Atlantan gets art project spot
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Monday, July 06, 2009
What will you say you did on your summer vacation?
In all likelihood, Atlanta poet Karen Head will be able to top you.
Courtesy of Karen Head
Karen Head, graduate communications coordinator at the Georgia Tech School of Literature, Communication and Culture, will be one of 2,400 people involved in a public art project, ‘One & Other,’ in London this summer. From 5-6 p.m. July 31, Head, an Atlanta poet, will be stepping up on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, part of a 24-hours-a-day, 100-day project proposed by sculptor Antony Gormley to ‘help make a living portrait of the UK now.’ In the UK to teach a Georgia Tech summer abroad program, Head will spend her hour on the plinth to do some kind of poetry/technology project to be determined, hopefully raising money for Poetry Atlanta.
Head, graduate communications coordinator for Georgia Tech’s Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, will participate in a huge public art project in London. For an hour starting at 5 p.m. July 31, she’ll step up on the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of what’s proposed as a living portrait of the United Kingdom.
Make that a rather sprawling living portrait: British artist Antony Gormley’s “One & Other” will involve 2,400 people taking their place on the plinth for 24 hours a day over 100 days starting July 6.
Knowing that she’d be teaching at Georgia Tech’s summer abroad program at Worcester College in Oxford, Head applied as a lark.
Once she heard that more than 15,000 people had also applied, she “assumed that would be the end of it,” says the author of the recently released poetry collection “Sassing” (WordTech Editions, $18). “I didn’t think for a second that I’d actually get a spot.”
But the computer that randomly selected participants picked the Atlantan while passing over Gormley himself.
The artist suggested to the Observer newspaper that the project will “be like opening up a Pandora’s box of ideas.
“It’s usually only terrible things that make a nation take stock,” he told the newspaper. “I hope this will do the same thing, but in a playful way.”
Head is game. For her hour, she plans to use Twitter and her blog (“Poetic Acts in the Digital World” at karenhead.blogspot.com) to write poetry in the “exquisite corpse” tradition. That’s a style in which various collaborators contribute words or phrases to essentially “collage” a poem.
She’s hoping to turn it into a fund-raiser, with supporters donating to the literary group Poetry Atlanta (via a button on www.poetryatlanta.com).
The varied plinth participants have hatched a panoply of plans: An architect will pedal his pink bike to illuminate a specially designed suit. A retired teacher, 83, will create signal messages with semaphore flags from her wheelchair. A Leeds University student will celebrate her 20th birthday with cake and champagne.
A 48-year-old hospital porter will hoist a large cut-out photo of his father, who died when he was a child. “I want to make it an almost statue of the ordinary man,” Anthony Pressley told the BBC. “Not a king. Not a general, just an ordinary man.”
Erected in 1941, the Fourth Plinth was intended for an equestrian statue, meant to counterbalance one of George IV on the opposite side of Trafalgar Square. But funding ran short, and it has been empty for decades. In recent years, it’s been the site of a series of public art projects.
“Everybody, I think, has a little tickle inside them to do something they have never had the right plinth for before,” Gormley, undoubtedly tickled at the notion, told the Observer.
Atlantan Head says she’s a fan of installation art such as Christo’s “The Gates” and “loves the idea of repurposing public spaces in interesting ways.”
Her big summer adventure, and that of the other 2,399 participants, will be carried live from July 6 through Oct. 14 at www.oneandother.co.uk.
