Photograph by Providence Journal's own Kris Craig
Oh the webs we weave!
Recently I had the honor of being interviewed by Bill Van Siclen, the go-to-author, critic and wordsmith for all-things-related-to-art that pass through our fine city of Providence. For the last few years, we have not had a chance to sit and catch up. In August, he visited my studios and I walked him through our most recent projects and adventures. When the piece was published in The Providence Journal, it was generously accompanied by a slew of photographs and given two full pages to breath. The printed version is attractive and the Journal printed not only photographs of our work, but also portrait shots taken specifically for the article. I couldn’t be more pleased with the layout. On the projo.com website, however, the text is complimented by one, small photograph – leaving the text as the main focus.
I began to get anxious about this when I got feedback from my nearest peers. Those who know me, but not intimately, loved it; those are close to me were alarmed. They felt that the article appeared to suggest that I didn’t take my main body of art, Tape Art, seriously. I know that wasn’t the intent; and in a feature article, one meant to entertain as well as inform, this does no harm and is a decent entry into the public record.
But looking just at the story, I find that I could have been clearer about my work and how I experience it. And there are a few inaccuracies. In this, Mr. Van Siclen is blameless. I myself created the circumstances where Tape Art’s story is muddled.
With the freedom that comes from having a boundless webpage, I’m taking the liberty of breathing my own voice into the story, editing the content, adding minute details, streams of association, and a photograph or two from the way-back machine. And I’m doing this partially as a cautionary tale for others. Please note: To any artists out there, young entrepreneurs, interview givers, web site makers, moms and dads – what follows is a short paragraph detailing what I could have improved. If you have your branding and imaging under control, kindly skip the next few paragraphs.
First, the Tape Art website does not do the subject justice. A website should be a resource for an interviewer to turn to if they have questions. An ideal website would include a mission statement, a press release, a history of artworks, biographies of artists, résumés and, perhaps, text describing each photograph. My website tapeart.com, as of the summer of 2011, has none of these things.
Second, regardless of having a website as a backup or main resource, the artist himself should be able to articulate a singularity of mission or direction that leaves the interviewer with a sense of a greater purpose. Colin Bliss and I have made some really, really great work in the last few years. We have received tremendous, heart-felt accolades for the public art projects we have created - but none of this has translated into spirited self-promotion. Humility is important, but not at the cost of accurately portraying the scope and success of your own work.
Third, not every time is a good time for an interview. I have been very fortunate over the course of my public art journey to have been interviewed hundreds and hundreds of times by individuals spanning the entire stratosphere of news media. For the most part, I approach public speaking with ease and take for granted my capacity to tell the same stories over and over in a fresh and engaging manner. Frankly, right now I am a bit off my game - not the best time to be interviewed – and I unwittingly paid the price.
And last, if you must be interviewed and know you are not at your best, bring a friend.
Now for the addendum, some serious, some not so much, mostly agreeing with or annotating Mr. Van Siclen’s comments with a little twist. In blue, you will find statements as they appeared in the story:
A few weeks ago, Providence artist Michael Townsend decided to buy a new computer.
No small thing for me! I have been rocking the same computers for over six years. The two machines that are the foundations of my digital empire are my 17-inch G4 1.67 PowerBook and a Quad G5 2.5 hooked up to a life-changing 30-inch monitor. These two computers represent the fastest and biggest of the pre-Intel Mac. They have processed an absurd amount of information and have been stellar and seemingly indestructible.
These machines continue to serve daily and have my loyalty. But I had missed out on the entire Intel Mac phenomena and, as a person bound to these operating systems and software, I felt it was time to experience the goods.
He even had one picked out: an ultra-thin Apple MacBook Air.
The single purpose of the new computer was as an ultra-portable device that I could use for the purposes of writing. It doesn’t hurt that it has the horsepower to edit Final Cut documents, do heavy lifting in Photoshop, and manage thousands of photographs seemingly instantly. Nice bonus. If you have not seen the Air, it is worth taking a look at. I have nothing but nice things to say about it. The single biggest thrill is shutting it down with all applications open – and then being able to fire it back up in less than 30 seconds with all applications restored. Finally!
