300 Pounds of Foam
PHP: Let’s talk about your most recent piece, the Aberrant Sidewalk.
KH: That was such a much more massive piece.
PHP: What was that made of?
KH: It’s carved foam. But it does weigh about 300 pounds and comes apart in sections.
I’m really happy about the reactions that it’s been getting. With both projects I’ve been impressed with how much the general public gets nuances of meaning. I think that most people think that modern and contemporary art is something that they can’t understand. But if there’s a humorous element to the work, and you ask the right questions like “What does this make you think of”, or “Why do you think this is here”, you’ll access great thoughts that people wouldn’t voluntarily come up and tell you.
With the Tubisms, which was situated in Times Square and near the Whitney, I really saw the difference between art people and non-art people more. Though not exclusively, people in the art neighborhoods like Chelsea were more likely to think theoretically and would assume that there was a concept that they needed to figure out—“ I think it’s a piece about security” or “It’s definitely a piece about global warming”. People in Times Square were much more literal in their interpretations—“It’s an air-conditioning vent”, “It’s crushed cigarettes”. Things like that. One artist called it “invasive and absurd”.
PHP: Invasive and absurd. Perfect!
KH: With the Aberrant Sidewalk my favorite comment was from this man in the Bronx who said “It’s a tidal wave of emotion.” Another man talked to one of my Aberrant Tracking Society Members for about half an hour and we distilled it down to a sentence: “This is what it’s like when I don’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and I start using drugs again.”
PHP: I was wondering when I read that if that was a glib comment, or if it was real.
KH: It was real, and he went on for a long time about it and how when he was sober his life was like a straight sidewalk but that when he would start doing drugs again it would get all jumbled.
PHP: Did anyone think that the sidewalk had actually exploded?
KH: Yes. Though not many, I think in part because the actors that I had playing aberration trackers looked very campy in their Aberration Tracking Society lab coats with their official seals. The “scientists” weren’t allowed to ever say that it was an art project and they improvised off of a script that I put together. So they would present this as “We think the mass anxiety of the population over the economic crisis is actually causing our infrastructure to buckle and shift. We’re worried about it. Why do you think this has happened? Have you seen this anywhere else?”
A couple of people were like “Really? Wait this just happened today?” And they’d always go around the block and come back and ask “So this just happened? Really?” About 1% of the population could not wrap their brains around the idea that someone could be telling them something that wasn’t true.
