Tilting the World
Grace, MN. — Preparations for the annual celebration of wish-making are well under way in Grace, MN. In the fair weeks of spring, residents and visitors of the small town prepare for the event by exercising particular mindfulness, consideration, and care for each other and the place they inhabit. Spontaneous acts of kindness, gift giving, public dancing, and slow walking are expected to occur.
A small Midwestern town, Grace, MN, is a friendly, familiar, and inclusive sort of place. Rather than fenced, gated, and privately policed, the community of Grace, MN, is open to those who manifest symptoms of misfit and oddball ideas, in particular, those folks whose imaginations do not easily fit into a society at large where self-interest, consumerism, and greed reign supreme. In fact, for someone at home in Grace, MN, these very priorities seem skewed, upside down, and are said to produce a kind of vertigo, induced by acute attacks of sensory and intellectual discombobulation.
Observing this increasingly widespread condition inspired the then future residents of Grace, MN, to create a haven for those out of sync with the oppressive demands of an ever accelerating world, a reprieve from the burden of widespread dogmatic insistence on individual culpability and bootstrap mythology.
As a community founded in response to the world as we know it, GraceProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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C MN, was named to invite associations with the manifold meanings of “grace:” the seemingly effortless beauty or charm of movement, form, or proportion; a disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill, mercy, clemency; a favor rendered by one who need to do so; a reprieve. When asked about the possible Christian innuendo of the town’s name, Marcus Young, longtime resident and co-founder of Grace, MN, responds, “if Christianity has cornered the market on grace, we are in trouble.”
In addition to becoming a clement reprieve for those in such need, Grace, MN, has also come to house Young’s multifaceted projects that, anywhere else, could best be described as conceptual works of public art. In Grace, MN, though, taking these initiatives is not limited to those who identify as “artists.”
Inclusive and community oriented, Young’s practice is aimed at creating openings in, for example, the rigid imperatives of proper public behavior (Don’t you feel it too?), the ever accelerating pace of 21st-century life (a slow walking project named Pacific Walking), or the standardized responses to graffiti in public spaces (Unity Ceremony at Lake Phalen).
In September 2008, when the city of St. Paul hosted the Republican National Convention, predictable protests erupted all around the heavily barricaded downtown area. But the properly attired and officially badged conventioneers also encountered a phenomenon more difficult to categorize: converging on Rice Park, a number of people were dancing, without apparent fear of embarrassment, sweaty and happy in their flamboyant, understated, or plainly athletic contortions. Each dancer moved to a tune inaudible to anyone else, pods and players sensibly tucked away to allow unhindered movement. Bloggers from Alaska to Oklahoma were mystified by the phenomenon, even more so after asking the dancers for an explanation, any rationalization for their curious acts of joyful public embarrassment. The only consistent answer was a question: “Don’t you feel it, too?”
It seems safe to assume that, no, most spectators did not feel “it,” too. But if they wondered what that elusive emotion may have been, they might have inched closer to Grace, MN, where whatever is considered part of the ordinary foundation of society, in its casually repressive regimen and taken-for-granted normative behaviors, is ever so slightly tilted. The effects of this unexpected tilt can range from subtle disorientation to revelatory confusion and all the way to a full-fledged loss of “common-sensical” stability. Although the latter is rarely observed in spectators, the dancers as ideal performers are actively practicing this very loss, Young explains.
The disorientations and destabilizations that are nourished and sustained by the residents of Grace, MN, share an attitude of unwavering gentleness. The goal is never agonistic conflict and contest, but an invitation to open up to the possibility of an experience steeped in a value system of emotional generosity, empathy, and a profound sense of playfulness aimed at articulating alternative ways of being in the world.
In July 2008, a sandstone sculpture of a woman’s head in Lake Phalen Park was defaced with blue graffiti smears: racial epithets and messages of hate disfigured the serene mien and cast a shadow over the Lake Phalen Dragon Boat Festival, scheduled to take place in the park. According to Marcus Young, the typical response of the city to violations of this sort consists of covering up the offending marks, effectively rendering them invisible to those who might be hurt by them, and removing the marks as promptly as possible under the cover and out of sight, as if to pretend that nothing ever happened in the first place. But since the sculpture in question had been created as part of Minnesota Rocks, a sculpture symposium dedicated to creating art in the public realm, and was owned by Public Art St. Paul, the city’s default response was open to slight alteration.
Like an injured patient, the sculpture was sheltered from public view by a white, gauzy paravent, to be entered only by those who wished to witness the harm done. Those who did enter were invited to participate in the restoration: each visitor could apply a one square inch piece of especially prepared tape to the blue scrawls. By removing the tape, the spray paint, too, was dislodged. Slowly, a stream of visitors collectively restored the sculpture’s warm sandstone color by applying and removing the conservator’s tape. The ritual allowed participants to mourn the racist attack, to witness the sculpture’s defacement, but to ultimately become part in the restorative power of a communal response.
Changing St. Paul’s sidewalks into works of art by adding poems composed by city residents, serving tea in The Big Idea Store, raising awareness for Mears Park’s fledgling recycling program by sending a message in a bottle out to the community, or convincing the Walker Art Center to harbor an itinerant Disguise Painting — Marcus Young and the artists who make up Grace MN — Aki Shibata, Travis Spangler, and Kathleen Maloney — are dedicated to shifting, ever so slightly, what each of us may take for granted, and to bring us, one dance at a time, closer to a place they envision, a fabulation rich with possibility.
On April 25, 2010, Wishes for the Sky, the fourth annual celebration of Earth Day on Harriet Island, will unfold, inviting visitors to fly kites, listen to wind chimes, and make wishes. At times, Grace, MN, is closer than you might think.
Images (all images come from the website of Grace, MN):
1.) – 3.) Wishes for the Sky
4.) Sidewalk Poetry
5.)- 8.) Don’t you feel it too?
9.) – 16.) Unity Ceremony at Lake Phalen Park
This essay has so much heart. I wasn’t expecting it. It gave me a sense of relief.