Fortune Not Cookie by Daniel Casler, Jon Coyne, Hayley Lind VanDeBogart, JC Stade
January 4th, 2009 10:04 AM / Location: 61.570622,-149.4520Our fortune, for those who are wondering: "New doors will open." See why we chose a door now?
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Our finished work, I accidently put R's where there should have been p's... Left to right, HayleyLind, me(Jon), and Daniel
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Picture of the thermometer not an hour after we did the task just to show how cold it was.
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learningexperience4 comment(s)
I'm against this sort of graffiti too. I'm voting for 2 reasons: new doors WILL oRPpen, and -20F is COLD.
Take Lincoln's advice into consideration, though, guys, he has some good points. And I can confirm that him being a cranky old fart is nothing to do with his opinions, for I, myself, am but a youthful whimper.
Oh, and I give you these two points under the promise that you'll come out with something epic in the not-too-distant future.
As a very artistically limited person, I often quail at visually creative tasks. Constructing something to be judged in form and structure, of all possible things I could make, is very daunting to me. I fall into the camp of players who will mothball a project that didn't come out as well as it should have, and short of really hitting a high note artistically, only an insightful look into the *process* of creation (successful or not) deserves to make it past the cutting room floor in my opinion.
Here, your fortune is apt, but painting that message onto a door could be a visually beautiful (and likely grueling) sub-zero mural. Here it wasn't. I don't shame you for that, god knows I couldn't pour out a bucket of paint with directions printed on its bottom, but if you aren't painting for the sake of the visual result you have to ask yourself why you are doing it.
Is it a fortune for the owners of the door? Who are they, what will their reaction be? Why them?
Is this about reclaiming the public forum, as against churches who forecast their own fortunes with prominent proselytizing signs? What does your statement that "new doors will open" mean to you? Why is this a message worth fighting for?
Perhaps you feel SNIDE about it, and want to just disrupt the status quo a bit. By why's this a bit of the status quo deserving of a little trial and tumult? I'm willing to say that a little disruptive graffiti can be a good thing, but only when it is *defying* expectations. Any message in the medium of graffiti is quickly lost to grumblings about rambunctious teens, and the world listens just that much less. Lincoln's "Have a Great Day!" snaps traffic-jam drivers out of the rat race for a minute simply because it is surprising when every person on the planet just seems like an unwelcome source of traffic (those jerks, going places, clogging up the roads with their bad driving, why I oughta...) but I digress.
The goal here is "Genuinely free, self-conscious, authentic activity as opposed to the alienated labour demanded under capitalism." We all interpret that differently, and we want to know your interpretation. Just let us know what it is.
Yeah, what they said, there's a reason why I backed out of this one. I think the store would have been better, let's try harder on the next one.
I dunno. I just dunno. I love SFØ with all my heart and I love people going out and tasking. I love the making of art and breaking rules and being a pest in the hair of society and fucking up other people's normal. But this just rubs me a bit wrong, maybe I'm just an old cranky fart and am over-reacting, and I very much love the new AKØ group and I love seeing you all going out in weather that would make me give up and then tasking. You're all brilliant. And I love messing with public institutions (especially a church). But I think there's a fine line between graffiti and benefiti. This I think is cool, this just looks like you pissed on somebody's property. And don't get me wrong, I love the intent, I just think you all fell short on execution.