September 3–10, 1998

cover story|fringe festival

Street Seen

The Visual Fringe brings public art to Old City.

by Robin Rice

		Good Visuals: A detail from Nmesh, a multimedia installation by Carolyn Healy and John Phillips at 141 N. 2nd St., part of the Visual Fringe

Last year the Fringe Festival was very visible, but it didn't have much of a visual arts component. Lots of people wanted things to be different this year, so producing director Nick Stuccio contacted artist and writer Joan Smith to coordinate the Visual Fringe (Sept. 8-20 throughout Old City).

"The idea," says Smith, "is not to hang work on a wall behind a velvet rope."

An informal call for proposals generated plenty of responses. One artist who was asked to participate is Richard Torchia. The expenses on his Piece for Public Pay Phones are being picked up by the New Quarry Café (147 N. Third), which Smith now owns (when she began planning the Visual Fringe project she was not a restaurant owner). The café is a center for information about the Visual Fringe; it's also the center of Torchia's piece. Two telephones installed there will be linked—three apiece—with pay telephones around Old City. The location of the pay phones is posted beside the telephones in the cafe, and visitors can dial any of the numbers. Will the telephone be answered? If so, what will you say to your unknown respondent?

Some artists who are participating in the Visual Fringe don't want their audience to be over-prepared. Nicholas Muellner, who is part of the CONTEXT Project co-curated by Gerard Brown and Ann Raman and centered in Nexus Gallery, is reluctant to pre-release details about his taped walking tour describing an obscure 20th-century art movement. (See this week's First Friday Focus for more on the CONTEXT Project.) Robert Nesbit, whose stamped painted metal signs exactly reproduce the format of city signs communicating parking regulations, has not divulged the specifics of the texts from Aeschylus' The Libation Bearers he has chosen to express the "anxiety and guilt" of the Philadelphia parking experience. Even more mysteriously, installation artist and photographer Vida told Smith about her plans, "The less said, the better."

While some works may be difficult to identify as art, others will be impossible to ignore. Like Billy Ehret's enormous balloon Action Figures, to be suspended between the second and third stories of buildings at 138, 147 and 156 North Third St. Smith describes the fan-inflated works as "action figure bodies with giant baby heads with big dough eyes—a little scary and a little playful at the same time."

Projections are scheduled for after-dark hours on the facade of 139 N. Third St. (Silicon Gallery building). Thomas Gartside is showing Killers and Army Men which includes close-up portraits of plastic toy figurines. Michael O'Reilly is also showing a video projection connected with his multimedia installation at Eastern State Penitentiary.

Audience and artists are one with the Philadelphia Dumpster Divers and Creative Artists' Resource Project (CARP). The group invites everyone to participate in building The Ark/Arc of the Divers. Bring your cordless drill or hand tools and found objects to the Northeast corner of Elfreth's Alley and Second Street from Sept. 1-19 and contribute to this evolving work. On Sept. 9, the Ark will parade to the Please Take M.E. Materials Exchange (340 N. 12th St., 7 p.m.) to publicize an auction of Sustainable Art and Treasures from the Trash. The idea of Sustainable Art is for artists and people who collect things from trash to exchange one object for another and support the reuse of materials.

This is just a sampling of the interactive, site-specific, mobile, indoor, outdoor, silly, spiritual, oddball art events on the Visual Fringe. Additional artists include Carolyn Healy and John Phillips, Esther Schooler, and Buy Shaver. "We have no intention of this project turning into a commercial 'art festival,'" Smith emphasizes. "The grittiness and wholesale business are part of this neighborhood's charm for me."