Saturday, August 27, 2011

Chain Slaw Skip Diving


Whew! Just finished marathon three-day deinstall of Chain Letter. Many stories and interesting photos to come, possibly in print-on-demand book form. My favorite moment came on on the second day. The scruffy but amiable gent pictured here is noted LA performance artist Skip Arnold, whose contribution -- after standing in line for a couple of hours -- was to remove and leave his Austrian cowboy boots. He arrived in his socks to retrieve them, but they had been in the F1 space, which had been deinstalled the day before -- like many, Skip hadn't got the email with the revised deinstallation times.

We searched through the stuff Christian and I had rescued, and looked through the scraps left in F1 to no avail. Skip wasn't too distraught, but wanted to check the dumpster. We thought the dumpster had been emptied, but in fact the art had just been buried by black bags full of oozing restaurant garbage. Hooray! And there, very close to the top, were Skip's boots. He shook them off, slipped them on, and strode off into the west. God bless you, Mr. Skippy! And thanks for contributing to the magic that was Chain Letter!

Photo by Christian Cummings

No comments: