The Wishing Tree vanishes

Monday morning in the bleak blustery rain, I went over to see what happened to the wishing tree. The wishes were gone and so was the Sharpie and the blank wax paper strips to write another note. I felt as though magic had evaporated, but then I can still make wishes when I see the tree.

The Public Space Assignment

Nicole and I decided to hang wishes on a tree and make a sign inviting people to tie their own wishes to the tree.

Easter Sunday ten a.m.

Last night a performance artist helped me install my work for the MFA show. I asked him what performance art was, he said to him it was not so much doing a performance for the public, but repeating the same action over and over, like hanging a picture.

So I cut wax paper into strips, wrote my wishes onto them and then tied them on the tree. Then I tied a sharpie and blank wax paper to the tree, for the public to write out their wishes and tie them on the branches. Mostly since it was Easter Sunday, families walked past me, after getting out of their cars and bundling in warm coats. I’d left my coat at home, which was a mistake.

A man pushing a stroller with two youngsters came over and said his son, who looked to be about three, wanted to know what I was doing.

“I am tying my wishes to this tree,” I said. “Do you have a wish?”

At first he smiled and said he didn’t and then his father said he was making a wish for Evie, his baby sister asleep in the double stroller by his side.

I plan to go back at three and see what the latest developments are over at the wishing tree.

Here’s the text I generated for the assignment, I made up new wishes as I went along. Thirty, oops, I mean 28, wishes or so

I wish I were thinner.

I wish I was already retired.

I wish I’d join the peace corps.

I wish relationships were easier.

I wish I would cook an entire dinner for one person.

I wish I was single.

I wish I was married.

I wish my thirteen-year old dog would die.

I wish my dog would live forever.

I wish I knew where I was going.

I wish I didn’t have to move ever again.

I wish the Koch brothers would support another cause besides the Tea Partiers.

I wish I could still get my degree in a month without attending another class.

I wish I watched the sun rise out of Lake Michigan and the sun set every day.

I wish I knew where I’ve been.

I wish I didn’t love chocolate.

I wish I had a home where I would live every day for the rest of my life.

I wish I had made more than one friend in the last two years.

I wish I had to pick one job from three offers.

I wish I’d used the money I spent on tuition to buy a new house.

I wish my sister was speaking to me.

I wish my brother was speaking to me.

I wish my sister-in-law was speaking to me.

I wish I could win an award.

I wish I was the president of the United States.

I wish that Libyans were free from dictatorship,

I wish the United States would not be at war.

I wish I had enough money to be able to retire.

I wish I’d figured out a lot who I was a lot sooner than yesterday.

I wish I’d already done my taxes.

I wish I wouldn’t have to die alone.

I wish I knew how to love myself.

I wish I couldn’t remember what my life was like when I was growing up.

Dance with Yourself

For this piece the performer was to construct multiple texts that were developed using public transportation as a structure for constraint. Dance with Yourself is inspired from the temporal, physical, and social constraints of Chicago's Red-line train.

Five individuals wait for the train. They each, in turn, board the train, express their distaste for public transportation and then gets off. Each individual has a different rhythm to their life (jazz, techno, classical, Latin, public radio) and the spirits of all but one dance on, free from the obsession of progress that inflicts us all.

The assignment was to generate seven texts about public transportation. Then we were to choose one to make into a performance. I arranged the class as though they were on a train and then had them change trains and shared three stories using film to create an atmosphere of travel and movement between imaginary trains to emphasize the passing of time between decades.

