Ideas for submission

SO I have been thinking about what my proposal should be.

I can we "use" the Art on Call project to our advantage. Considering that we are not a DC school, and almost none of us is a DC resident, it might be very hard.

However, since the call boxes project is basically a "recycling" project, perhaps it would be interesting to use recycled material to reinvent the boxes. They would become art themselves.. maybe with recycled glass or clay pieces, the boxes can be the canvas for a mosaic. The recycled material could be provided by DC tourists, or DC people, so that the work would be as much theirs as ours. We would have to discuss logistics. During my research I realized that much of the material that is used to fix the boxes comes from specific vendors. In our case, we would not need a locksmith or a professional painting company, because the refurbishing of the boxes would be entirely done by us.

This still needs some thinking!

More Photos from earlier travels

In order :

1-Mt. Pleasant. This is one of Michael's Sculptures. They can also be found int he Kalorama neighborhood.

2-Dupunt Circle. Very graphic and informative. The layout is the same in all the boxes, I mentioned in an earlier post about the number at the top being the original identification number.

3- Dupont Circle again.

4-Eastern market. My smile after a day of useless search. I could NOT find any call box.. this was next to the metro I was about to take to go home :-)

5, 6, 7, 8 e 9- Eastern market again. Front and back. The art work here is a bit more authentic (for all it means)

Walking Up and Down the city.. not only call boxes

DC holds a lot of street art. We should appreciate more!

http://www.welovedc.com/2011/07/21/a-true-adams-morgan-original/

Glover Park

Charles Glover Sculpture in a Call box which becomes the frame of the relief

Last Saturday I was on my way back from my Batala rehearsal and I stopped in the Glover Park area to walk around the Arts on Call there. Underneath is a quick map that can be found on their neighborhood association's website. All of the boxes are painted dark green with gold highlights. I noticed that many of the "theme" colors for the project include a main color and a highlight, however the original call boxes were designed to only have one color (blue for the police boxes and red for the fire fighter boxes). It is interesting and it speaks to the natural human instinct of spirit of emulation.

One of the boxes in glover park represents a map of the neighborhood's important building. This underscores the similarities between the way these boxes are used and the informative panels around the city.

The site underlines a very important point: "note how many times you have walked right by them without even knowing they were there. We would like that to change."

I wonder if that really changed. Perhaps in the future I could work on an interview/survey to figure out if something did change in people's awareness.

Sticky Man

Sticky Man is a street artist that adds his little robot-like figures all over cities. Like for many other street artists, his image/figure became his "signature". As I mentioned in an earlier post, some of the call boxes have this kind of genuine and "free" art in them, and maybe this makes the boxes more fascinating (from and artistic point of view) than many of the other works. However, even the sticky men are "reproductions". They are not per-se "original"...

Finally a few images | National Cherry Blossom

Finally I am able to upload some of the images from my DC call boxes tours.

My Camera is still in the repair shop, so all these images come from a friend's iphone.

This first series is taken from the Call Boxes that are down by the museums and run straight down by the water. The boxes are all refurbished and painted blue and pink. Their "theme" is the cherry blossoms and representations in honor of the festival as well as the Mall in general. The artist that painted the original work is Thomas Chesterfield. The work, as the plaque explains, was originally painted in 1990, and was later used for this call box. It is then a reproduction of the work itself. This questions the value of the work, and the value of reproductions or re-creation, which was a very heated argument in modern art.

The plaque in the back serve as explanation of the work and give a little background, very much like the museum tags do. This is something that perhaps can be kept in the my proposal.

Noticing the boxes

Since I started this project, I decided to talk about it with many people. The more I talk about it, the more I understand what the real purpose of the project is. What am I trying to accomplish? People have different opinion and give me various insights on the boxes.

Most of the people I talked to have never noticed them, now the cannot avoid them. Maybe this is the point. The boxes need to be noticed. As of right now the most fascinating part of this research is the stories behind Arts on Call. Reading about the people they portray, or the history of the neighborhoods. As I mentioned in the past blogs, it seems that the value of the project as an informative piece rather than an "artwork" is much higher.

There is no doubt that is in some sort a form of Public Art. However, they hold a similar position in the public-art-spectrum as the informative panel (the "you are here" and "what's to see in this area" ones) which, from a design prospective, are well done and worth to notice.

It is interesting how people with a different background, react differently to my explanation of what I am trying to do. The artsy-people find more interesting works such as the Mount Pleasant's sculptures. Historians like something like in Dupont or Tenlytown. Perhaps the variety offered, makes the project even more interesting.

People in the DC tourism field push the idea of creating "walking tours" related to each neighborhood through the position of the call boxes, an interesting project, but not for its artistic significance.

Some of the work is already coming apart. One of the Dupont Circle Box is pealing off and it is rusting. So the risk is that the boxes will fall into disuse again soon.

What is the solution?

Could the empty boxes become the frame to see the city from, and the city become the artwork? After all is a very constructed city.

What if the boxes themselves became the art rather than the frame for artworks or informational design work? They could become a blank canvas for visiting artists and local artists alike. It still needs some thinking. And talking. And seeing.