You can't always vend what you want

12/29/2007
Socrates Sculpture Park Proposal
Status: Rejected

To Whom It May Concern:

This project is submitted for your consideration as a proposal for all three of Socrates’ available awards. I wish to re-purpose a vending machine, like the kind that you see for the dispensing of snacks, for the distribution of a catalogue depicting several works that are the result of a collaborative project directed by myself.
The project is this: I will contact other artists, one at a time, to accompany me on a walk around New York or a neighboring area, perhaps even limiting the area to Long Island City. The location can be chosen by either person individually or together. While on the walk the artists pick up articles and objects they find that interest them en route and save them. Once the walk is completed the artists collaboratively assemble the objects and articles they’ve picked to create a work of art that is sculptural by nature. I’m tentitively calling these sculptures “constitutionals”.
The catalogue of these projects will have photos of the assemblages accompanied by a map detailing the route taken and any notes or comments about the conversation or ideas had between the other artist and myself. The catalogues will be printed in different sizes and shapes using an online publisher and be placed inside the vending machine for public purchase. The cost of each book will be equivalent to the cost of its production, and the money will be used to print a replacement. The machine, which retails at $2,599.00 is 72" High, 33" Wide, 27.5" Deep and approximately 375 Pounds, will be equiped with some type of attatched roof for weatherproofing. The sides of the machine may be equiped with shelving to display some or all of the sculptures in the catalogue.
A variety of issues surface with this project. I’m not interested in commenting on the comodification of art, or the ubiquitous “market”. This project is more about questioning the nature of sculpture, exhibition, presentation/display, distribution, and accessibility. It is about turning articles used for the collection of capital, in the case of the vending machine, into instruments of socialism. And articles of detritus, in the case of the found “trash” for the sculptures, into instruments of beauty that are a representation of a collective effort. This project could be considered a bit dangerous when words like “socialism” and “collectivism” are used to describe it, but I also think that those two words are precisely what America and American art could do with a little more of.
I’m very excited about this project and it can only be completed with the help of organizations like Socrates. I hope you find it exciting too; and let me know if you feel like going for a walk.

Sincerely,

Ryan Sullivan


The images below are two "constitutionals" created in this way. The collaborator is Thuridur Ros Sigurthorsdottir.

After this proposal was submitted I was pleased to find some information supporting the idea.
In a click opera entry of 2/20/2008 Nick Currie talks about "Strollology". An apparently legitimate science of walking. He found this on Wikipedia:

'German Wikipedia tells me that strollology is a perfectly serious science founded by the late political economist, sociologist, art historian and planning theorist Lucius Burckhardt in the 1980s at the University of Kassel. Also called Spaziergangswissenschaft (knowledge about moving through space), it deals with human perception and its feedback into planning and building.

"We are conducting a new science," Burckhardt explained to Hans-Ulrich Obrist in the preface to his book Why is Landscape Beautiful? "It's founded on the idea that the environment is normally not perceived, and if it is, it tends to be in terms of the observer's preconceived ideas. The classic walk goes to the city limits, the hills, the lake, the cliffs. But walkers also traverse parking lots, suburbs, settlements, factories, wastelands, highway intersections on their way to meadows, moors, farms. Coming home, when the walker tells what he has seen he tends to speak only of the forest and the lake, the things he set out to see, the things he read about, had geographical knowledge of, or saw in brochures and pictures. He leaves out the factory and the dump. Strollology deals not only with these prefabricated ideal images, but with the reality they eliminate." '

Even though I know that applying for things is a crap shoot I still get that "what wasn't good enough? What am I doing wrong?" feeling when those rejection letters come back. I feel like this project is interesting and challenging. Am I the only one aside from a few friends that feels this way?
The older you get the more you begin to realize that the social constructs you experienced in high school never really go away. Cliques are a part of human nature. As a social species we need each other. But we only really need a certain amount of each other. Cliques are a kind of mental utopia. And that utopia can contain as many or as few as desired, as long as everyone is thinking in a similar manner. A letter of rejection can make you feel like the kid no one wants to sit by at lunch. This is amplified when "lunch" is the art world and the kids are all other artists. Weren't we the ones everyone thought was weird? Now we are turning around and doing it to each other?
That's how I felt at first, but now I know better. It's naive to think that being creative is equal to being alienated. But I think ultimately success comes down to how many people would want to "take a walk" with you.