Project
Love Buttons Series, 2008
Love Buttons is a conceptual project designed to spark contemplations on love. Sale initiates this process by going public with poetic language and evocative text fragments, in drawings on paper, in the exchange of campaign-style buttons, and in text printed on large aluminum signs. Such a text fragment might say You under-punctuate m.e, or beauti-fully, or RADIATE.
People can interact with the project in various forms. Someone might be given a button at a public event and then notice that somebody else is wearing the same button; two people may decide to exchange different buttons with one another. Others might experience the project by viewing the drawings in a gallery. Still others may unexpectedly encounter the large aluminum signs installed in a plaza or incongruously interspersed among street signs.
Within a community context, Love Buttons connects participants through chance encounters and linguistic associations. Imagine Love Buttons dispersing a sea of poetry into a crowd of festival-goers, a community of art lovers, a neighborhood. In its manifestation as campaign-style buttons, Love Buttons might first take the form of a gift or an event ticket (a commodity). The buttons are then a kind of wearable art, which then becomes a kind of public art, both interactive and performative in nature.
Organizations and institutions presenting Love Buttons include Scottsdale Public Art Program; Glendale Arts; UC Santa Cruz, CA; Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; and MOCA Tucson. On a Sunday afternoon in April 2008, Love Buttons engaged approximately 4,000 festival-goers attending a rhythm-and-blues festival in Scottsdale, AZ, by gifting more than 9,000 buttons as attendees entered the festival grounds. Second in the series, Stuck on You dispersed a sea of poetry into a crowd of 13,000 festival-goers attending the Glendale, AZ Jazz and Blues Festival through distributing 14,600 stickers. A third, smaller variation, Butt ins, took place as part of the conference Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Social Art Practice at UC Santa Cruz, May 2008. For the summer exhibition at Lisa Sette Gallery, components of Love Buttons will be accompanied by a participatory event co-sponsored by Scottsdale Public Art for the 2008 Spectacular Summer Artwalk. In Fall 2008, the project will be presented at MOCA Tucson in part to recognize the informal collective of poets and Spork Press in Tucson, AZ whom contributed to the language of the project.
The Scottsdale Civic Center Mall, where the project debuted, is home to a Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture. In creating Love Buttons, Sale was inspired to engage in a conceptual conversation with Indiana’s work. Sale developed the project series while on artist residencies at Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY, 2006 and at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2007.