Out of the Gallery, into the Street
Each moment is a slice of time that can not be recaptured or revisited. Each slice of time contains a truth. For some, that truth is art. That said, tripping over a moment of truth on a wet Saturday lunchtime in April outside the Bod perhaps wasn’t quite what the artist had had in mind. It was certainly a soggy truth: the dramatic contrast of white cube and black charcoal smudging to pavement grey, a comment on the bland nondescript nature of modern life. No doubt.
A man wielding brochures and controlling the crowd of me and openly staring passers-by explained that this was Jordan Mckenzie’s performance installation called ‘Untitled: At Arms Length’. It wouldn’t have been easy to guess, but the size of the cube was the cubed space of the artist’s arm, which he intended to push (it was on wheels) around the streets of Oxford creating as he went some sort of pattern of the city’s architecture.
True to his word, after some time kneeling and lying on the cube drawing on its sides, he got up and pushed it all the way down Broad Street and into Cornmarket. Mckenzie’s installation was part of the VENT Live Art Residency Programme at OVADA (the Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency) in which twenty artists took up residence in Oxford for a programme of installations, ending April 30th.
28th Apr 2005