There was just one problem: the nearest Apple Store is in Providence Place mall, a place Townsend has been barred from visiting since 2007, when he and several other artists were discovered living in a fully furnished apartment hidden within its walls.
It’s true. We were only two days away from getting the wood floors installed and a mere month away from functioning plumbing.
The discovery made headlines around the world and turned Townsend and his pals into instant celebrities.
The story of the Secret Apartment in the Mall became global news and in a few select places really resonated. At the top of the list of places that placed the story in their news loop were India, South Africa, Norway, Hong Kong and Ireland. On TWO different occasions in New York City, I have been spotted by people who hail from India with a greeting like this: “You! You are the one that lived in the mall!” Apparently the story played on their national television for a week. It gives me chills to think how many people saw it. Stateside, we had an incredibly diverse collection of media outlets take an interest in that narrative. From CBS to Fox and Friends to hip hop radio stations, we were taken by the range of the audience. One of oddest juxtapositions we witnessed was hearing ourselves on a long, insightful interview on NPR the same day we had a full-page story in the National Inquirer.
Also worth noting: The breadth and consistency of the narrative through the media made us conclude that the story was being told the way we wanted it to be. It was open-ended so that people could draw their own conclusions, and it wasn’t bogged down in politics or over-contextualized. Because of this, we made the decision to turn down all movie, book, and television offers that poured in (four to six calls a day average for over a month.) As artists, we had achieved a good balance and the focus was on the story, not us.
It also got him banned from Providence Place for life. “Most of the time it’s not a problem,” Townsend said during a recent visit to his actual residence — part of the sprawling Monohasset Mill complex near Eagle Square. “But sometimes it’s a pain. It would have been nice just to walk over to the mall and buy the computer.”
Over the years, there have been things that I truly wanted to get from inside the mall. I see the darn place almost every day. It is on my biking paths, my running paths, and I drive by it. It has, however, led to some fantastic moments in trusting strangers! On more than one occasion, I have stood on the sidewalk of the mall and waited to find someone that I could easily approach. That person would be given 60 to 100 dollars in cash and instructions on what I wanted from inside Mall Verboten. On every occasion, after a ten-to-fifteen minute wait, the person came back with my software program, trash-sack linings for my studio’s trashcan, or new headphones – and handed me the corresponding change and receipt. The Apple Store in particular has been a true champ over the years. They have accommodated “ghost purchases” with my credit card, bringing me the goods at the door, as well as occasionally sending an employee out to assist with tech questions on a computer.
A lanky 40-year-old with large blue eyes and the slightly manic energy of a soda-fueled teenager, Townsend makes no apologies for his mall-squatting exploits.
On a personal note: Energetic, yep. But I, thankfully, have not experienced what it feels like to be soda-fueled since the summer of 1993. That is the summer I gave up both soda and caffeine. My best friend (and accountant) Dave Hartley and I decided it was time to move on from our Coke-fueled nights. One last soda bender and we would hang up our cans. We both brought a six-pack of our liitle red friends to a free outdoor concert of Ray Charles performing in Boston. As Ray plowed through classic hit after classic hit, we took our classic hits. Six cans later and I can still conjure up the sloppy battery-acid feeling in my stomach. Been clean every since.
“Sometimes it got a little scary, especially when we were trying to dodge mall security,” he said, recalling how the so-called “secret apartment” began as a lark but eventually morphed into a full-fledged art project, complete with hours of video documentation and regular updates on YouTube.
Does that sentence imply a hide-and-seek mentality to you? I hope not, because “trying to dodge” doesn’t actually jive with our intentions or experience. We did, of course, want to stay under the radar. On the other hand, from the very, very beginning of our construction of the apartment, we made the conscious decision to never mock, underestimate or trivialize the work of the mall security staff. When we received national attention we made a concerted effort to acknowledge that the mall security did an absolutely stellar job for what they are trained to do. No one trains you to be on the lookout for urban developers, which was what we were. That complete absence of vigilance is also how we lose historic mill buildings. More about that later.
