Arted-Up Chair (Making Art With Friends)

This chair is a green shoot from old roots.

I've written here before about art-making and the life force. There is a community version of that. Try to picture the button-down-ness of public middle school in Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 1950s. We lined up, recited the pledge of allegiance, marched in single file to our assigned seats, arrayed in neat rows and columns. We were expected to sit still and stay quiet until called upon -- which I found to be impossible. As John Taylor Gatto put it: this variety of schooling is more about compliance than education. Miscreants whose disruptions didn't rise to the level of the principal's office were dispatched to the art room. Opening the door released a cacophony of music and tween fun. In the middle of it all was the 5 foot tall art teacher, my mother, Hannah Geraldine Rheingold. 

The regulars actually voluntarily returned after school. We called ourselves "art club," which mostly meant hanging out and being boisterous in ways we couldn't act in our regular classrooms. And we made art. Sometimes together. I've never really left art club behind.

In the 1980s, my friend Are We Really, a Kesey disciple and prankster, organized the Art Police to make large animated floats for Grateful Dead concerts at the Oakland Coliseum. When Clinton was elected, we made an eight foot high version. In his left hand, a glowing joint; in his right hand, a saxaphone. When he raised the joint to his lips, his eyes rotated and smoke came out of his ears; then he raised the saxophone. The eight-foot high sculpture, made of papier mache on a chicken wire armature (except we used canvas strips instead of paper in only slightly diluted wood glue) was perched on an eight foot high wheeled platform that we pushed through the crowd. I guess she was around eight or nine years old when my daughter stood on the platform, with a wig on, as Chelsea Clinton, waving to the ocean of mindblown Deadheads.

Art Police ended when Jerry Garcia died in 1995. In 2001, AreWeReally and I and a few of the old gang and a few new ones started making big pieces of interactive art for Burning Man. We called ourselves "the Mindshaft Society" -- "give us your mind; we'll give you the shaft." We made bigger and bigger pieces and grew to dozens as we moved each year closer to the center, eventually ending up in Center Camp (which requires 24 hour action). We rented two of the largest big rig trucks and took hours with a crew of a dozen to load, unload, load, unload everything necessary for our more and more ambitious installations (and everything required for the tribe to live on the playa for a week). Around 2008, our enterprise collapsed of our own weight, although we didn't stop hanging out.

In 2009, when I was in cancer world, AreWeReally and our Mindshaft partner, Fabrice Florin, decided it would be good for me to make art with friends. We didn't enjoy two aspects of our collaborations that Burning Man required of us: The deadline mania gets more and more intense as the projects grew larger, and the pressure on the group builds in July to an insane level in August. So we didn't want deadlines. And we didn't want to rent big rigs. We decided to start with a kind of combinatorial oracle that would construct advice randomly via some kind of device we would build. Dr. Really thought we should call it "the philosophical slot machine." Dr. Fabio countered with "metaphysical slot machine." Then my lightbulb went on and I suggested "Pataphysical Slot Machine." We used electromechanical and digital devices and media and exhibited it our local library. Now we are building a time machine. One of the great advantages of the current project is that deadlines are irrelevant. The whole story is documented by Dr. Fabio in multimedia detail at the Pataphysical Studio website.

On Saturday afternoons, between zero and ten people show up in my garden-studio to work on the time machine or just make art. So although we are slowly creating the time machine, we are also working on projects of our own, individually and together. Art Club. Which brings me to the chair. It was a funky old chair with a woven jute seat that eventually rotted out. I turned it to face the wall in the space where some of us sat to chat and work on projects. A couple weeks ago, Dr Really took the chair back to where the power tools and wood stash is located, tore out the remnants of the seat and made a seat of plywood, which I screwed into place. He said: "You could art it up." That's how it came into being. When I finished it, he went to another chair and put one of my pillows on the chair. Perfecto. I had these pillows made up with the image of an old painting of mine -- My Familiar Spirit, a story I've told here.

I'm now stripping the old paint from a rocking chair that we could never figure out what to do with.

So: go forth and make art with friends.