Portal 5, Expression. The Joker.

Perola and I have begun painting Portal 5 of the 13 Portals project. The number 5 represents expression, language, technology, and the Fool from the Tarot, (The Joker) who experiments and toys with reality. At first for Portal 5 Perola and I were thinking about painting a big machine. When Perola suggested painting the Joker in the center of the Portal I was delighted with the idea. Maybe it is because I can relate a lot to the Joker. 

Perola’s sketch for the Joker. Reference taken from a photo of our genius friend Zel Nonnemberg, a filmmaker, and visual artist.

We begin Portal 5, collaging books and even money onto the fabric. This Portal is sure to have some tricks behind it. Look closer.

I have always loved jokes, pranks and magic tricks. As a child, my first victim was my brother. We were always together. Sometimes in perfect adventurous harmony and sometimes in all-out-battle against each other. This always involved pranks or some kind of sibling sabotage. One of us would often end up locked out of the house, locked into a closet, drenched in water, unknowingly covered in colorful marker or in the most extreme case, running to the bathroom due to dangerously delicious chocolate Exlax s’mores. 

The joking continued at school and especially in various summer camps, where, with proper retaliation from my foes the pranks were raised to new levels. One summer at Interlochen (School/Camp for the Fine Arts) I led my cabin crew in a revenge attack against our counselor after she removed and hid the doors to our bathroom stalls. She laughed and laughed as we spent hours looking for those doors. For that prank, the price would be high. We gathered one night to plot our counterblow.

We had it all planned. She would return late that Friday night after going out and upon return would encounter a linear chain of unfortunate events. First we switched the door knob with the cabin next to ours so that her key wouldn’t work to unlock the door.

We predicted that her next move would be to try to climb in the window, which we left cracked. Just inside the window we tied together a mass of strings creating a large web that would prove challenging to penetrate. The web was full of booby traps. We tied some of the strings to cups of water which we perched carefully on top of the rafters. She would make it inside, but not without getting wet! Once inside the cabin we assumed her next step would be to try to sleep so we removed her mattress and hid it on top of the exposed beams in the main room of the cabin. We made a dummy out of stuffed clothes and put it on top of the mattress so that when she went to pull it down the dummy would fall off as if it were a person sleeping on top of the mattress. Our final move was the collective setting of all our alarm clocks. We timed them to go off 10 minutes apart starting at 2:30 am and hid them throughout her room. It was an evil plan. And we clearly had too much time on our hands.

I remember staying up late waiting for our counselor to return. The butterflies in my stomach fluttered with teenage adrenaline as I peered out of the window from the top bunk of my bunk bed waiting to catch a glimpse of her approaching. I was so excited for the chain of events to unfold. In the end the joke was on us. She came home at 2am, drunk and tired, tried the door, saw the webs of string in the window and being as exhausted as she was, wisely decided to go sleep at a friends cabin. 

As time has gone by I have become more successful at developing more constructive pranks or perhaps more fittingly, “art actions.”

There are a few that come to mind that involve art on the street.

The first, called Art Explosion was developed by the Free Art Society and I. It involved blasting one city block in the East Village with concentrated, site specific street art overnight, and then, after slipping away into obscurity, returning at 7 in the morning to flood the same block with interactive performance art and public spectacle.

My next post is about the first Free Art Society “Flash Art” project:

The ART EXPLOSION.