5. Freewrite
On Friday I biked around my neighborhood and considered a few different ideas for my
installation/intervention.
Something to do with all the tree stumps? A piece that uses tiny people figures and plays
with scale, like Sinkachu? Little figures summitting the stump? I could just see all the kids
around making off with the pieces.
I could buy some carpet and cover over an empty tree square. Make a tiny soccer field?
I could weave streamers into the staircase and railings around the G-train entrance on Lafayette,
where tons of people go in and on on Marathon Sunday.
The triangle park where Greene Avenue crosses Fulton Streeet has a low fence with posts that
seem to end in juicers. I could halve a bunch of juiced lemon halves on them. Maybe put bottles
of lemonade at the base of each post and see if anybody takes them?
Then I biked home, stopping in front of the pay phone that is right outside my living room
window. Tada! I had my site.
At 6 a.m. on Sunday, I suddenly realized that there would be a cop on my exact corner all day,
redirecting traffic away from the Marathon, so I jumped out of bed, found some materials (dou-
ble sided tape, fabric ribbon, fabric-like crinkly paper, and some good quality Tiffany-Windows
wrapping paper from the Met), and ran out of the house.
Within five minutes of getting outside, a few cops appeared and positioned two of those blue
NYPD sawhorses on the other side of the intersection. With my head down and a hood on, I got
to work. Funnily enough someone had left a couch almost directly opposite the phone, which
gave me a convenient place to put my stuff. I hadn’t taken any measurements beforehand, so all
the measuring was eyeballed and the cutting was with kitchen scissors, on the fly.
During the thirty minutes it took me to decorate the payphone, I avoided all eyecontact with the
occasional dog walkers and runners who passed. (Though one did say, “Awesome!” I was en-
couraged.) Eventually the cop approached me. He was perfectly friendly, though I didn’t get any
awesomes out of him. “Do you do a lot of these? Just pay phones, or other things too. Are you
local? You know, the phone company might consider that grafitti. That’ll probably be on TV.”
I didn’t want to leave any traces, so I gathered up every scrap of paper and went back inside. We
have a few windows that look out onto the corner, so on and off all day I took photos and video.
I would say only about 20-30% of the people who passed the phone even noticed that it was
dressed up. Those who did seemed to enjoy it, kids especially. Many of the adults took pictures
on their cellphones.(The irony!) A few people checked to see if there wasa dial tone. (There was.)
A few times I went out and casually talked to people looking at it, pretending to have happened
upon it just like them. I was hoping to see what people’s interpretations of it were, but no one
was really analyzing it outloud.
Around 2 p.m., a woman had a very long conversation on the phone! It was so long, I left before
she hung up. She seemed completely unfazed by the installation.
By 3 p.m., the wind had loosed the curtains from their ribbon-ties. One man stopped and fixed
them, then took some pictures. That made me happy.
I was very pleasantly surprised how well my installation was received. It lasted through Monday
and most of Tuesday, though by 6 p.m. Tuesday someone had ripped off the curtains. The “wall-
paper” was slightly ripped, but overall in good shape, still.
I ended up feeling a weird kinship with my phone. I felt sort of sad that, despite all the attention
it received, it didn’t get any more use as a phone than before. (In fact, perhaps less. I wonder if a
man would have been as comfortable using it as that woman had seemed.) I was happy that lots
of people interacted with it and seemed to enjoy it, but mostly it was just a fun curiosity.
