Paint the Town Pink
March 2004
The snow is melting away like the wicked witch after she was doused with a bucket of water. And just in time for the spiritual renewal symbolized by spring, I've read the first issue of a new magazine called
Spacing, which praises the importance of public space and random acts of imagination.
"I was really surprised today by a pencil-crayon drawing of a red covered bridge which someone taped to the swinging door of a phone booth on my street," wrote Sheila Heti in one essay. "There is a need... for a certain type of public art. Not the kind purchased and placed by business or government - but the kind that happens spontaneously, that could come from anybody, and that is proof of the living humanity that files onto buses and walks down the streets."
She calls for "acts of public art that surprise and baffle as non-sequiturs do."
A bicycle tire near her home has changed positions several times in the last few months, from "locked to a post, hanging off a street sign, lying flat on the ground... the city is a pretty bizarre and magical place."
Spacing magazine's writers have tracked down these magicians - and they are us. One pair of friends, angry at the harassment against an identifiable group personified by the ubiquitous "post no bills" blurbs on hoarding, defiantly postered back with portraits of Bills Clinton, Cosby, Idol, Madison, Murray, Shakespeare....
Others use chalk to draw on the sidewalks. In a Portland, Oregon suburb, neighbors created a little teahouse and community meeting place (made out of recycled materials) to prettify an ugly intersection. (City council later passed a by-law allowing neighborhood folk to convert intersections into public squares if there's local support.)
In Toronto, you can find telephone numbers posted at various locations around the city. Call the number and you get a story about something that happened at that very spot (like the simple tale of someone who used to hang out there when it was a punk bar instead of a big tree.)
You can make the city come alive too, if you have an answering machine that allows your friends to punch the number sign and go directly to the beep, bypassing a message that will have lost its charm the 15th time they hear it....
Hire an artist to have a go at your blank building wall. Paint whimsies upon the dead trunk of an abandoned tree. Under cover of darkness, give those ugly bicycle posts a lovely electric pink sheen. Wrap Xmas paper around garbage bins. Twine some festive ribbon about your balcony. Hang something delightful in your front window.
There's guerrilla gardening, too. (A book titled The Green Carnation was published in Oscar Wilde's time, and the plant came to symbolize gay men. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually exist, but there's always green spray paint on plastic flowers.)
Spacing was inspirational. I'm now determined to bring a crooked smile to the lips of passers-by, and show them that the city is not an impersonal space. It's a space for us.
I'm starting small. I went to the local dollar store and bought a bright red tie and draped it around the trunk of the tree in my front yard.
Someone might steal it, of course. But that's okay - I bought extras.