Love Buttons, 2008
Designed as a participatory event for festival-goers attending a rhythm and blues festival on Sunday afternoon, Love Buttons employed poetic language and evocative text fragments to disperse a sea of poetry into a crowd of 4,000 festival-goers. Love Buttons connected participants and the site through chance encounters and linguistic associations to spark a collective contemplation on love.
Buttons were given to attendees as they entered the festival grounds. A button might say You under-punctuate m.e, or beauti-fully, or RADIATE. Pinned on shirts, hats, and bags, festival-goers might notice somebody else wearing the same button or a mate to their button; or two people may decide to exchange different buttons with one another. Additionally many festival-goers engaged with the three Have More Love carts: They could exchange some love - exchange their button for one of 45 different messages; buy more love - buy longer poems comprised of several other button messages; or make more love - borrow a Frisbee that says hover over me. If they played with the frisbee long enough, they got to keep it. The patterns of connection inherent in the poetic language were also reflected in a smattering of signs (large versions of the buttons themselves) mounted to lampposts across the festival grounds. The more than 9,000 buttons distributed begin as a kind of wearable art, which then become a kind of public art that ended up being both interactive and performative in nature.
Love Buttons took place during the Sunday A’Fair Arts Festival on April 6, 2008 on the grounds of the Scottsdale Civic Center Mall in Scottsdale, AZ.The Scottsdale Civic Center Mall is home to Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture. In creating Love Buttons, I was inspired to engage in a conceptual conversation with Indiana’s work. The project is multi-authored with assistance from an informal collective of poets and Spork Press in Tucson, AZ.
5-hour public art/relational art event, April 6, 2008
Sunday A’Fair Arts Festival, Scottsdale Public Art/Scottsdale Civic Center Mall, Scottsdale, AZ