A WORK IN PUBLIC SPACE BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN, PRODUCED BY DIA ART FOUNDATION NEW YORK
LOCATED AT FOREST HOUSES, THE BRONX - NEW YORK CITY, SUMMER 2013
This week was a really fabulous week, which began and ended with drawing in a new
way (vertically) with new materials: Sumi ink and spray paint. Ink is a really beautiful
material that lends a visual and emotional weight to an image and I think it’s really
great to see how the kids’ pictures in ink compare with those in markers or tempera
paint. We also began with ink this week as preparation for the spray paint. Though
the two media are seriously different in terms of application and effect, they are
similar in that they are both hard to control, graphic, and not usually trusted in
the hands of little people. The ink, I think, is still a little confusing to many
of the kids: it looks like paint, but doesn’t move like paint, and the lines look
like marker, but it’s applied with a brush. Most of the kids love spray paint because
it is fast and something of a taboo. One child, Adam, comes in every single day asking
if we can do graffiti.
The rest of the week was filled with activities of all kinds. A group of 4-5 year
olds visited from the Forest Early Learning Center and we made animal masks (spotty
cat masks). For one super intensive day we talked about De Kooning, as a way to make
a bridge between expression, line, and form. On this day we made still lives and
transcriptions of some abstract De Kooning paintings. A few days later we talked
about painter Mark Bradford and made collages. The next day we watched the classic
video of a kinetic sculpture, The Way Things Go, by Fischli and Weiss and constructed
our own Rube Goldberg like sculpture, which was a failure as a functional object,
but a total success as a work of art. Somehow there was time to make recycled paper
and the end of this very hot week came with graffiti/murals and some popsicle stick
huts that we made when we were too hot to do anything but glue sticks together.
TEXTS