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.

Read the rest of this entry »