An Open Day
Right in the middle of Chicago’s urban grid, between delivery trucks, passers-by, taxi cabs, and countless business activities, the Red Ball raises. Framed by a beautiful gate, it is the only round form in sight, once again challenging the normality of the everyday landscape.
Even though plenty of folks already know about the Red Ball Project, we find ourselves bombarded with questions and curiosity. Throughout the day, I hear people talking and commenting on what they think. Now and then, someone with a lack of interest or even kind of angry brings are attention with a “this is not art”. Well, I don’t really know what people are thinking, what is art or what it is not. What I can tell, however, is that it is surprising how much time people are taking to engage with the work, how much time they devote to it: looking at it, touching it, jumping against it, taking photos, adding things to it, imagining it as a stage for something else, etc.
I have to say that “normally”, in a museum or a gallery, I don’t recall so many people appreciating some work and spending more than a minute, maybe two, in front of it. As an artist, that itself is telling to me: there is something in the Red Ball that engages the audience in a different way. People feel free to negotiate the work, to define it in their own terms. There is no institutional context pushing a preconceived understanding or a disciplined behavior. It is in the unexpected encounter of the work and the public that art, in this case, happens. Purschke’s Red Ball is, in the terms of Umberto Eco, an “Opera Aperta” (an open work), waiting to be discovered and redefined by each of its audiences, whether they like it or not, as soon as they decide to ignore, question, interact or appropriate it. It stands there, staring at us as a big red round question: what do you want me to be?
-Monica H. (RB Assistant)
