Recently my daughter, Hillary, a professional organizer spent 8 (yes 8 hours) going through my books shelves, cleaning and aligning them to be more user friendly and beautiful. I am a lucky mum. For a year I've been toying with the idea of taking each book from the shelf, considering it's worthiness for my collection, donating or keeping it. If I keep it then it gets covered with white paper and labeled with it's contents. Wouldn't that be beautiful? My books would bring such light to the room. Maybe I just need a team of 15 friends to do it with me some night. Volunteers? You know I'm not kidding. In researching this rainbow aesthetic I see so often in art, design,
and
decorating I came across something on the McSweeney site that I'd like to
share. I'm a huge fan of McSweeney anything. And this interview with
Chris Cobb by Suzanne Kleid is really worth a look. He rearranged a whole bookstore by color. And of course, being the wish it was all perfect, but not really, virgo that I am, the name of his project, I fell in love with.
There
Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World.
AN INTERVIEW WITH
CHRIS COBB
ON GLUE-STICK STATUARY, SPEAKING TO MASHED POTATOES, AND
REARRANGING 20,000 BOOKS BY COLOR.
Q: When did you originally think
of the idea for this? What made you decide to do what you're going to
do?
A: I wanted to make something that I didn't think would exist anywhere,
and that nobody would ever make, that I couldn't go anywhere in the
world and see it.
Q: And tell us what it
is that you're going to be making.
A: Well, I was thinking a lot about places I've been inside dreams,
where I'm familiar with a building or a room, or like when I'm in a
house in a dream and there are combinations of things in the house that
don't exist in reality. So I wanted to do this project, where I have a
giant bookstore full of books, and instead of them all being organized
normally, they'll all be organized in rows of color. Through some kind
of herculean task, some kind of massive effort, to change the entire
space into something that you would see in a dream.
Q: So you are going to
actually be doing this, you're going to be rearranging every book on
the shelves in this bookstore.
A: Yeah, I had originally thought that I could do it by myself. A friend
of mine owns a bookstore and after a year of negotiating back and forth
he finally allowed me to take over his store for a week, and to allow
me to bring in my whole team of like 15 people, which is what I estimate
it'll take, maybe 20, and in one night—I've planned it out—if we stick
to the guidelines, we can completely change the store. With Andrew
[McKinley, the owner of Adobe Bookshop], it took a year of me being
around and gaining his trust before I could get to this point, where he
would allow this to happen.
Q: Which is pretty
crazy, when you think about it.
A: Or inspired. One person's crazy is another person's inspiration.
Q: So you think you
can do this all in one night? How are you going to do it?
A: I'm really grateful for the fact that when the bookstore was
organized, all of the shelves along the walls are exactly the same. I
think there's seven shelves in every unit. So you can estimate the
number of books pretty accurately. It's around 20,000 books. Because of
how they're positioned, I can map them out and give coordinates for
every book. It'll be, like, shelf 3, row 1. Each book will be given its
own designation, so that after they're all taken out and rearranged by
color, when it comes time to put them back I can just go back to shelf
3, row 1, or whatever, and I'll know exactly where they go.
Q: Because it's a
piece of public art and because you're just rearranging books, there
isn't a thing you're producing that can be sold, you know? You're doing
this incredibly complex, time-consuming thing and it's only going to
exist just to look nice.
A: Well, there are elements of the sublime and elements of beauty
involved here that do more than "look nice." The fact that it's
something you wouldn't see anywhere has the potential to make it a
transgressive experience for some people. People who can appreciate
imaginary things or imaginary places, and the power that those places
have.
Also, there's a lot about ceremony, I think, and ritual. Ritualistic
acts. In some Native American cultures, if you make something, you have
to then sleep with it next to you overnight, so that the object is
transformed through your dreaming. Then it has this special power that
it wouldn't normally have, and this is kind of like that same place,
maybe.
Q: Because you're
going to be transforming the bookstore overnight, right? You and the
team are going to go in after closing, and by the time the store opens
the next day it's all going to be changed.
A: Yeah, exactly. It'll be like in a dream. One day it'll be like how it
is, and the next day when the store opens it'll be completely
transformed.
Q: Your art in the
past has been made out of materials that you wouldn't normally associate
with art. You're working with books this time, but in the past you've
made sculptures out of glue sticks and you've made sculptures out of
mashed potato. What else have you done?
A: Napkins. Torn-up napkins. Recordings of streets.
Q: With the glue
sticks, you carved them into copies of Greek sculptures, correct?
A: Yeah, there's the Laocoön and the Nike of Samothrace, and Roman and
Greek votive sculptures that I made in glue stick.
Q: You made faces out
of the mashed potato.
A: Yeah, I had some mashed potatoes with garlic and peppers in it that I
was making, and I thought I saw a face, or a potential face. I started
playing with my food—I've always played with my food, I like to play
with food—and I started to think, well, maybe I could make these mashed
potatoes into sculpture. So I did. The things that came out of that idea
were that maybe the mashed potatoes are talking to me, you know? And if
they were talking to me they'd have to have a face. Those are called
"Oracle." If you saw a face emerge out of your mashed potatoes, of
course it would have to say something really incredible to you. Probably
like foretell your future or your past. Tell your fortune.
(softly) I don't know—I shouldn't talk about the Red Alert thing,
huh?
Q: Why not?
A: It might sound too crazy.
Q: No.
A: OK. So, with another recent project, I was thinking about what chaos I
could create just by using the color red. I looked around town and I
realized that there are red curbs all over the city. I wondered, what
would happen if I extended the red curbs and made them go down a whole
block or a whole street? Where normally you could park, but instead I
covered it all in red? Then you couldn't park. It symbolically extended
the authority of the police, quietly. One night, I went out and covered
up the curb, down one whole block, so it was all red. I took a
photograph first, when the cars were parked there, and the morning after
putting the red on the curb, I took another photo showing that the cars
weren't parking there anymore. Just that little bit of red changed the
whole order of the block.
Q: And it was red
tape, which is symbolic also.
A: Yeah, if you painted it red you'd probably go to jail, but I felt I
could get away with using the red tape. And it's also a silly metaphor
for bureaucracy.
Q: How long was it
there?
A: Two weeks.
Q: And nobody noticed
that it wasn't a real red zone?
A: Not a single person seemed to notice, and nobody parked in the red
zone. My red zone. I'm just glad I wasn't someone that had to park
there. But it would be nice if everybody would get out red tape and
cover up all the curbs so nobody could park anywhere.
Q: You have used the
phrase "utopian gesture" before in describing this new
book-rearrangement project. What does that mean?
A: The title of the project is There Is Nothing Wrong in This Whole
Wide World. "Utopian" is kind of a loaded word, I guess, but my
basic take on that whole concept is that—you know, it's good to pretend
like things are gonna be OK. And it's good to pretend that things'll go
well ultimately. Because in a lot of ways, you don't really have any
choice. And if you can reconcile the fact that there's really no other
choice than to believe that things will eventually work themselves out,
you know, if you can understand that really that's the best way to be,
then a lot of things can fall into place, and a lot of possibilities
open up for you.
And [the book project]
is going to happen after the election. Right now while we're talking,
we don't know who's going to win the presidential election. Or who's
going to win in the Senate or the House. And so we could easily go into a
tragic direction, you know. But still, either way, you have to act like
things will go OK.
