Project Description
Project Presentation
These images- one for each day- along with the project statement, site location map are presented as photographs.
Another mode of presentation would be as a slide projection- with either a single 35mm projector or digital projector sequencing through the entire series of images or with five separate projections- one for each day- throughout the gallery space.
The projectors should be placed on the floor with the projections sized at about 36 x 48" lined up on the wall in order (days 1-5).
Project Statement
During the month of March in 2002 I placed five ads in the LA Weekly’s “Chance Meetings” section of the Personal ads. Normally, these ads are placed by people who are looking to reconnect with someone, usually a stranger, they had already seen or met by chance. The aim of my ads was the opposite: to encourage a random meeting with strangers. The woman at the Weekly was hesitant to place my ad. She seemed suspicious but couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong with the whole thing. The fact that I was putting myself out on the street seemed to be an issue. “You’ll be standing on the corner?” she wanted to confirm. “Yeah, I’ll be on the corner.” “And who do you expect to meet?” “Anyone,” I said, pointing out that the ad did not reveal the gender of the person placing the ad. Finally, after informing me that it was not the Weekly’s policy to encourage chance meetings, she agreed to place my ads.
The ads appeared in the LA Weekly over five consecutive weeks. The ads read as follows:
FEBRUARY 28- “STARS AT NOON: I will be on the N/E corner of Hollywood Bl Curson on Saturday March 2nd at noon.”
MARCH 7- “STARS AT NOON: I will be on Harper Av between Fountain and Delongpre on Monday March 11th at 10:15am.”
MARCH 14- “STARS AT NOON: I will be on Rosewood just East of Crescent Heights on Friday March 15th at 7:30am.”
MARCH 21- “STARS AT NOON: I will be on the S/W corner of LaBrea and Rosewood on Tuesday March 26th at 4:30pm.”
MARCH 28- “STARS AT NOON: I will be on the N/E corner of Fountain Av and Orange Dr on Sunday March 31st at 1:45pm.”
The five locations were determined by drawing a five-pointed star over the map of Hollywood, with my own home at the center. The specific days were chosen randomly, though they are all in March, the last day, March 28, was also Easter Sunday.
On each day, at the appointed time, I went to the designated site where I waited for about an hour. No one ever showed up who said they had seen the ad, although there were a number of cars that seemed to slow down, the drivers peering at me. Whether these people had seen the ad and came by to check me out, I’ll never know, though I suspect maybe one or two had. I did occasionally interact with random passersby, though this was rare. LA is not a city that has a lot of pedestrian traffic. On March 21 I did have a nice conversation with a young African-American woman who admired my light-blue pin-striped bell-bottomed suit.
The work was as much an interaction with the city as with the people. The city becomes a backdrop for an activity that is equal parts artifice and event- a fantasy that yearns to be realized. A daydream. An impossibility. A wished-for transformation in which we seek that one moment, that one encounter, that will forever change not only our lives but our very identities.
What happens when we make a spectacle of ourselves? When our private desires go public? When we bear, not only our hearts, but our asses for all to see? Stars at Noon was in part an homage to those individuals I’ve seen over the years around LA that troll the streets in ragged finery, their make-up smeared and a crazed yearning in their eyes that says “pick me up, do something to me.” Like the skinny, worn man with a mullet on the corner of Sunset and Highland with the words “Ladies Only” hopelessly scrawled in magic marker on his bony chest . Or the heavy-set black guy in the alley behind Aron’s Records wearing only light blue jockey shorts, his face painted to match. Or the fat, barefoot woman in a wheel-chair who miraculously lifts herself up and ambles over to your car when you stop at a red-light. For these people the sidewalk is both a stage and a killing floor and the line dividing street theater from a riot is rather thin.
Like many of these shut-ins who miraculously appear on busy corners, my assumed alter ego, Mr. Blonde, exists ambiguously between a number of acute stereotypes. Equal parts pimp and hustler, he takes as much as he proposes to give. A private detective, he’s both undercover and exposed. He’s a wanna-be that skipped directly to has-been. A dirty man that’s all washed-up, he’s simultaneously down-on-his-luck and in the midst of a reversal of fortune. In the end, however, the presence of the photographer cast me more in the role of a model than anything else and the entire piece became a kind of bizarre anti-fashion shoot.
The basic goal was to simply put myself out there. I really didn’t know what would happen, though I suspected nothing much would. It was a token offering, a way of making myself “available” and visible in a city where “public” space is virtually non-existent and to be on the street is always a suspect, oftentimes criminalized activity. My five little corners, staked out and occupied for just an hour here and there, became for me a kind of “free zone” where something outside the dominant social order could potentially take place. This potentiality, the proposition inherent in it, is the crux of the work.
