Free Idea Factory

I recently visited a friends used book store. I purchased a book about Alex Katz mostly because another artist I know, Henry Long, autographed it. I like Alex Katz’s work, but I am more amused by Henry’s signing a book that he did not contribute to producing.

The bookshop owner noted that most people hate other people writing in books. We both felt differently. There is a personal history to the hurried comments left in margins, inscriptions, etc. I often find these elements more intriguing than the book itself.

My friend told me of a book she had purchased. It contained a womans intimate details about her feelings during a divorce as it related to the content of the book.

There are often stories in other stories, and there are even stories about those stories. This idea, which I offer to you, is to go buy a used book with notes or comments in it. Get into the former readers head and develop a new body of work based on your reading, experience, and imagination. May you take with you a piece of someone else’s personal history and create a new piece of your own.

Research all documented periods throughout art history (you’ll learn some great things along the way). Make an equal number of small boxes out of archival rag paper. Collaborate with artists whose work represents each period of art history. Have each artist examine the same theme, perhaps “art itself”. Give them all specific deadlines as artist’s are often otherwise occupied with other projects and ideas. Collect all work, document it, giving proper credit to all parties involved. Compile each work representing a specific period in art history on one large piece of firm board (mat board, wood, etc.)

Matt and frame nicely.

Lastly, write an essay about the project and submit to galleries to be considered for exhibition. Then make prints of the completed artwork to share with the world.

This is an open ended project–it would be a series of short Flash films (or Java animations, or or or) all featuring the same character.

This is going to take some explanation, and very little of it will be linear. I just have some broad brush strokes of a concept, and I’m going to need to rely on your ability to connect the dots.

Concept:

“coyote” is a similar character, but Tada is not Coyote, or Loki.

similar in that Tada is potentially archetypal, cross cultural, universal.

Tada is the bellyflop

Tada is that lock or shock of hair that springs up or out

Tada is the first tree to turn bright brilliant red in the middle of a mountainside of trees that are all still green.

Tada is a flamboyant bow before the crowd accompanied by the sound of ripping pants.

Tada is the dive into the empty pool

but Tada is not just silly or comical, Tada is the spirit of boldness incarnate, and Goethe tells us:

Whatever you would do, begin it now. Boldness has a greatness all its own.

Tada is the one ear of corn that’s 8″ above the genetically engineered carpet-even height of the rest of the field.

Tada steals the stone from the masters hand while the master is still explaining the challenge

Tada is the running squirrel

Tada was Minnesota Fats, not Willie Mosconi

What does Tada look like?

Maybe he’s a walking jangle of letters in the shape of a person, but with swagger for sure.

Maybe he lives in a world where all the objects are composed of their spellings:

       c
       o
      ooo
     ooooo
     ooooo
   r ooooo r
    rooooor
    rooooor
     rooor
       N
       N
       N
       N

Maybe he himself is made up of the letters T a d a

Maybe he walks around and his shape is defined by the limits of his never quite stopped motion.

Tada is like a jangle of springs wound too tight and occasionally Tada BOINGS into being in just the right, or sometimes just the wrong, place.

So, what I’m thinking is a series animated cartoons with this character of Tada. I see Tada all around me, every day. I can give as many scenes of Tada at his best as you can animate. We could start with one or two and just keep adding to them. The key would be for there to be as much latitude as possible in what Tada looks like, so Tada can look like anything. That’s why my original thought was a jangle of letters in a world built out of letterforms. But it doesn’t have to be that. We’d just need to capture this essence of the character of Tada in some way that would allow Tada to be recognized in a wide variety of situations. Always different, always identifiably the same. He goes “sproing”, and is slightly unkempt.

Tada is Gene Wilder’s Willie Wonka when you first see him and his cane gets stuck in the sidewalk and he falls….into a somersault.

Tada is the Emcee who pulls back the curtain with a sweepingly proud gesture to reveal the set crew still at work setting up.

Tada is a bit of Popeye and bit of Crocodile Dundee.

Tada is what it means to make a crazy wild guess and be right.

Tada knew it all along.

Andy Warhol once said: Nothing looks cooler than someone completely unafraid of looking uncool.

Tada is beginner’s luck.

Tada is irrepressible.

Tada doesn’t always win, but Tada never gives up.

The key is this Tada-ness is something we see all the time, and it’s this mix of bold, confident, foolish, often right, sometimes wrong, always enthusiastic.

This idea is for a way of more effectively responding to businesses whose practices are objectionable. Don’t simply not give them your money, which doesn’t have much effect because those businesses have little way of measuring what it is they lost, because they never know what they lost. Instead, almost give them your money, and then cancel your transaction and state explicitly your reason for canceling.

For example, instead of not shopping at a merchant’s website because the merchant has a privacy policy you don’t agree with, place a very large order, and then immediately cancel it (or, actually, these days you can just load it all in your shopping cart and then exit the website–they track abandoned carts), and tell them in an email WHY you canceled that order.

A thousand customers who didn’t walk in the door won’t register on any decision-maker’s reports. A large amount of cash money that almost got spent, and then didn’t, absolutely will show up.