The tone of the article when The Providence Journal broke the story as a news report – rather than a feature – was clearer on this point. It did a world-class job of thoughtfully covering the background and can take complete credit for anchoring how that story was retold in other news outlets. They listened well and they wrote well. The story, in its simplicity, sticks with a lot of people and several years later we continue to hear augmented versions and excited retellings of our own adventures.
Now back to the discussion of urban spaces and developers:
There is some truthiness (thank you Colbert) to the idea that the whole project started on a lark. But it was, in addition, a reasoned response to the loss of Fort Thunder, a massive mill building that had served as home and studio space for artists for many years. When Fort Thunder and neighboring historic buildings were demolished, developers explained that a computer had identified the location as ideal for a grocery store and parking lots. Providence artists protested that this decision failed to consider the downside for the community. (Even USA Today weighed in with a lament.) We were ignored, but we learned to spot developers of urban spaces before they started making decisions about other neighborhoods.
In the jargon of urban development, if a space is underutilized then - as a society and as citizens – there is a responsibility to develop that space to its full potential. Having failed to preserve the full integrity of 13 acres of historic mill buildings, we artists acquiesced in the argument that it was our civic duty to develop any underutilized spaces we spotted. From the day we began to micro-develop the apartment in the Mall, we strove to make the 750-square-feet of unused space into a valuable condo-type dwelling. Our lark, as it were, was backed by conditioned convictions.
Bringing the apartment to life took several years. At the peak of activity, we took the time to document our progress. We have lots of video of the apartment in its earliest and rawest forms. Included in the documentation are some harrowing moments, as well as evidence of decisions we made about how to progress. For our own records, we pieced together a short, edited movie with an attempt to make sense of it all. This we show to friends, family and the occasional stranger in a controlled environment. Shortly after the story became international news, General Growth Properties - the company that owns the Providence Place Mall - sicced their dogs on us. Because we have no coffers to raid and the story was already making its journey around the globe, they decided to pursue a very interesting approach: asking us to forfeit all of our intellectual property in relationship to the Secret Apartment in the Mall story. They ultimately failed to legally do this.
“But otherwise it was fun — at least up until the part where we were arrested.”
The quote by the author of the article is funny. But, again, a little off the mark. I can say with almost complete certainty that in the seemingly countless hours I have had the chance to present and talk about this project, this has never been the thrust of my comments. Like any large-scale endeavor pursued to its logical conclusion, the entire enterprise was a genuine challenge, thoughtfully executed and punctuated with moments of exhilaration… but I wouldn’t ever describe it as “fun.” Furthermore, there is an aspect to the entire exercise that was slightly desperate in relationship to the other work we were making at the time.
Starting in September of 2001 through the September of 2006, the same team of artists developed an internet-based September 11th memorial. The scope of this project was enormous. Over the course of five years, we created life-size drawings of every single fireman and airline passenger who died that day in Manhattan. These figures, drawn one at a time on buildings stretching from the WTC to 125th in Harlem, were thoroughly documented and incorporated into web pages with names and biographies of those who perished in the towers. In those five years, as a group of artists, we committed over 30,000 hours to the project. We were overwhelmed by the data of disaster. Unfunded, the memorial threatened to consume us and it took strength and dedication to continue building the website, especially in leu of the fact that it was being constructed in an atmosphere that experienced little to no feedback outside of our small group.
Since the memorial overlapped the Mall project, building the apartment gave us an escape of sorts. The space in the Mall provided refuge from our studios and was completely and utterly unrelated to the mountain of grim September 11th work. As a group of artists, it also provided, for lack of a better word, a team-building exercise. It was a riddle to solve and its ramifications and purpose gave us something to muse over when we were not trying to figure out how to elegantly boil down documentation from the work in Manhattan. Again, fun was not the most apt adjective.