Summer 2009
The Overnight Train from Amsterdam to Prague

Luggage stowed, I was settled for a fifteen-hour trip from Amsterdam to a writing seminar in Prague, Czech Republic. A fit young man with curly blond hair and green eyes, bearing an uncanny resemblance to my first boyfriend, interrupted my solitude by ordering me out of my seat, saying that it was his seat. I refused to budge. I dug out my train ticket, in an effort to end any argument that this was his seat, not my seat, couchette number 75. Then he made me look at the numbers on my ticket. I was assigned couchette number 75, but on the train car 172, not 171. I am sometimes wrong, I often joke to anyone who will listen, but usually only in thinking I’ve made a mistake.
In an effort to be conciliatory, Marco offered to help carry my luggage to the new train car. I said I didn’t think he should touch a stranger’s baggage. He said those rules were for planes and we were on the train. Bumbling about, I heaved my big suitcase out of the overhead rack. Even though I was leaving my life behind to travel, I was bringing a suitcase big enough for my tennis racket. Fumbling under the weight of the red bag, he awkwardly followed me through the narrow aisle and swinging connection where the two train cars got linked together.
We soon found a shared vocabulary that crossed every international boundary: pictures on our phones. Marco showed me photos of the rooms where he and Edwin had stayed on other trips pointing out the two single beds. Then he looked from the single beds to me with a teasing smile. Were they gay, I wondered.
As it turned out, Marco and Edwin were travelling companions, not lovers. Marco, a social worker, kept insisting he was bewildered to be almost forty years old and not married. But, being single gave us time to assemble photos on our phones. Marco and I showed each other pictures of our exes, whiling away the hours as the train raced through Eastern Europe. When other riders crowded into my compartment to take their seats, Marco gave me a kiss on each cheek and one on the mouth to say good-bye. I noticed that nothing was very customary about Marco, including his take on the European way of parting from each other.
During my three-week stay in Prague, I sent Marco pictures of my young female friends. He responded to my shots enthusiastically, inviting us all to get together. “The more the marry,” he wrote. He spoke and wrote in Dutch better than English. When Marco signed his email, “X x,” I responded in kind. When he emailed “Love, Marco,” I returned my email with “Love, Anne.”
Three weeks later, I sat down on the wet marble steps of 21 Prins Hendrikke across from the central train station in Amsterdam. I decided that if he didn’t show, I would walk to the museum of Anne Frank’s home. Shortly after one, Marco, looking angelic with his halo of blond curls, approached me, walking easily along the sidewalk. He carried an umbrella and wore a white shirt with a collar and jeans. He kissed me directly on the lips, not even pausing to brush each of my cheeks with a kiss, European style.
“What were you hoping?” asked Marco.
“I was hoping you would show,” I told him.
“Do you want to see my town?” Marco asked.
“Yes,” I said.
Just before I boarded the train to Utrecht with him, I told him that my roommate from Prague thought he was lying about his age. She thought he wanted to seem old enough to go out with me, Marco might be thirty-five, not almost forty as he claimed. She writes fiction, but she did have a point.
“I am not lying”, Marco said. With a delightfully funny pretend show of irritation, he determinedly got out his passport and thrust it in front of my face. He forced me to look at the typed letters indicating the date of his birth, December 4, 1969.
“See,” he exclaimed in mock outrage. “I am thirty-nine.”
“All right, all right, put it away,” I said.
“But how do you know that I am not an axe murderer?” he asked.
“I’ve decided to trust you,” I said.

I saw Utrecht from the back of Marco’s bike. Once Marco started to pedal, I ran alongside and then jumped up to sit side-saddle, behind him, poised on a sturdy black metal frame suspended over his back tire. We cruised on cobblestones past canals, art galleries, bookstores and bridges, past ancient churches that had not been bombed in World War II and even past a statue of a rabbit, done in the style of Rodin’s thinker, made as a joke about sexuality and called “The thinking Rabbit.”
When I exclaimed that I loved lavender, Marco promptly bought two lavender plants and balanced them on the front of his bike handlebars. Each time after we stopped and then needed to start again, I got a little better at hopping onto the metal frame jutting out from behind Marco’s seat.

I need to explain here that I have never been a crier. Whenever my mother yelled angrily at me in the car on the way to school, I scorned my sister who cried openly. I always held back my tears, not wanting to cry in front of anyone.
Then when I got to school, I would head straight for the girl’s room across the hall from my classroom. Then I locked myself in a stall and cried by myself, glad that no one could see me.

