Conflux Festival: A Joyful Return to the Street

Conflux takes me back. Those days in your 20s when engaging people on the street was so powerful. You need a break from the white walls. Time to put art out there with a lot of other artists out there. For a month ahead of time, you talk with your friends and quasi-friends about your plans. On the day, you set up and go. Something a little strange happens with the non-art people. They say something to you or to each other. It doesn't matter what, but the artists that gets the most people or the most enthusiastic reaction wins in the story telling back at the gallery. (Never tell your parents except to prove how different you are from them.) The stories can be told for at least six months. Some for a lifetime.

But the best part is that every artist is sure that this is the first time "something like this" has been done on the street. It is invented to be different. Paintings and sculpture can have some common traits, but these volunteer actions are absolutely unique. Of course its not 100%, but it feels that way. And why not enjoyed it for a weekend.

Rebecca Nagle....................Kurt Bigenho

Conflux is on going in Brooklyn, New York, this weekend September 13-16, 2007. For the stories, 8PM to close at the Luna Lounge, 361 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn. I wish I could blend in and here the tales.

Check out the website for complete descriptions. As see it, these artists share the following purposes with my past: to personalize the city in the way the lonely artist knows the city; to perform anonymously while hoping to be recognized; and to spark some energy or thought into the non-art public for a moment.

Here are a few of the 100 events. You need to read the statements to fully remember those early days.

1. Tour based on Ghostbusters
2. Tours of real and invented Acid Rain
3. Suggestions of personal stories through posted polaroids with a message
4. Soda cans that make noises until you get too close like a cricket
5. Tell the artist through the cellphone your movements and she will repeat the motions wherever she is.
6. Wear strange pink things in public
7. Stand in the median with a message written on cardboard
8. Giant expandable duct as a traffic blocker and tunnel to safely cross the street
9. People embracing in a powerful HUG on busy sidewalks

And just to prove my credentials to any 20 somethings reading this blog, I lived on Java Street in Greenpoint in the early 1980s before I moved to Williamsburg and then Seattle.

All my love.

Joe Mangrum.......................Eh-Team

Michael Dory............................Caroline Woolard

ALL READY AN UPDATE: MATCHING PAST AND PRESENT
Forty years ago in 1967, experimental artist and cellist Charlotte Moorman organized the fifth annual New York Avant-Garde Festival -- 24 hours of non-stop performance aboard the John F. Kennedy ferry by 100 artists.

On Saturday, Tianna Kennedy, an experimental artist and cellist from this generation, plans to dedicate the 24-minute piece she'll play aboard the Guy V. Molinari to the little-known artists in Moorman's festival. Part of the www.fmferryexperiment.net.