Winter passes by with hardly any snow and no reports of giant spiders or any other unusual occurrences. In mid-April, you find yourself wandering across Valentine quad around midnight. Suddenly, you notice that an orange glow suffuses the well-lit paths instead of the usual golden glow. Head tilted to one side, gazing upwards, you observe a layer of translucent orange paint covering the lantern of the lamppost, interspersed with stencils of unusual objects, ranging from hammers and pliers to scissors and hole-punchers. You wonder what new antic the Valentine Dining Hall staff is up to or what prank some mischievous student has decided to pull. You shrug and eagerly hasten to bed.
Come to think of it, a few days earlier, some of the trays in Valentine Dining Hall actually had colorful silverware silhouettes spray-painted on them. Some of the trays displayed spray-painted doilies, while others bore silverware silhouettes spelling out the word "play." You begin to suspect subversive activity on campus.
Have you been to the women's bathroom in Frost Library recently? Ever notice the new banana light switch on your way out? Surely, the orange and blue city silhouette stickers plastered onto the stately white columns of Chapin Hall or Johnson Chapel last week must have caught your eye. As you begin to ask fellow students for an explanation of these bizarre occurrences, you hear reported sightings of other painted lampposts, light-switches and city silhouette stickers.
Remember that neon yellow bike-wheel table sprouting a metallic-colored umbrella that stood in front of the Campus Center? Perhaps you remember that someone had teasingly spelled out the word "play" in blue tape on the pavement nearby. How about the maddening clicking noises that emitted from a stereo hidden behind one of the Campus Center pillars? Random devices-a watch, a spoon, a key and a belt buckle-dangled from the umbrella. Bottles filled with varying amounts of water lined the periphery of the bike-wheel. This couldn't possibly have been art, or was it?
The instructions on the sidewalk read "play," yet you were too scared to mess with someone else's artistic creation. Let's say you had given the wheel a spin; as the objects dangling from the spinning umbrella hit the bottles, you would have heard musical sounds and would have suddenly realized that this strange contraption was actually a musical instrument.
Finally, I remind you of the latest in these series of oddities that have spontaneously materialized and just as stealthily disappeared around campus these past few months: the recording of a squash game blaring throughout the bathrooms of Valentine Dining Hall. At this point, I think, you started to second-guess your sanity.
All of these marvels are the work of a mad thesis student, Rebecca Blum '06. But unlike her peers, Blum has found a way to combine the disparate activities of playing and thesis-writing. An interdisciplinary major in English, music and art, Blum wanted to study the intersection of art and play. Her thesis project comprised a spin-off on various ideas of play that she had continually come across in her classes: wordplay, the improvisatory play of jazz and the play of cultural history, among others.
Blum described the phenomenon of play in her thesis, "Play can neither be an event nor an object, it is always a gerund, a movement that is also a suspension, a twisting in place that also suggests pause … it is an experience which, like Don Quixote's fighting of windmills, creates new meaning out of the familiar."
In order to translate this theoretical idea of play into art, Blum took images of everyday objects, the same images of silverware, office supplies and fruit that you have been seeing around campus all month, and put them into unusual contexts where those objects are not normally used or seen. She placed her art in spaces that people use routinely: the library, the dining hall and the bathroom. Blum's intent was to interrupt routine, to create a moment of surprise. "I really like the freshness of encountering something and not knowing how to interact with it," she said.
If Campus Police keeps a list of wanted persons, Blum's name was certainly on it due to the artwork she put up without the College's permission. When Blum solicited Dean Lieber's permission post facto, she recalled him saying, "I find with these things the less I know, the better … You know what they say, one person's vandalism is another person's art."
These surreptitious activities would not have been possible without faithful sidekicks willing to scale buildings and lampposts at ungodly hours. Blum enthused, "What inspired me during the project was the extent to which my friends broke college-credo and woke up at dawn, or stayed up until four in the morning with me, to help me sneak stray trays into Valentine or hang things on lampposts."
This Thursday, at 5:30 p.m. in Pruyne Lecture Hall in Fayerweather Hall, Blum will present a slideshow of her thesis project along with Daniel Marks '06, who will be presenting his thesis film. Refreshments will be provided, and all are welcome.