What was fun, oddly enough, was the arrest. It was a necessary step in the process of us being discovered. Since 99% of the parties involved were consummate professionals – from mall security to police to court employees – and since the overarching accomplishment was both harmless and unique, the situation prompted an interesting sense of camaraderie in the shared experience. There were, oddly, moments during the arresting process that provoked laugher – by all parties directly involved. The City of Providence proved to be a supportive and generous maiden and we thank her for smiling on its citizens with love.
Still, Townsend has moved on.
Let me say aloud that I still harbor frustration that we didn’t get to follow through on the next steps in our work at the Mall. We were a few months away from having the best Christmas ever. That Christmas was going to mark a world-class shopping spree where the objects purchased would go directly from the stores to the cabinets, drawers, nooks and crannies of our apartment in the mall. And the following year was going to be the one where Colin and I moved in full time, got employment and slowly worked our way toward mall perfection.
Last month, for example, he and a group of friends created a giant mural on the floor of the Bank of America skating rink in Kennedy Plaza. The mural, which depicted scenes from the life of Roger Williams, was part of the city’s 375th anniversary celebrations.
And unlike the mall project, it was completely legal.
For the record, the mall project resulted in misdemeanor trespass and a $50 fine. As street artists, and public artists, we make very conscious of making decisions about what our impact on an environment will be. We are almost always involved in different shades of trespassing when we make our public works in urban landscapes. If we only drew or created work on the surfaces we owned, there would be a lot of work on the sides of our cars. Our simple litmus test prior to a public art project is rooted in making sure that we never do permanent damage to the surfaces we work on. And we don’t leave behind a mess for someone else to clean up. Our work is intentionally fleeting and designed to temporarily metamorphose surfaces into places for direct and spontaneous human interaction.
“They were great,” said Deb Dormody, program director for Greater Kennedy Plaza, the non-profit group that organized the event. “They worked for almost an entire month in very difficult conditions. One day it was 90 degrees. The next day it poured. Somehow they got it done.”
When we were working in the pouring rain, people would ask us why we were out there. We could only reply that the folks who hired us knew that – no matter what the circumstance, no matter how bad the weather, no matter how much the skating rink doesn’t drain – we would work tirelessly and thoughtfully to create a piece of artwork that represented the City of Providence. At a bare minimum, we would embody the determination and blind persistence that has been at the root of so many of Providence’s great accomplishments.
The mural project also showcased one of Townsend’s artistic specialties. Rather than using traditional materials such as chalk or paint, he and his fellow mural-makers, Pamela Baron and Colin Bliss, used something more ephemeral: colored painter’s tape.
I have dedicated a better part of my life to exploring the medium of tape as a tool for collaborative drawing. For the last 23 years, the medium of Tape Art has taken me all over the world, and I am still thrilled by the seemingly boundless potential of it to bring people together and give a voice to those who need one.
The tape we currently use we describe as a Drawing Tape. It gets this designation because it has been identified as being the only tape in the world, presently, that has the qualifications that makes it suitable for the wide range of drawings that we do. As for the collaborators, not enough credit can possibly be given to Colin Bliss: He is the quietly under-appreciated colleague that I have worked with to produce all of my favorite projects over the last six years or so. Pamela Baron (see pamelabaron.com) has been a valuable member of our education team and is currently producing paintings in the Bay Area.
In fact, you might call Townsend the Picasso of painter’s tape, considering that clients ranging from Hasbro Children’s Hospital to the Worcester Art Museum to corporate giants like General Electric have paid him to create tape-art murals on their buildings.
I appreciate the kudos, but I must say that identifying Tape Art with any artist runs counter to our teaching methods. When we introduce Tape Art to groups, especially in a teaching setting, we make a very pointed observation that there are no Picassos, Leonardos, or Monets of the Tape Art world. The medium, because of its relative short history, is consistently defined and re-defined by the people who use it. We intentionally never show pictures of our own work before we teach people the principles of Tape Art because we want the ownership of the medium to belong to the people who are discovering it. There are quite a few artists who have used tape in some way or another to make or compliment an image. We get to bear the title as the inventors of Tape Art by virtue of the longevity, persistence, and incredible volume of work created over the last two decades.
