RSS SPIRIT

Can you spot the performance art?






You dash out to Kinkos, for finding Kinkos is the first grail, or cremaster moment as they say in hermaphrodartistic parlance. Enter the street to warm weather, windy but does that mean storm later? Appearances, apparitions and appurtenances appear without meaning or foresight. You pray, quietly as you walk, but are interrupted by something pretty waiting for a light. You will wait many lights before the day is through.

Scheming and wheeling dealing on the crossroads of bridges dumping cabs down past huddled walkers ignoring the news ticker and bad public art. So much bad public art. But that is a fight for another cremaster series, or grail quests, as these art works are alternatively known. You must find a Kinkos. To do that a question must be posed to a man bearing a Virgin Mega Store logo. He points the way. Into a hotel you enter. And stop.

Another life, another ecology. Black people in a cozy but abundant lobby. Black people in mustard suits. Black people sitting at marble tables, granite wheels in rows. Black person getting his shoes shined. A central American lady shines them. She knows where the Kinkos is.

Kinkos costs too much money and is overheated with the stuffy afterburn of handouts. Agendas, musical selections and color schemes are distributed to conference goers in the grand old hotel. The place has that old magic; a notepad and pen by the pay phone. It feels like hushed negotiations in wallpapered shadows and rich girls who haunt the place.

A conceptual roundabout appears on the street that leads from the hotel to library. For what is modern art if not high concept? Picture this: a guy is walking the street of the city, and he thinks up this performance art piece about stereotypes. The twist is, in the piece a guy walks the streets and sees the opposite of every stereotype imaginable. Such as - a sexy librarian, a friendly white guy, a teenage girl who does not answer her cell phone, a bum who tries to give people walking by something, and so forth.

Of course in this meta age (sublimely nuanced in this piece) you are thinking up this conceptual piece while walking and then actually see a scene of this performance in real life. It is a bum on a long row of bums by that unused park and the library. There is this bum and he, that is she, dispenses blessings to passers-by. There seems to be no cost for these blessings.

"God bless you," she says first to one direction of pedestrian, then another, then to you.

You know you have received a real blessing but feel vaguely uneasy about the free part. Uncertainly into the library you enter. Here odd shaped locals must be surpassed on the escalator. You ascend 7 escalators, past the long line to use the internet, and arrive at books with no waiting. Good ones are found. Hardcovers, the best way to read.

Check out, go up the street, under the tracks and over a river bridge. The five-o-clock whistlers herd into the train shed. You find a windy warm stretch that feels like multiple springs, layered sediment of sentiment. Yet not debilitating - a resolution, a moment of beauty. Two women lean against the wind. A wet grey smell wafts past. You run after it like a grail, or if you wish, a cremaster cycle of bundled life that lurches longingly to light.

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