Hi everyone,

Back again after a week; thanks for all the posts.

First, I wanted to respond to Linda's concern about Michael Rakowitz's shelf display. It's surprising and also helpful to hear that you read the shelf as a potentially alienating part of the presentation. It's not an art historical in-joke; that reading would probably horrify Michael. Certainly his work draws on many sources including other works of art, but Michael isn't wired toward the cheeky or the smug. He's a storyteller, and a very generous one.

The shelf is part of the paraSITE narrative. I don't see it as a freestanding work of art— conceptual or otherwise—but rather as one of the ancillary elements of his presentation in Beyond Green, along with the the DVD that shows sketches and photographs of Michael's collaborators and their structures in use on the street. The shelf display and DVD help him tell the story of the paraSITE project within a museum gallery. As you say, the inflatable structure says a lot by itself—the dirt on its sides, for instance, makes it clear that it was really used out on the streets--but the shelf and DVD flesh things out. They embody aspects of the project that would otherwise only be shared through a wall label. The bags, tape, scissors stand in for the remarkable fact that most of the paraSITES were made from off-the-shelf materials costing under $10. That in turn suggests that small gestures and micro-experiments like this do have the potential to be taken up by others, that we all have the potential to make a difference in our own ways. Projects like Michael's can foster real change in individual lives while also activating the world of symbols and metaphors, and shifting the dinner-table conversation for those who encounter them. The latter is something that Michael's very interested in, and one of the places that all of these projects can work some magic.

(I should note that Bill Stone's structure, the one included in Beyond Green, was a prototype made out of more expensive and sturdy materials, not plastic bags. And most of them were used in Cambridge, MA so I suspect they'd stand up to Portland...)

More to come on the rest...
-Stephanie