The short list of institutions that we have worked with above speaks well to the versatility and encompassing nature of the medium as we have been evolving it. We have yet to find a scenario or location that hasn’t provided a terrific platform for creating images that enhance the space significantly.
“Once you get the hang of it, it’s really very easy to use,” he explained. “You can apply it to almost any surface and the results, at least from a distance, look a lot like a painting. The only difference is that when you’re done, you can just peel the tape off.”
No question about it. I do actively emphasize the ease of use. The process of Tape Art has a wide range of advantages that make it uniquely suited for first-time users. Its ease of entry has made it a roaring success as a tool for actively engaging groups of people and fostering situations where people shed their preconceived notions about what it means to “draw.”
Tape does share some things in common with paint: both have the ability to leave a generous, opaque, one inch wide swath of color on a wall with a single swipe of the arm. They both sit on top of their canvases and have the capacity to be layered on really thickly. They are both mediums that have the capacity for boundless scale. That being said, their differences are also substantial.
Townsend began his tape-art career in the early 1990s, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design.
As we swing it now: Tape Art. Briefly, in the mid-nineties, for a couple of years we de-capitalized it to read as “tape art”, because we felt it looked good design-wise and projected a sense of humility. As we began to fully internalize that it was the one singular all-encompassing name that defined who we were, we adopted the capitalized version of it. We also made sure, since 1996, that we owned the trademark on the name so that it would not be adopted for commercial use by a company that would do no justice to the medium as a social tool.
Back then, he and his friends would stay up all night making tape-art murals on dorms and other campus buildings.
Ain’t this the truth. We made an outrageous amount of drawings. We redefined worker-bees and would go for months without missing a single night of transforming the spaces around us into grandiose and humorous stories for everyone to discover when they woke up.
One night they created a forest on the walls of the RISD cafeteria.
To be completely fair, we have created well over five hundred large-scale drawings since the late eighties in locations all over the United States and the world. I will admit to you that I can be accused of losing track of some of our offspring. I am almost completely positive we never brought our forest imagery into the cafeteria space. And this outpouring of flowers did in fact grace the walls of the cafeteria at one point.
Images that would be the closest fit to the description in the article are a meticulously rendered 360-degree forest scene that we rendered in a circular room at the Wood’s Gerry gallery.
Another night they drew giant zigzag patterns on the patio of RISD’s student center.
This one, I am at a complete loss for. For the most part, all of our work has a tendency to be rooted, as a starting place, in representational imagery. Though we absolutely love pattern making, those patterns are discovered from patterns we translate from nature. More than our fair share of time has been spent making grassy fields with willowy, thin, bending lines and splashes of vegetation, wrought with interpretation of leaf clusters. In the world of zigzag patterns, I can relate it to images like this:
Perhaps their most elaborate effort was a 50-foot maritime mural, complete with lashing waves, saber-rattling pirates and a life-size sailboat. Fittingly, the mural was emblazoned on the wall behind the “RISD Beach,” a favorite campus meeting place on College Hill.
This particular drawing held a unique place in a lot of people’s hearts because it was one of the first to really feel like it dominated an imposing vertical space. By making the effort to elevate the mast of a pirate ship five stories into the air, we started our journey toward conquering spaces instead of just drawing in them. I have to give a shout out to Blair De St. Croix, the head of the office of student life, for not only being one of our biggest advocates, but for being the angel donor who kept secretly providing us boxes of tape for our undercover nightly raids on the walls of Providence.
To create a tape-art mural, Townsend typically makes a rough pencil sketch, then begins “drawing” directly on whatever surface happens to be handy.
Not so much! I have intentionally shunned preliminary sketches for all Tape Art drawings. (In fact, I have a high school art teacher that would swear on a stack of Bibles that to his dismay I hated sketching before launching into massive projects!) Our process is based entirely on verbal communication and agreeing, as a group, on the direction a piece of artwork should go. It has always been my experience that working from highly rendered sketches reduces us from artists to human xerox machines attempting to scale a drawing to fit the proportions of a wall. We have been ultimately very satisfied with determining where the major structural elements of the drawing will occur, then allowing the drawing to dictate what happens next.
