothing and The Styrene Fantastic, a work by Lizzie Scott for two female performers, who alternately hoisted and flopped on their unwieldy Styrofoam-filled garments.

“It’s interesting to see the interaction between my static work and something kinetic,” Blackwell said. Nodding emphatically, Scott added, “It’s where art needs to go: to take into account all that has happened in dance in the past fifty, or one hundred, years.”

Introducing The Styrene Fantastic Blog

The first Styrene Fantastic performance is tomorrow. The project has already grown so big it's taking up the whole sidewalk, so I'm moving it to a new home, The Styrene Fantastic blogsite.




We're all still family, so Sidewalks will still be getting updates from Styrene. But this is the place to find pictures of fences and drains and sidewalks (and styrofoam in drains on sidewalks) and The Styrene Fantastic is the place to look for performance videos, photographs, updates and other documentation.

A little Non-dancer Dance Practice

My dance costumes are coming along, here's an unfinished "Fainting Couch" modeled by me, non-dancer extraordinaire.

The Styrene Fantastic will premiere at Rachel Uffner Gallery on Sunday April 26th, as part of the Movement Research Festival

styrene fantastic coming to Movement Research Spring Festival

Save the date:

Sunday, April 26th

Styrene Fantastic
world premiere performance

at Rachel Uffner Gallery

as part of Roll Call, the Movement Research Spring Festival

Good Fences

I just wanted to give a shout out to the Parks Department for the loving care they give to mending their fences.


Look at how many kinds of fence there are in one 3-foot stretch. Wrought iron, chain link and those wooden slats that arrive in big rolls on the back of Parks Department trucks. I can't decide if this is one complex fix or several attempts to correct the problem.


This one is hard to spot, but it's the most exquisite fence-mending. Two thin, hand-twisted wires spanning the gap horizontally.

Barbies Dance the Styrene Fantastic

A performance (starring the styrofoam) danced en maquette. Actual performance and performers coming soon -- stay tuned for details!

"Fainting Couch"

"Fainting Couch" in action

"Bench" and "Fainting Couch"

"Chaise"

And be sure to stick around for the after party!

Rescue Mission in Park Slope!

On Saturday while walking across the park to the bank I suddenly saw this on Garfield Place:


All this clean white styrofoam in the trash! I know the city picks up Christmas trees, but it doesn’t recycle styrofoam. I am actually quite self-conscious about trash picking, but this was too much to let go. Also, way too much to carry in my hands.


So after depositing my checks, I had to do a quick calculation: would buying plastic garbage bags just to carry styrofoam home offset the good done by rescuing it?

But of course, I’m not really saving the planet, I’m saving styrofoam! So I bought recycled plastic bags, but art was always going to win this battle anyway. I would have bought bottled water if that was going to help me get this sweet styrene into my studio!

On the way back to the site, I was so excited my heart was pounding. I was sure someone else would beat me to it, and that my styrofoam would be gone.

Not only was it still there, it seemed to have spawned.


Walking across the park was also a nice little performance piece**. Everyone stared at me, one woman stopped me to ask what it was -- it’s funny that carrying styrofoam turns out to be more provocative than crawling around a subway grate in knee pads.


**Interaction is my preferred word for this kind of piece, actually.

Happy Newish Year!

Some celebratory aftermath in Prospect Park -- the lovely shadows of the firework fences on the path around the long meadow, and a little accidental painting -- confetti and silly string fused to the asphalt.



Happy 2009!

The things you see in Chelsea

Over the course of two relatively recent visits, some highlights:
Reflecting pools under subway gratings.
Tiny mushrooms growing out of a tree on 22nd Street. (Lovely to see, but probably bad news for the tree.)
Some lovely Robert Morris felt pieces at Sonnabend, and some lovely ladies looking at a Joan Mitchell painting.












I've never felt much for Joan Mitchell -- all those later American abstraction heroes kind of blend together for me the same way classic rock radio filler does. I would never seek them out the same way I would never intentionally listen to Steve Miller Band. But this visit to Cheim and Reid I rather liked these paintings. Maybe it was the two ladies sharing the gallery with me. Maybe it was because I've been thinking about paintings of plants. Maybe it was just the way suddenly you hear Tiny Dancer on a car radio and find yourself singing along so happy to hear it again. And you know every word.

Or maybe Joan Mitchell is just like Aerosmith, who I do truly adore.

My own private landfill

As many of you know, I've been collecting styrofoam from my friends and neighbors for a few months now. I could rhapsodize about the material forever, but right now I want to focus more on the accumulation. It's taking up quite a bit of real estate in my studio. It's pretty amazing that a few posts to a few yahoo lists can generate this much styrofoam.



I've always had a very local and personal response to the problem of consumer waste. Our apartment gets perilously close to being a collier mansion, not because I'm such a hoarder -- I don't really want the stuff, or picture a future for it -- but because I can't bear to add it to a landfill, or worse, send it off floating on a barge forever.

Now I read that (as usual) I've simply been a little ahead of the trend. This week's NY Times reports that as the demand for materials to recycle falls, cities and people are being forced to store their own paper, bags, bottles &c.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/business/08recycle.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

No time to blog...

...because of the baby.

Walking around the Lower East Side

fence on median park

water tower shadow projected onto blank billboard

There was a lot to see and a lot to forget. Mary Heilman's 1970s doors were exciting, as was the shadow of a water tower on a blank billboard.

Elizabeth Peyton made me want to vomit. Everyone who knows me know I have my impolitic moments, usually at parties, but sometimes in the ether. This may be one of them, but I doubt she's one of my readers. Way back when I was moved by the Kurt Cobain show. It seemed to capture the smallness of being a fan. Also I was 24 and a bereft Nirvana fan myself. But by now smallness doesn't even begin to describe the scope of this project. Which honestly seems to be just to make a marketable brand, and to excuse it by piggybacking on other marketable brands.

Art should be more.

But it was a gorgeous day.

President Barack Obama

Fall in New York

Some balcony Sukkahs in Satmar Williamsburg

Brooklyn Botanic Garden drain

Autumn in New York, both above and below. Happy Sukkot everyone!

Foreword

The pedestrian sidewalk on the Manhattan Bridge, seen from the Q

It seems it's not conventional to introduce, but to dive right in seems too abrupt. I'll try to avoid over-explication, so this doesn't end up reading like the pilot of a long-running series. But if I wasn't chatty, I wouldn't be starting a blog.

So. This is an open sketchbook. It's about sidewalks, and things on the sidewalk. About cities -- especially New York City -- and public space and personal space and how it's not easy being green. It's not an eco-art blog, but rather an art blog with urban and eco leanings.

Or at least that's what I think it is. What it really is, dear reader, we will have to wait and see.