By Ann Wiens
They loiter on street corners all over the city. Occasionally alone, but frequently huddled in pairs or groups of three, four, a dozen.
Sometimes tidy and well kept, more often a bit disheveled, hinting at past abuses. They vie for our attention as we pass, most of them begging for our pocket change: The Chicago Tribune. USA Today. The New York Times. Newcity. The Chicago Sun-Times. La Raza. Today's Chicago Woman. Extra! The Employment Guide. Chicago Social.
Most of us walk by dozens of them every day without a thought, selectively noticing them when we need a news fix: the bright red box on Wednesdays, the white one in the morning if we have an urge to read Kass reviling "Da Mare," blue if we're yearning for Sneed's latest "scoop." But over the past two and a half years, you may have stumbled across an unusual addition to this street-corner crowd, an unexpected feature in this untidy landscape of objects that, for all their efforts to grab our attention, tend to fade into the everyday clutter of the city streets. Boxes that dispense not news or apartment listings, but ideas.
The first gray, plastic Dispensing With Formalities boxes hit the streets of Chicago in the summer of 1997. Initiated and largely self-funded by artist Brett Bloom, the series has included more than two dozen projects by a variety of artists and activist groups. Boxes have been placed in neighborhoods all over the city, as well as in Champaign-Urbana; Bratislava, Slovakia; and as of last week, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Individual projects have had runs from as short as two days (a poster created by the Vancouver-based organization Adbusters, which urged post-Thanksgiving Michigan Avenue shoppers to observe International Buy Nothing Day) to as long as eight months (a box installed across the street from the Urbana courthouse for nearly a year now, which the Danish collaborative N55 stocks every two weeks with twenty pounds of fresh potatoes). Each has its own artistic or political agenda -- some overt, others humble. What they share, however, is a desire to thoroughly democratize art, not only to take it out of the decorous confines of the museum and gallery, but to remove it from the art context entirely.
"I worked at the Museum of Contemporary art as a security guard for a month," says Bloom. "People came mainly to laugh, because they didn't have access to what they were looking at. When they know it's art, it sets up barriers." With Dispensing with Formalities (DwF), Bloom and his collaborators are able to present art outside of that context, to give viewers an opportunity to come across works that may shake up their perceptions of the world around them -- the goal, on a level, of all artworks -- without the preconceptions or trepidation that many feel when approaching a rarefied art object. "I have Utopian leanings," Bloom acknowledges. "I have a belief that art is a tool for social change, in that it allows a certain questioning coupled with human creativity that no other discipline does."
To this end, Bloom wanted a distribution method for artworks that would reach as large and diverse an audience as possible, an audience far broader than might visit an exhibition space. He initially explored using vending machines, but settled on the dispenser boxes when the former proved too costly. To date, about a dozen DwF boxes have been put into service; four have disappeared without a trace. Projects have included Laurie Palmer's hand-pumped drinking water dispenser, Stephanie Brooks' sets of "good" and "bad" stickers, Piper Rothan's cardboard license plates reading "IM4ART," bars of soap with handcuff keys concealed inside by D.O.C. (a collaboration between artist Michael Piazza and two former Cook County Juvenile Detention Center inmates), and Jacqueline Terrassa's hand-sewn tissue holders, among many others.
The format has been a natural one for Chicago artist Marc Fischer, whose fifth booklet for DwF is currently available both in Copenhagen (where self-serve dispensers are not a normal element of the city streetscape, making the 25 DwF boxes installed this month a far less subtle insertion than they are here) and at the northwest corner of Monroe and Wabash (through late November). For DwF, Fischer has produced pocket-sized booklets that gather simple, black-and-white images into visually provocative groupings. The booklets complement other ongoing projects of the artist's, including a series of moral-lesson tracts that perfectly mimic those given away by religious groups. Fischer has also infiltrated non-DwF dispensers, designating them "Charity Deposit Boxes" with signs urging passersby to contribute such "desperately needed" items as "juggling sets for fun-loving people" and "10 CDs for the price of 1 with no obligation to buy more ever."
Both Fischer and Bloom agree that an important aspect of the project is its gentle approach to the audience -- participation is entirely voluntary; the work is never "in your face." The issue of authorship is decidedly secondary as well. The works are not marketed as art or to an art crowd, and reach viewers largely anonymously, their effect and fate seldom known, and the artists receive no payment or even feedback for their efforts, all of which flies in the face of the established art-distribution systems. Bloom also discounts the importance of "newness" and the ownership of ideas. He notes that his is not the first dispenser art project ever, and hopes that others will "steal" his project and spread it to other cities.
"I would like this to become a widespread, alternative method of distribution for ideas," he says. With DwF now active in Denmark and plans underway to extend it to Japan, Brooklyn, Miami, and anyplace else with the interest and energy, those rows of street-corner dispensers may deserve more focused attention.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.