Because the painter’s tape he uses has a strong adhesive, it sticks to almost anything — glass, wood, metal, masonry. Yet because it’s easy to tear, it can be applied in almost any shape, from a straight line to a circle. “It’s a lot like drawing on a sheet of paper,” Townsend said.
The medium is great. Beyond being a great way to apply lines to a surface, one of the great thrills of the medium is as an instrument for imposing control and ownership over the world around you. You can draw on anything. Look around you. See that? That is something you can draw on.
Also, while teaching the principles of Tape Art and singling out some of the things that make it qualifiedly different from regular perceptions about drawing, I openly discuss the disadvantages of drawing on paper. Paper, traditionally, is a relatively small surface area and most of us associate the space that we are allowed to draw as an area that is 8.5 inches wide and 11 inches high. This is a phenomenally restrictive boundary to work in, whether people realize it or not. It is Tape Art’s ability to break completely free of that frame and replicate a scale that is natural and human that makes it so usable.
Since graduating from RISD in 1994, Townsend has created dozens of tape-art murals around the country.
This is what happens when you don’t put a rèsumè on your website. I graduated with a B.F.A. In Printmaking in 1993 and later returned to RISD to get my Masters in Art Education / Community Art. This is a small and ignorable factual hiccup. What can’t be ignored though is the under-reporting of the number of murals.
The active development of Tape Art as a method of communication has consumed the last two decades of my life. By just sheer volume, it can be reported, that I have worked on over five hundred large scale Tape Art drawings. It is difficult to put into perspective how much time I have spent drawing with tape. Heck, even the New York City September 11th Project was a five-year endeavor by its lonesome and accounts for tens of thousands of hours. Not to mention the time spent teaching Tape Art in classrooms all over the United States. Someone once calculated for me that if you took all the time I had spent pressing tape onto walls, and did it as one non-stop tape-a-thon, it would easily go for over a year straight and keep on going.
Beyond actively taping non-stop for a solid year of my life, I have dedicated countless hours to understanding Tape Art’s impact and potential. It is only important to clarify this, because I know so many artists who work laboriously, year after year without anyone recognizing the amount of work it takes to arrange to do the work. You have to take into account the time spent planning, writing, working the phones, and building websites. I know many artists, including myself, that have work schedules that demand 70- to 80-hour work weeks. The only individuals I have seen that work the sheer volume of hours we do are people at the highest end of the economic spectrum – for example, career-focused lawyers and doctors – and those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum – sweatshop laborers.
Many of them are documented on his web site, tapeart.com, and include everything from forests to nautical scenes to tape-art versions of famous artworks. (One of the most elaborate murals on tapeart.com is a copy of George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” a famous painting of fashionable Parisians lounging on the banks of the Seine.)
Once a year, for a few years, we dedicated a day to replicating famous artworks out of tape. You would be amazed how closely you have to look at a sculpture or painting to find a reasonable way to translate it through a medium that is primarily just opaque lines. On the website I included a photograph of one of these works. We always did works of art that we were big fans of and wanted to have an opportunity to spend more time with. And by making these ad-hoc replications, we made it abundantly clear to ourselves that the medium of tape was in its own ecosystem of image making and a long ways away from paint.
Hospitals — and especially children’s hospitals — are among Townsend’s biggest tape-art customers. “He’s fantastic,” says Paula Most, arts programming director for Lifespan, the health-care consortium that manages Rhode Island Hospital and Hasbro Children’s Hospital.
In 1997, we were discovered by Paula Most and brought in to make work in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. We suggested that we could work directly with patients and families in their rooms, as well as make a drawing in a highly trafficked common area that everyone would be able to enjoy.
