(Above is one side of the banner I had installed in Nørre Snoede, Denmark, this summer, which then moved to Humlum. Reproduced below is the catalog essay I was asked to write for ET4U's 2013 Banner Project, installed in four rural coastal towns in western Denmark. See below essay for other side of the banner.)
Upon hearing that this year’s theme for ET4U’s innovative public art project now in its fifth year was “Wavy Banners,” I thought of ripples wind might make in fabric. Perhaps this year’s banners would be secured only along their tops, rather than on four corners, and left to flap in the wind. Such conjecture brought the entertaining thought of those strangely animated inflatable advertisements spasmodically seeking attention along the quiet streets of Humlum, Nörre Snede, Sdr. Nissum, and Vorgod-Barde, mostly in vain. Consistently commercial in nature, those nylon characters distract drivers from dense traffic amidst American strip mall blight, alternately deflating to the point of collapse before violently snapping back to attention, a cycle repeated as long as the power cord is plugged in.
Envisioning these mesmerizingly anthropomorphic dynamos along quiet streets in rural Denmark evoked an absurdity on par with the notion of spending lots of time and money affixing digital prints representing 51 international artists to lampposts in four Danish hamlets. How much energy can one justify expending to seek attention from a few people? Is it more or less significant to make and show work to a small number of people who might see it repeatedly rather than attempting to impact many for even the briefest of moments? Such questions are among those this project asks, and the ephemeral aspect of the project posits an answer by maximizing viewership through rotation between the lightly populated sites. Knowing that something will be present for a short time heightens the urgency potential viewers feel to investigate. Further, the public can tolerate something for a short time that it might protest being permanently installed.
The fleeting nature of these Wavy Banners–like a wave itself–encourage passersby to stop and pause long enough to receive the wave, which requires one to recognize or identify its source. Looking, and looking again, is the order of the day, which might lead us to remove real or metaphorical caps and scratch our heads, wondering: “where is that artist from who depicts a man with what look like gasoline containers tied to his legs that bog him down?” That particular banner reminded me to consider the lives and planet I am impacting every time I choose a car over a bicycle, or fail to carpool to work. Is Sumedh Rajendran's’s banner itself enough of a wave to pick me up and “beach” me somewhere else in terms of my use of fossil fuels? One cannot anticipate what leads us to change our behaviors or pass along to others what might shift their lives despite our own resistance to change.
Going back to first impressions before any banners yet waved, I was somewhat relieved to read in the fine print sent to participating artists this year that the concept of the “Wave” was “a quite open theme for free interpretation – ‘not only related to the water-waves.’” I considered cycles and repetition, directing me back to the basis of my work for the past eight years – our “to do” lists, and how their contents never seem to abate. Waves of tasks advance upon us, sometimes washing over us, and we [try to] keep acting, even in the face of the knowledge we simply can’t “do it all.”
Sometimes our work loads ebb, but more often they flow, so I decided to use the banner’s two sides to share my own then current “to do” list, which contained the very items that kept me from delivering my digital files on time, a sort of mea culpa that might offer a permission slip for others to reflect on what is on their plates, even as they walk past (and perhaps ignore) the banner in their hurry to meet friends, mail a letter, pick up some groceries, or take a walk during which the banners might offer a welcome distraction from difficult economic times to some while representing infuriatingly “frivolous” use of resources to others. Regardless of how one perceives the project overall or what kind of “meet and greet” is received from the snippets of information each banner holds, individually and collectively they set off “waves” in the form of conversations, inspiration, curiosity, ideas for use of public structures, and other forms of energy that will continue rippling outward in ways one cannot anticipate.
Despite my failure to submit my files on time, I still dared to show my face in Denmark, eager to witness the banner phenomenon. I was also curious about the remarkable people who committed significant time to orchestrating this multi-media extravaganza of site-specific public art commissions, a word I use because in contrast with so many exhibitions, there were stipends for each participating artist. Because artists so often pay to exhibit work, this project deserves kudos for supporting artists around the globe while bringing their work to Danish streets not in culture-filled Copenhagen, but rather along rural highways where tractor drivers and bicyclists are among the most frequent viewers, and where school children and home-owners alike simply have to walk a few feet from spaces where they spend the bulk of their time to have their minds bent a bit by images, ideas, and texts presenting many different visual and verbal languages. The efforts involved in getting these sums of money to each artist were likely among the most time consuming aspects, but each of those stipends is a “wave” of recognition of what it takes to make art--to stay open and responsive to the world, and to set aside the time to create despite the many demands of life and the day jobs that most of us have to have to keep power flowing to our computers and refrigerators.
And why work so hard? Because who knows how a school child might be affected by seeing Ellen Hyldemose’s image of a wavy potato chip (or BØlge chip, in the artist’s native Danish) floating through space one banner down from India’s Tushar Joag’s world in which one cartoon character waves his allegiance to another atop Nelson Mandela, who offers a fist bump. All the while the Statue of Liberty emerges from Mahatma Gandhi’s seventh chakra, waving her torch adjacent to the beckoning cat, or Maneki-neko, a welcoming Japanese figurine considered good luck, and whose paw is often motorized to wave slowly but surely.
Like the Maneki-neko, this year’s Wavy Banners emitted greetings, while simultaneously asking questions through numerous forms, pastiches of cross-cultural collage being just one of myriad approaches too numerous to mention. That potential energy met eyes and minds that may or may not have been ready to receive them. The hope involved in sharing artwork with an audience that did not set out to see art is an inspiring form of community building I am grateful to have been able to contribute to as well as witness first hand thanks to the generosity of the inimitable Klaus Weiss and Karen Havskov-Weiss, the masterminds behind ET4U!