creative time

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I’ve been reading The Book by Creative Time, a LONG running (33yrs) public arts organisation based in New York - it is amazing!

Here are some quotes:

FROM THE SURPRISE CHAPTER

“Creative Time’s old motto, “art where you least expect it,” points to the organisation’s love of creating profound experiences through unexpected encounters with art in unusual places. Chance encounters with art can sartle audiences into pausing during their daily drive from place to place, errand to errand, home to worka nd back again. Once they pause, no matter how momentary, the experience is invariably uplifting; it’s our belief that the unusual encounter is also the positive, meaningful encounter.”188 (Anne Pasternak)
“surprise is a powerful tool for disarming people” 189 (Anne Pasternak)
“Whether commuters responded with delight or even confusion, they took the time to stop, pause and engage with their surroundings anew, revealing the power of art to generate more creative and dynamic daily experiences. Perhaps when the art was gone, it promoted a longing for more surprises.” 189 (Anne Pasternak)

“Nonmonumental public art aspires differently. It infiltrates matchbooks, deli cups, milk cartons, 900 numbers; it lurks in classified ads and abandoned buildings; pops up online, on billboards and radio shows. Audience members hustling past such art on their way to work might easily ignore its existence. Its arthood flares into being only when the passerby chooses to engage.” 190 (Frances Richard)

“As an art praxis, surprise is less like the commemorative statesman oxidising on his plinth, and more like the garden in which the statue stands. Rather than fix an unambiguous symbol to consolidate spectatorship, surprise makes a frame to contextualise roaming contemplation. Its purpose is not to relieve the viewer of the pressures of 360 degree perception, but to submerge her more deeply in them, to jostle the percipient into consciousness by bringing him face to face with meaning in apparent overwhelm. Inside, outside, on purpose or by accident, surprise designates a galvanic act of attention that disrupts settled distinctions and leads the observer to experience how the like and unlike mix. Surprise is the mild face of the uncanny.” 191 (Frances Richard)

“Surprise, then, is a name for what happens when the perceiving subject wakes up in the liminal zone where contraries touch without collapsing, in the live minute where presuppositions shift.” 91 191 (Frances Richard

“Art should impinge on the daily life of everyone and should be injected into the daily prime-time work-time… [people] are ready for the kind of public art that uses the entire city as a performance space. 191 (quoting Mierle Laderman Ukeles - www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/1984/Transfer?Transfer.htm)

(more from other chapters later)

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