The private work with the patients was fantastic. We decided to draw our communal artwork in the short hallway that serves at the single entrance to the PICU. As family, staff, patients, and visitors came through the doors, on the left would be a Tape Art drawing that would change two or three times a month. For the last fifteen years we have returned to that same wall, over and over and over and over again and made original Tape Art drawings for the PICU population. The content for the drawings are often inspired by direct requests from patients and families… but we do our best to provide an opportunity for the staff to have a say over the walls they surrounded by. We also work regularly in the Tomorrow Fund Cancer Clinic, as well with select patients that have been singled out as one’s that would benefit from having some control over their environment.
“He’s basically an overgrown kid, so he has no trouble bonding with the younger patients. And he’s extremely caring and considerate. I don’t know how many times families have told me that meeting Michael and watching him work helped get them through a very difficult time.” Townsend, who works mainly with young cancer patients in Hasbro’s pediatric oncology unit, said the experience had affected him deeply as well. “It’s obvious that these kids and their families are going through a lot,” he said. “To take their minds off their problems, even for a few minutes, is really a special feeling. In a way, I think it helps me keep my own problems and challenges in perspective. It keeps me balanced...”
The people who continually blow my mind are the staff at the hospital. Some of these people I have worked with/near for fifteen years. They have been pillars of consistency and serve patients with a seemingly unshakable compassion and perseverance. During our time working at the hospital, the Tape Art crew have borne witness to family scenarios and medical circumstances that are heartwrenching and occasionally earthshaking. We are only there one day a week and we have experiences that are so moving or emotionally draining that the rest of the day is spent in reflection. The staff there does this all day, every day. We are humbled by them constantly and are honored to have them as a gentle reminder every week of what it means to serve.
Another frequent outlet for Townsend’s tape-art skills: art museums. Last year, for instance, he led a group of artists on a week-long tape-art binge at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. The event was part of “Draw On!,” a community art-making project that attracted more than 2,000 art lovers, including students from more than a dozen public schools.
This was a fantastic collaboration with a museum that challenged our ideas about being public artists. For the most part, we make it a hard and set rule that we never make work in an interior space that is not accessible to the public or that someone has to pay to see. So far, 99.9 percent of the work we have done has easily fallen into the free and accessible category. With the town of Ridgefield, we found ourselves in an affluent community that had a downtown area of a few humble buildings. We proposed a model to the museum of making custom-made drawings inside the houses of their museums’ patrons – and documenting the results for an exhibit at the museum, accompanied by the tape used in the murals. We were also assigned locations that were not residential housing and made drawings in a few schools, a grocery store, and at GE’s global learning center.
The Aldrich project also brought an unexpected windfall for Townsend. While working on the project, he was approached by representatives from General Electric, the Connecticut-based conglomerate that makes everything from washing machines to jet engines. They explained that GE operated an executive training center in the nearby town of Crotonville, N.Y., and that the company was looking for a way to teach its executives how to work together creatively. Would Townsend be willing to give a tape-art demonstration for GE’s executives-in-training?
There at Crontonville they have their global education center for all of GE. Whenever they want to do some top tier training and professional development of their future leaders, those employees are sent out to this magnificent campus on 57 acres of woodland north of Manhattan. On this campus we have witnessed one of the most active, progressive, and thoroughly thought out curriculums and teaching that I have ever seen. Being an educator who loves looking at my own practice and fretting over how it can be improved or assessed, this place is a dream come true. They never stop trying to improve. We have introduced Tape Art collaborative drawing exercises in a variety of different fashions as a way to supplement their existing curriculums.
Townsend said the visit went so well he was asked back again this year. “They really got into it,” he said. “Basically, I give a short demonstration — a sort of Tape Art 101. Then they divided up into teams and created their own tape-art murals.”
This must be said! Every time we go there, we see these adult-professionals use the medium of tape in a way we have never seen. We always see a genuinely great drawing from all these self-declared “non-drawers.” We are delighted to work with them and it continues to be a fascinating challenge.
When he’s not planning a new tape-art project, Townsend usually can be found sitting in front of a bank of computers in his Monohasset Mill studio. His goal: killing zombies.
