Day Three – Thursday 4th June: Timelapse and Notes

I had not even been at Locksmith long enough to click on the timelapse before Keg arrived. In the first frame of the timelapse she is crouched on the floor arranging the puzzle pieces into a two-way arrow.

Before that we had taken the couch off the top of Zanny’s class’ aftermodern sculpture. Keg said the stack was making her uncomfortable and we quickly decided to give the room its second domestic iteration. So strong was our will for domesticity that we even swept up the floor, but instead of throwing out the swept pile, we put it in a drawer in the sideboard cabinet which we placed against the opposite wall from where Astrid and Alba had placed it in the first domestic iteration. Since this was a collaborative composition many of our ideas were discussed and the timelapse contains numerous frames of us consulting with each other about the positioning of certain objects. We seemed to be thinking along similar lines because it all happened very easily and without disagreement. We both liked the idea of open space in the middle of the room, with only the carpet, perhaps because it was the inverse of the teetering stack that we encountered when we arrived. Keg pointed out that with the massage table standing up on its back legs, kinked in the middle, it looked some frightening creature bucking. And the table-creature duly obliged when we tried to move it, jumping back and snapping its jaws. Partly because of their number, and partly because Kaprow singles them out in his Points of View text, the chairs were difficult compositional units. In the end we stacked the yellow ones in one corner and the brown in another, with vague ideas about some kind of diagonal offset, but really we just wanted them out of the way so we could make an open space. The massage table went on the wall opposite the sideboard and Keg’s two-way arrow was swept up as a result. I asked her before I destroyed it but she didn’t have the slightest preciousness about it. As a Push and Pull veteran (she went to a re-enactment in New York in 2006) she is totally down with the ephemerality, and this was the first of a few carefully composed pieces she made that were quickly disturbed by changing circumstances. We put away as many things as we could in the sideboard but there were still many objects (like all the accumulated pieces of wood) that had no really obvious placement in a domestic scene, so we just had to hide it away neatly in corners. A great deal of the stuff in the room had come from the wooden warehouse that Keg lives in, known as The Barn, and there are so many objects owned by so many people crammed into all the spaces of The Barn that it is, as Keg said, a permanent Push and Pull. Nothing gets chucked out because even though its been sitting there for 6 months, apparently so and so still wants it. Actually, Keg’s partner Lucas had seen the record players and the massage table on the timelapse and was disappointed that she had taken them. I know people who would literally go insane if they had to live in a situation of clutter like that. Hilik came by on his motorcycle and was excited about the project. He said he had been telling everyone and was planning to do something else soon. Frank from next-door came in for his customary quick hello. After we’d finished composing our open interior we rewarded ourselves with a juice from the fruit shop.

After the juice I left to drive to my friend Deni’s house to pick up his Foosball table which I think he got from Freecycle. The timelapse shows that Keg spent this time by getting the books down from the shelf and arranging them on the carpet like you would a house of cards. Many of the books were too flimsy in the spine and so it took many goes before the stack held up. She then ate a carrot and flicked through the Push and Pull folder that the Kaprow Estate had sent us. Then Sarah Goffman arrived, shortly followed by her friend Lisa Andrew and they quickly got to playing in the space. A couple more women arrived and this was how the space was peopled when I returned with Deni and the foosball table. When I was studying the timelapse frame by frame I was almost annoyed at how pleasant things had been in my absence. Because for me the journey to get the foosball table was an exasperating experience of time, with the frustrations of traffic, the awkwardness of the foosball table, bad navigational decisions and running out of credit to ring Keg to tell her I was late. So I arrived back at Locksmith a bit flustered but Keg had not even noticed that I was late. How drastically different our experiences of the last half an hour had been! The foosball table was immediately set up in the middle of the room and Keg and Deni christened it. The table has a quirk befitting Push and Pull. At some point in its life it has been left out in the weather and so the flat surface on which the ball rolls has been warped and contains little hills and valleys that the ball rolls through as it moves across the field. This adds a wonderful topographical dimension to the play in that not only are you scrambling to co-ordinate which levers to maneuver to try and get the ball where you want it, but you are also having to take into account the terrain which diverts a perfectly good pass to one of your own players into the path of your opponent.

Deni had to go home and study and Keg also wandered off to the other places she had on her itinerary. Sarah and Lisa had by now warmed right into the space and were busy moving around, adding and altering in various ways. Lisa drew a penis-gun on the wall and from it’s barrel-tip came a piece of blue string which then wrapped around the legs of the massage table that had been flipped upside down. Sarah had brought a miniature model of a lounge-room on the opening night, and her denim-wearing friend (who I think is Jane Polkinhorn) who had arrived used the tree, some elastic and a part of the record player to make a little scene. Sarah came up with a display solution for the pieces of wood that Keg and I had piled in a corner. Lisa also made a nice chain of pages from the fairy tales book that was hung on the roof using a coat hanger. Sarah and Lisa were the last visitors of the day and they left having added many small and well-crafted pieces to the space. The last frame of the timelapse is, once again, of me carrying the ladder towards to camera.