Buy a pack of Post It Notes
Draw a small character on each sheet
Walk down a street
Place a Post It on everyone who passes
Essay:
A few different things inspired this piece. One was Yoko Ono’s Pea Piece in which she wrote to by a bag of peas and leave one everywhere you go. I wanted to create a piece that copied the idea of leaving something behind as you go throughout your day. Originally, my idea was to bring around a marker and put a dot on everyone I passed, but decided that may get me into trouble. Another one of Yoko Ono’s pieces that inspired me was her Tape Piece III. In this piece she encourages the reader to tape the sound of snow falling and use the tape roll as gift-wrap. I loved that this took a simple object, which usually has a certain use, and uses it in a completely different fashion. I decided to write a score in which the reader would take all of their professional documents and pieces of artwork, print them out, then use them as pieces of packing paper to send in packages. Gift-wrap is meant to be thrown away, yet a recording or photos are usually meant to be kept and preserved. I wanted to do the same thing and take a professional and personal thing and essentially have the reader turn them into trash.
I decided to combine these two scores into one. The resulting score was Post It Piece. I wanted to take the element of turning art essentially into trash from one piece and the idea of leaving something everywhere I went from the other. In this piece the reader takes a pack of Post Its (of any size) and draws images on each one. Once they have completed this, they must go out into the world and as they walk around, place the Post Its on unsuspecting civilians. This way people aren’t as prone to start an argument due to the temporary state of the object left behind.
I, personally, am not a huge fan of going out in public and interacting with many people I don’t know. I wanted to create a score that would help people overcome that feeling and allow them to interact with people in a light-hearted way without specifically conversing with them. Also, as a person with an artistic side, I love the idea of sharing my art with the world, without necessarily throwing it in people’s faces and asking for compliments. In some of the readings we’ve done in class, there have been mentions of artists that put something personal in every piece of art work and I believe drawing on small Post It notes and spreading them around is the same thing.
As I went around, I realized there were a few affordances that came with using Post It Notes. For one, they would not necessarily stick to people’s backpacks. It would fall off almost immediately, therefore I had to try and stick it to articles of clothing instead. However, when I did this people would notice and would give me unnerved and confused looks that eventually made me stop playing out the score.
The point of this score is to help the reader overcome the shyness as well as lighten up the world by adding little smiles here and there through unexpected art. It certainly helped me. At first I asked friends to help me, or even friends of friends until I realized that this wasn’t the point of the score. I decided to go out and try it in the real world, and that made all the difference.