To be fair to the entire bank of computers, they are all not dedicated to the purposes of vanquishing the zombie hordes. Some of them are quite happy to just process photographs and videos and make websites. Though, I know secretly, that given the chance they would dedicate all of their wonderful electronic innards to fighting in the lofty and endless zombie missions.
In fact, while Townsend’s mall-squatting and tape-art exploits have garnered plenty of attention, his biggest claim to fame may be as the top-ranked zombie hunter on “Call of Duty: Black Ops,” an online video game that allows players to switch from the main World War II-era storyline into something called “Zombie Mode.”
Zombie fame is an entirely different kettle of fish. The attention that the mall project got captured the imagination of a lot of different media outlets around the world and spoke a tremendously wide demographic. The story reached out through magazines, television, radio, and newspapers. Video game fame is oddly anonymous and exists in a closed circuit, seen by millions globally, but through very few outlets.
In “Zombie Mode,” players team up to defeat a horde of zombies who inhabit a decaying Nazi-era opera house. For the past few months, Townsend, playing under the online name “FB-com-zombieUSA,” has held the world record for zombie kills, according to the “Call of Duty” web site. That puts him ahead of more than 500,000 other “Call of Duty” players worldwide.
Call of Duty is one of the most popular video games in the entire world. The latest installment “Black Ops” made over 365 million dollars on the first day it went on sale and within a month and a half passed the billion mark. A lot of people play it. For the online game play there are leader boards that record every player who has ever played and creates a global ranking system. When you play the game, you know exactly where you stand against the entire planet of players. When I first got into the top 70,000 out of 9,500,000 players I felt like I had really accomplished something. Then it dawned on me, wait a minute! Does that mean there are 69,999 better players than me around the world? So, I started to figure out how to be the best - got a teammate, Willie Austin from Memphis, and the two of us, with a little support from our friends, are pretty unstoppable. Record-breaking games take around 50 hours to play with no pauses. The “500,000” number quoted in the article is just how many players are online 24 hours a day trying to break the global records.
Townsend said he began playing the game as a way coping with the death of his father, a former Marine, last year. “Last year was a very tough year for me,” he said. “My dad was one of my biggest supporters, and losing him hit me pretty hard. There was a while there where I just didn’t feel like going out, so I basically taught myself to play video games. It turns out I’m pretty good at it.”
I guess if you had to paraphrase the connection between these two things, in two sentences, this is a pretty solid way of doing it. To be a little more frank about it, last year our family experienced seven deaths in less than six months. It was a clearing-house of rolling grief and surprise. In my world, three of the four members of my family that I regularly turned to for support, guidance, inspiration and grounding – my dad, my grandmother, and my great-aunt – passed away. It is really tough not having these people around and I can only describe their absence as one that creates a state of “rudderlessness.” (In our very small family, this leaves a very small total for three generations: one aunt and uncle, my mom, my brother, his wife, and their two kids. That’s the whole gang now. Three generations fit into a van easily. That sucker goes over a cliff and two family lines come to an end.)
The passing of my father caught everyone off guard. Heart attack. Reeling from the experience, and deep into new uncharted territories, I am learning what to do with myself. It has been a fascinating time period. My father was a person who essentially acted as a one-person fan club with such love and persistence that I was never hard pressed for an insightful word or blind encouragement. The connection to electronic games is, I admit, a bit tenuous. He brought home a Pong Video System in 1977 and introduced me the world of video games, competition, having a crazy amount of fun, and enjoying the company of your fellow player. While he never played video games once his sons were grown, I found myself drawn in his absence toward the ease and immediacy of the social interactions provided by online video games. Any time, 24 hours a day, you can turn it on and participate in an act of teamwork with someone else who is sharing some of the same goals that you have. The better you are, the more you are an asset to a team. It’s nice to feel wanted even in a virtual environment.
And since my dad instilled in me the thrill of being the best you can be at whatever you undertake, and I am pretty sure he would be delighted out of his mind that I managed to turn sitting on a couch grieving into a laboratory for excelling at something! Having found some ballast, I am at present segueing screens and moving from the Playstation to the newly acquired laptop – on which I will start writing the things that should be written, starting with this.
