Friday, February 7, 2025

The Arts Commissioning offers a workshop for Inter/Active artists

Toledo loves public art— from landmark murals to performance artists. It’s for good reason, too. Public art offers the community an equal-opportunity way to enjoy aesthetic works and engage in visual concepts— everyone, from passersby to members of the neighborhood, can reap the creative benefits of public works.

But public art doesn’t need to be as permanent of as a mural, or as transient as a sidewalk musician. Public art can also be interactive by directly engaging the community with opportunities to react, create and participate.

Are you a local artist with an idea for an interactive, community-driven and collaborative public art project? The Arts Commission, longtime champions of public art, is seeking proposals for these type of works to be featured during the 3rd Thursday Art Loops.

To help artists hone their skills and get a sense of what they are looking for, The Arts Commission is holding a workshop on what interactive art is and how to apply for this project, and other public art opportunities, on Tuesday, June 28 at 5:30pm.

Interested artists should RSVP to attend this informative workshop. Project proposals will be due one month from today on July 28. For more info, see here

To celebrate this exciting opportunity, I’ve rounded up five diverse and influential interactive art projects:

5) Rhythm 0, by Marina Abramović (1974)

Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0 (1974) from Marina Abramovic Institute on Vimeo.

I’ll be honest— I’m pretty obsessed with Queen Marina. Consistently touted as the “grandmother of performance art,” Abramović helped define the genre with divisive and vulnerable performances. She’s recently been pushed back into pop culture with her MOMA three-month performance, “The Artist is Present,” (2010) but one of her early works stands out to me as completely transformative.  

In her 1974 performance "Rhythm O", Abramović spent six hours inviting the audience to do whatever they wanted. The eerily calm artist remained still as strangers used one of the 72 objects she provided, which included wine, a feather, nails, and even a gun loaded with one bullet. As the performance went on, the audience became aggressive and sadistic, proving a very dark point about human nature.

As Abramović described later; “What I learned was that… if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you… I felt really violated.”

4) The Anthropometries of the Blue Period, by Yves Klein (1958)

See a video here

A French painter in the mid 20th century, Kelin spent most of his early period doing monochromatic blue paintings, but went outside of the canvas for quite a few projects, including “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” where he sold empty space to collectors.

In one of my favorite Klein projects, he kept true to blue, but introduced a new approach. During "Anthropetries of the Blue Period," Klein painted nude women in his signature color and used his models and living brushes by directing their movements to create large brushstrokes. Not too far from finger painting, this collaborative performance piece required physical action and human interaction.

3) Truisms, by Jenny Holzer (1977-present)

Holzer is a conceptual and installation artist who became prominent in the late 1970s for her project "Truisms", which are concise and divisive statements. She began printing her truisms cheaply, in plain fonts, and pasted them throughout public places in New York City.

The anonymous text containe often controversial opinions without a cohesive philosophy. Instead, Holzer’s truisms were voices from society with no known origin. The series has been turned into posters, LED signs, and even printed on hats, condoms and pencils.

Explore the Truisms with the project most recent step: a web presence.

2) Following Piece, Vito Acconci (1969)

Vito Acconci was a New York-based performance and conceptual artist who, to put it nicely, was a bit of a degenerate. A lot of his projects are as brilliant as they are extreme, and the "Following Piece" is no exception. Ethically vague and borderline illegal, Acconci spent most of October of 1969 following strangers in the city until they reached a private place.

Using his body and experience as the work of art, Acconci’s project helped answer the questions and curiosities of chronic voyeurs: Who are they? What do they do? Why do they do it? Do they have a family? Are they in love? Are they happy?

1) Yard, Allan Kaprow (1961)

It’s pretty difficult to talk about interactive art without mentioning the happenings of 1960s New York City. Part performance art, part party— can it get any better than that?— happenings were based on eliminating the barrier between the artist and the audience by making the piece of art require interaction.

One of the movement’s biggest artists, Allan Kaprow, coined the term in the late 1950s, and happenings served as the basis of his work for most of his career.

For "Yard", Kaprow installed mountains of tires in various NYC spaces and invited visitors to play. Strangers jumped, crawled, climbed and ran on top of tires during the exhibition length, typically a few days. He first made "Yard" in 1961, and held ten other happenings for the work before dying in 2006.

