among friends

We chatted with Nao again this week. We didn’t get to pretend we were in Paris, because iChat (and thus its special effects) weren’t working. But we had a very productive talk on Skype, and now we’d like to fill you in.

We couldn't play with the special effects, but Nao played with her funky hat.

Plans for the comfort station are coming along. Nao found warming heart gel packs for soothing purposes (click Read More to see). For the station itself, we want a cabana lean-to; the icon could be a red cross tilted to an X. Before Nao gets here, we’ll put together a questionnaire asking Haverfordians what their worries are. We’ll have a big sewing party to make fanny packs; Nao had the idea to make origami flowers from dollar bills and cover them with Velcro dots.

Nao with the warming gel hearts.

Nao talked about documenting the comfort station—any photographers or filmmakers out there? But, she said, the art is in the performance itself; the documentation is nothing more than that, a record of the art. This reminded us of our conceptual art class with John Muse. We are constantly asking the question, where is the art?

Nao said that the art happens in different places for everybody. In The Chain South (where she went to different McDonald’s across the country dressed as Ronaldo McDonaldo and demanded a free burger), for her, the art was in the form of some imaginary guy at McDonald’s headquarters tracking her steps with pushpins.

“I didn’t even know if it happened,” she said. “The art is mysterious,” she explained. “Why make art if you know the outcome? Just make the product.”

It’s what we plan on doing.