Christopher Arnott Photo
City arts czar Andy Wolf proposed self-flushing toilets and a permanent electrical set-up on New Haven Green.
Artist Jason Friedes, who created a satirical sculpture called “Paid-Shade,” a man-made tree which folds out only if you stick a coin in the slot in its trunk, argued that “the nature of a park operates best when nothing supervisory is happening in it.”
The graffiti artist Dooley‑O described public art in an urban area as “like flowers. It’s unexpected. You just run into it.”
Elinor Slomba of Project Storefronts noted that “leisure is suspect, in a way.” Friedes agreed: “Our overwhelming need to always do stuff, that impulse, I think, destroys parks. An open space has its own value; we should not diminish it.”
The topic was “Disrupting the New Haven Green,” and while the discussion ranged from political to social to practical to environmental, it was all being discussed in the name of art.
The talk, part of a day-long “Closing Conference” for the Artspace exhibit Vagaries of the Commons, was moderated by the exhibit’s curator, Sarah Fritchey, who became Artspace’s visual arts coordinator and Gallery Manager in March.
Vagaries of the Commons had overwhelmed the gallery — and its website — from July 25 to Sept. 13. The show’s concept was based on the old feudal and democratic concepts of common space and shared community resources, with New Haven Green as the clearest local example.
In that spirit, Artspace handed control of the organization’s own website to digital “hijacker” Phil Lique for the duration of the Vagaries of the Commons exhibit. Lique used this opportunity to mess with the heads of the site’s visitors, jamming the site with repetitive images and his own artistic manifestos.
Lique was a participant in the second of three panel discussion Saturday, and was present at the first discussion when a woman complained at length about how difficult the site was to maneuver through.
“I think we’ve done a good job of not jurying you or censoring you,” Fritchey told Lique at the later discussion.
“I appreciate that,” he replied.
On Monday the site returned to normal, and will soon undergo a more user-friendly redesign — good timing for those interested in Artspace’s signature community-involvement event, City-Wide Open Studios, in October.
Wolf, who was appointed the city’s head of arts, culture & tourism by Mayor Toni Harp in March, spoke Saturday of the Green in terms of “respect for citizens, but also an aesthetic.” Some of the ideas he will be pursuing regarding the Green include a new style of a self-flushing, self-sanitizing “Sanisette” toilet that is popular in France. Wolf said the toilets could be installed on the edges of the Green that are outside the purview of the park’s proprietors. Among “other amenities we think would be subtle,” Wolf mentioned creating a permanent electrical system “under a slab on the Green” to power concerts and other events, rather than having to start from scratch with generators and other equipment for each show.
In solidarity with other panelists who spoke of graffiti art as a vibrant and popular art form, Wolf said he was looking into public “digital graffiti boards” which artists could contribute to online. Mainly, he was hoping to combat “15 years of deterioration” on the Green, and to find money for overdue repairs on the wrought-iron fencing along Elm and Chapel streets. He saw these as cultural and artistic concerns befitting his role as director of Arts, Culture and Tourism.
Besides three panel discussions and a closing musical performance by MMoAA’s Laurelin Kruse, the Vagaries of the Commons Closing Conference featured a citywide “salvaging” of discarded and donated foodstuffs from a variety of local markets, which Nadine Nelson of Local/Global Cuisine cooked into an “Excess Feast,” demonstrating one aspect of art (this one culinary) serving the needs of the community at large.
The main Vagaries of the Commons gallery exhibit featured Friedes’ Paid-Shade tree, a tent from when Occupy New Haven occupied New Haven Green, live dance performances By Elm City Dance Collective, a series of posters from the Excess Project shaming people for not composting their waste, and other socially aware artworks.
A simultaneous exhibit that mirrored the themes of the Vagaries of the Common was Laurelin Kruse’s Mobile Museum of American Artifacts. The museum is a trailer which Kruse (a recent Yale grad) pulls around the country when driving to gigs she’s booked as a singer-songwriter. It’s stocked with “personal objects” from Kruse’s friends, family and the people she meets on her travels. Each object comes with a story. As she noted in a panel discussion on “Forging New Borders” Saturday, even though it’s composed of relatively nondescript everyday objects, Kruse curates the MMoAA’s collection carefully and doesn’t display every donation.
Some of the panelists acknowledged contradictions in their own stances. After describing the virtues of unexpected public art — on electrical boxes or walls, or on underpasses as he’s been doing with the Under 91 Project—Dooley‑O was asked how he’d feel if a street artist tagged his latest outdoor project. He said it would be “disrespectful. We are inviting professional artists to a place they could never have before.”
Friedes, whose idea of “disruption” seemed to be leaving the Green alone and not adding “accoutrements” which could turn it into something “like a Roman forum,” sheepishly confessed that he’d like to see drinking fountains installed in East Rock Park.
Given its theme of disruptions and border-bending, Artspace’s afternoon of talks was remarkably civilized, largely concerned with shared community standards, civic input and democratic ideals. The Under 91 Project was described in terms of 700 people voting on what sort of art they’d like to see in the underpass. One audience members felt the need to ask “What exactly is the disruption? What may not be welcomed?”
Some experts in that field, representatives of Occupy New Haven (which has persisted as a collective since been evicted from New Haven Green in April of 2012), were scheduled to be part of the “Disrupting the New Haven Green” talk but did not attend. “They had to work,” Fritchey explained.
Fritchey kept the discussion in an artistic context, asking “How can we present the political in art today?” and suggesting that “disruption is already proscribed within nature.”
While none of her own comments were particularly disruptive, Project Storefront’s Elinor Slomba seemed to sum up the whole day of friendly discussion and community involvement when she told of how she’d grown up in a community without a common space. “Just having a Green to disrupt,” Slomba said, “is significant.”
