Mel Chin, Coco Fusco, Jens Haaning, Michael Rakowitz

September-October, 2006
150 1st Avenue; 529 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn; and various locations throughout New York City
Image courtesy Creative Time

In addition to the provocative Who Cares dinner conversations and as part of Creative Time’s endeavor to investigate the contemporary dearth of socially-engaged art, four artists were commissioned to create public art projects which were presented in the Fall of 2006, a year after the dinners and around the time of the Who Cares book release. Political, acerbic, and witty, the projects included Mel Chin’s animated film comparing the histories of 9/11 in the United States, 2001, with 9/11 in Santiago, Chile, 1973, Coco Fusco’s multimedia performance about women’s role in the “War on Terror” (September 28-October 1, 150 1st Avenue), Michael Rakowitz’s temporarily reopened family import-export business from Brooklyn to Iraq (October 1-31, Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn), and Jens Haaning’s Arabic Joke, a traditional joke depicted on posters in Arabic and displayed throughout the city (various locations, October.)

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Hjalti Karlsson, Jan Wilker

September 4-September 10, 2006
Times Square, Madison Square Park, Chelsea, SoHo, Battery Park City, Coney Island
Image credit: Justin Ouellette

In search of an idea for the cover of Creative Time’s first major book celebrating thirty-three years of bringing art throughout New York City, the team of designers, Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker of karlssonwilker inc., conceived of a means to generate a cover that would capture the essence of the organization: a site-specific public art project called The Urban Visual Recording Machine (UVRM).

The UVRM was a set of equipment housed in a truck reminiscent of a “pope mobile” with its large Plexiglas windows. The machines in the truck were programmed to record the colors, volume of sound and voices, and weather (wind speed and direction, temperature, and humidity) of each individual location the truck traveled to for that moment in time. The data was instantly transcribed into an abstract visual representation of the environment, with graphic shapes and patterns created by the designers and Show & Tell Production, and printed out on-site with the time and date. Every thirty seconds for five days the truck visited locations of signature Creative Time projects: Times Square, Chelsea, the East Village, Coney Island, The Art Parade in Soho, and Lower Manhattan. Five thousand book covers, each capturing a moment in New York City, were instantaneously printed on-site, effectively bringing together new technology with artistic vision as part of Creative Time: The Book.

Michael Bevilacqua, B-Girlz presented by Martha Cooper, Dazzle Dancers, E. V. Day, Pia Dehne, Adam Dugas, David Ellis, Fischerspooner with Gareth Pugh, Micah Ganske, Os Gemeos, J.V.A. Flag Corporation, Taylor McKimmons, Ted Mineo, Muffin Head and Amber Ray, Julie Atlas Muz, Ara Peterson, Michael Portnoy, Steve Powers, Cristina Lei Rodriguez, Robert Snead, Bec Stupak, Three As Four, Momoyo Torimitsu, Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and others

September 9, 2006
West Broadway between Houston and Grand streets
Image credit: Justin Ouellette

Following the success of the inaugural Art Parade 2005, Creative Time, Deitch Projects, and Paper magazine teamed up again to bring New York City spectators The Art Parade 2006: a sometimes chaotic but always entertaining procession of floats, placards, portable sculptures, kites, performances, and street spectacles created by over seventy-five artists, performers, and designers.

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