Toledo loves public art— from landmark murals to performance artists. It’s for good reason, too. Public art offers the community an equal-opportunity way to enjoy aesthetic works and engage in visual concepts— everyone, from passersby to members of the neighborhood, can reap the creative benefits of public works.

But public art doesn’t need to be as permanent of as a mural, or as transient as a sidewalk musician. Public art can also be interactive by directly engaging the community with opportunities to react, create and participate.

Are you a local artist with an idea for an interactive, community-driven and collaborative public art project? The Arts Commission, longtime champions of public art, is seeking proposals for these type of works to be featured during the 3rd Thursday Art Loops.

To help artists hone their skills and get a sense of what they are looking for, The Arts Commission is holding a workshop on what interactive art is and how to apply for this project, and other public art opportunities, on Tuesday, June 28 at 5:30pm.

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Interested artists should RSVP to attend this informative workshop. Project proposals will be due one month from today on July 28. For more info, see here

To celebrate this exciting opportunity, I’ve rounded up five diverse and influential interactive art projects:

5) Rhythm 0, by Marina Abramović (1974)

Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0 (1974) from Marina Abramovic Institute on Vimeo.

I’ll be honest— I’m pretty obsessed with Queen Marina. Consistently touted as the “grandmother of performance art,” Abramović helped define the genre with divisive and vulnerable performances. She’s recently been pushed back into pop culture with her MOMA three-month performance, “The Artist is Present,” (2010) but one of her early works stands out to me as completely transformative.  

In her 1974 performance "Rhythm O", Abramović spent six hours inviting the audience to do whatever they wanted. The eerily calm artist remained still as strangers used one of the 72 objects she provided, which included wine, a feather, nails, and even a gun loaded with one bullet. As the performance went on, the audience became aggressive and sadistic, proving a very dark point about human nature.

As Abramović described later; “What I learned was that… if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you… I felt really violated.”

4) The Anthropometries of the Blue Period, by Yves Klein (1958)

See a video here

A French painter in the mid 20th century, Kelin spent most of his early period doing monochromatic blue paintings, but went outside of the canvas for quite a few projects, including “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility,” where he sold empty space to collectors.

In one of my favorite Klein projects, he kept true to blue, but introduced a new approach. During "Anthropetries of the Blue Period," Klein painted nude women in his signature color and used his models and living brushes by directing their movements to create large brushstrokes. Not too far from finger painting, this collaborative performance piece required physical action and human interaction.

3) Truisms, by Jenny Holzer (1977-present)

Holzer is a conceptual and installation artist who became prominent in the late 1970s for her project "Truisms", which are concise and divisive statements. She began printing her truisms cheaply, in plain fonts, and pasted them throughout public places in New York City.

The anonymous text containe often controversial opinions without a cohesive philosophy. Instead, Holzer’s truisms were voices from society with no known origin. The series has been turned into posters, LED signs, and even printed on hats, condoms and pencils.

Explore the Truisms with the project most recent step: a web presence.

2) Following Piece, Vito Acconci (1969)

Vito Acconci was a New York-based performance and conceptual artist who, to put it nicely, was a bit of a degenerate. A lot of his projects are as brilliant as they are extreme, and the "Following Piece" is no exception. Ethically vague and borderline illegal, Acconci spent most of October of 1969 following strangers in the city until they reached a private place.

Using his body and experience as the work of art, Acconci’s project helped answer the questions and curiosities of chronic voyeurs: Who are they? What do they do? Why do they do it? Do they have a family? Are they in love? Are they happy?

1) Yard, Allan Kaprow (1961)

It’s pretty difficult to talk about interactive art without mentioning the happenings of 1960s New York City. Part performance art, part party— can it get any better than that?— happenings were based on eliminating the barrier between the artist and the audience by making the piece of art require interaction.

One of the movement’s biggest artists, Allan Kaprow, coined the term in the late 1950s, and happenings served as the basis of his work for most of his career.

For "Yard", Kaprow installed mountains of tires in various NYC spaces and invited visitors to play. Strangers jumped, crawled, climbed and ran on top of tires during the exhibition length, typically a few days. He first made "Yard" in 1961, and held ten other happenings for the work before dying in 2006.

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