At Marco’s flat, nestled into a street along a canal, I watched him finish ironing his work pants and shirts. We drank some coffees, ate oranges and chocolate. He introduced me to some female artists singing English lyrics that I’d never heard before. I wrote down their names. He showed me his English books.
“Do you know this one?” he asked, hefting a large book of fables about creatures written in English. I didn’t. So Marco read aloud his favorite, a story about an ant and a squirrel. The squirrel thought the two of them should separate to find out how much they would miss each other. Ant didn’t see the point of being apart. Even the idea of separating was more than they could bear. So they decided never to be apart.
At first my eyes just welled up. Then tears spilled over the lids and started following each other down my cheeks. Marco finished the story and came around to my side of his sturdy kitchen table and put his arm around me.
I cried in front of him without needing to hide my tears. “It’s not that hard to love someone. If you love someone, nothing is lost,” he said.

Choose five objects and generate a text or texts from these

I went into my bathroom and made ink drawings of five objects I have there: an Inuit soapstone carving of a walrus, a boat hook, a painting made by an artist in Dayton that I interviewed for a story, a boat with bells hanging from it and a couple of lava rocks from a volcano on Maui.

To present the project to the class, I let them touch the objects and asked them to write using the objects as I prompt. Then I shared my writings. The class guessed from the objects that I was writing about things I keep in my bathroom.

Spotting Crime

In what served as one half of Richard and Matthew's collaborative project exploring the art of mapping, Richard used information gathered from http://www.spotcrime.com/ in order to tag his neighborhood's street signs/poles with translucent decals representative of all crimes (assaults, thefts, and shootings) that had taken place througout the community from 3/11/11 (the date of Japan's recent catastrophic earthquake) through the end of March.

The following information was written in permanent ink in the surface of each tag:

a) type of crime committed at that location (assault/theft/shooting)

b) the date the crime was reported to the police

c) the time the crime was reported to the police

d) "spotcrime.com"

Each adhesive tag was cut and shaped according to the type of crime it represented. These shapes were in accordance to the logos chosen on http://www.spotcrime.com/ and were as follow:

a) Assault (outline of a fist)

B) Shooting C) Theft

A map of all the crimes tagged in this project can be found at:

http://www.spotcrime.com/#4905%20N%20Glenwood%20Avenue%2C%20Chicago

In total, there were 22 assault tags, 12 theft tags, and 1 shooting tag. Before setting the tags, a route was created by laying out each tags as they were were seen in the map from the spotcrime website. The backside of each tag was then given a number corresponding to numbers written on a printed out map of the targeted neighborhood. This allowed Richard (the tagger) to easily retrieve the correct tag for each location during his route.

The tags were all placed on non-black poles (steel, yellow, green) so that the black, stencilled text on the tags could easily be read once posted. Because spotcrime fails to disclose precise street addresses (only the block in which the crime occurred) the tags were placed on poles in the general location of the crime they represented. All tags were placed at approximately 6 feet from the base of the pole on which they were placed.

Five days following the placing of the tags, all of those that were revisited were still in place and remained as legible as when they were first set.

Penny Project by Kitty Huffman and Emilie Crewe

Find a penny,
Pick it up . . .
Then all day
You'll have good luck.













Penny Project:
How Far Does Bus Fare Take You in Steps?






This is a collaborative performance piece by Kitty Huffman and Emilie Crewe, titled, “Penny Project”. The work is based on ideas of leaving a trace, mapping steps, and the value of currency. Beginning at 1 State Street, a penny was dropped as the artists walked along the street. Each step was represented by one penny, eventually totaling $2.25, the amount equivalent to bus fare in Chicago.




As the trace was made, pedestrians picked up the pennies, cancelling out the gesture of mapping steps. Pennies are often thought of as good luck. The act of dropping pennies on the ground serves as an offering to the public. The piece ends with nothing left behind.

Systems and Constraint - Kitty Huffman

Project no.3

The assignment was to use the Public Transportation System as a means of structuring 7 texts. These texts will then provide a constraint, or a series of constraints for an in-class performance.

Sitting on the train I overheard someone's phone conversation. Hearing only one side of the dialog, I was wondering, can a text be understood even with half of the information provided.. Can we piece together the meaning of the original text?

I chose a film that is based on a traditional narrative structure and it is built from a dialog between a man a and a woman. The film is from 1990, a thriller called 'Misery' with the screenplay from a psychological horror novel by Stephen King.

In this video I composed we hear the male character's voice, all his lines from the movie Misery, infused with images of a train ride, suggesting that we overhear a phone conversation or someone's internal dialog.