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Weekend Cover Story: Thinking Inside The Box From gardens to courtyards to stuffed birds, local celebrities package their ideas for Mattress Factory auction Friday, June 16, 2000 By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic
If there was "once an old woman who lived in a shoe," imagine what you could find in a shoebox.
Tonight, at the fourth Mattress Factory Evening Garden Gala, you'll get your chance to examine a few with celebrity content, and maybe even take one home if yours is a winning bid in the silent auction.
The smart, annual benefit has quickly become one of the hot events in the cultural social calendar, with its hip setting and equally cool crowd. Tomorrow, the museum gives back, with an all-day, free "Community and Family Garden Party."
New this year for the evening event, the shoeboxes were inspired by similarly shaped maquettes that artists would frequently make as three-dimensional sketches for the room-sized installations that they were creating for the museum. Most notable of these, and displayed in the museum lobby, is one by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama of her 1996 black and gold polka dotted room, "Dots Obsession."
That became an inspiration for a shoebox project with students from the public schools, and the children's output was so fantastic and looked like such great fun that offering adults the opportunity to playfully create was a natural next step.
A standard-size empty cardboard box with a seal that read "IDEA -- Perishable, Open Immediately" was sent to each participant. The spare instructions were: a. The IDEA exists (illustrated with a silhouette of a head); b. Carefully remove (very fragile at this point); c. Place IDEA into box provided.
With such free range, it's predictable that the results are all over the map: inside the box, outside the box and way "outside the box." Some of the works have proportions and visual presence that could easily translate to room-sized installations, like Post-Gazette Architecture Critic Patricia Lowry's plan with gigantic iceberg lettuce and moss-covered walls. Others are more textually conceptual, as is businessman
David J. D'Appolonia's deconstruction of what, exactly, art is. There are the personal, the arty and a few that brim, like treasure chests, with gifts.
Fred Rogers sent "Some silence for you, dear neighbor," on a Neighborhood trolley card. (His was the first box to be returned, arriving before the requested date -- isn't that just like Mr. Rogers to be prompt and considerate?)
DeCourcy McIntosh, executive director of The Frick Art & Historical Center, responded with a suggestion to bring a work back to the museum, Christian Boltanski's basement installation that was part of the 1991 Carnegie International.
The Most Enigmatic award may go to actor David Conrad -- star of television's "Relativity" and the movies "Return to Paradise" and (forthcoming) "Navy Diver" -- whose FedExed box arrived from California with claws sticking through a hole in its side. From his West Coast home, the Pittsburgh native quickly squelched murmurs that cryptic messages scrawled atop the box related specifically to its content (e.g. a reference to Gene Kelly's widow, that actually began as a note to a roommate about a Post-Gazette photograph of him and Patricia Ward Kelly taken when they were both in Pittsburgh), and said that his piece evolved out of his concern for animals.
Deciding that he wanted to fit his box with a stuffed animal, he set out along Los Angeles' Ventura Boulevard -- "A giant, four-mile strip -- everything you can imagine you can find there" -- looking for a taxidermied squirrel or cat. Then "I saw this wonderful chicken in a Western store." It reminded him of how chickens are raised in small box-like cages in farms now, he continued, and of how easily "we dismiss them." Besides, "it would be very soft when you reached in one end [of the box] while at the other end, its feet were menacing. It's scary and non-scary, mysterious and recognizable." When told that he sounded like a postmodern artist, he replied that he hung out with the architecture and art crowd when he attended Brown University.
"The art that I'm interested in is complex. I thought it would be perfect for the Mattress Factory because they have all those layers of thought [in the installations]."
Conrad said that when he took the addressed and sealed box to the FedEx office, someone questioned whether they were allowed to transport livestock. When he explained that the bird was preserved, he says the staff was very helpful with advice on how to keep the artwork from getting crushed en route to Pittsburgh.
Other boxes with tales of their own include a replica of the courtyard of the County Building, complete with fountain and brick by brick construction, from Jim Roddey's office, and a silk-flower covered place to be "Seen" by the Post-Gazette's Marylynn Uricchio, who had late-night glue gun support from Nancy Byrnes. A box from Pirates owner Kevin McClatchy contains autographed balls from several players and "new stadium rubble," and the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has parted with a "piece of Fallingwater." Coming tonight are boxes from, among others, Mayor Murphy, actor Michael Douglas, 1999 Carnegie International curator Madeleine Grynsztejn and the Andy Warhol Museum.
Saturday's entertainers range from Celtic to rockabilly, and through the day, children may "do the Bag Boogaloo" with Attack Theatre, make Sun Prints, search for silk leaves hidden in the Garden, taste edible flowers, create Garden Hats, learn origami and calligraphy and watch a claypot demonstration by the Manchester Craftsman's Guild. Also, the community Bridge Mural Project will be unveiled in the museum foyer, where it will remain through June 30.
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When: 6-11, tonight.