| FLUIDS Reinvention Event: results, eXperiences, thoughts, and pictures |
Who decides what a happening really means?
In a convergence of art, science, education, and community outreach, on Sunday April 27, 2008, the NASA-funded ArctiQuest Research Project hosted over 1000 community participants who gathered for an ice rendezvous at MacArthur Park in Downtown Los Angeles for the reinvention of an art Happening called FLUIDS, originally conceived by Allan Kaprow.
At 9 am, over 25 volunteers assembled to construct a wall of ice as a collaborative work of art, requiring over 700 fifty-pound blocks, to construct a wall about 30 feet long, ten feet wide, and nearly eight feet tall. The event was one of nine installations around the greater Los Angeles area sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and the Los Angeles County Art Museum (LACMA). The Union Ice Company provided 82 300-pound blocks of ice. Do the math: that's 12 tons of ice!
In the spirit of the Happening phenomenon, ArctiQuest provided additional activities for community participants, in celebration of the International Polar Year 2007-2009, including science presentations about Exploring Ice in the Solar System, by Julie Castillo and Christopher Boxe from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; ice science activities for children, led by Urban Science Corps coaches; constructions of Science Comix notebooks, led by Art Professor Carrie Paterson with high school students from the CIVITAS School of Leadership; and informal discussions about the science of ice and the effects of global climate change on the polar regions, led by Science Educator Richard Shope.
Additional blocks of ice were made available for further exploration as an "ice petting zoo" for very young children, which transformed into an "art imitates art" area as students from Charles White elementary school created a smaller version of the Fluids ice wall. Another area shaped like the outline of Antarctica was filled with additional chunks of ice and became an exploration arena with a comixing of adults and older children building towers and caves of ice-- a special highlight of the day was the spontaneous painting of the ice with watercolors!
The hot weather was punctuated by brief cloud cover and a breeze from off the lake, providing a pleasant ambience for participants to observe the transformation of the main Fluids structure as it melted over the course of several hours, eventually collapsing in the late afternoon.
Take a look at the collage of photos taken by artkid Helen Shope: glimpses of the sites at LACMA, CalState LA, A Place Called Home, and Rio Clementi Studios-- and then an extensive record of the MacArthur Park installation, featuring the alpha and the omega blocks set by Anton Kaprow, the son of the late artist Allan Kaprow, whose 1967 Happening was being reinvented this very day!
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Ice Rendezvous Event! NASA-IPY ArctiQuest Research Project
Share your Ice Rendezvous stories and pictures for posting on our website as ArctiQuest Results: just click on the poster below, send us an email, then check back soon!
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