Sometime last fall, I left Bella and her friend Dawkins to nurse a hot chocolate with my sister in a cafe while I kept on scanning the galleries in Chelsea. As usual, they had had their fill and I was just getting started.
I wandered into Jack Shainman Gallery and came upon something that intrigued me. It looked like some kind of a schedule on regular printer paper. There were rows for the days of the week and columns for the hours of a work day. It was only partially completed with initials in the earlier boxes, and each of the initials was in different handwriting – like the initials of the people who check and clean a public restroom every hour. The title was Jack Shainman Gallery Hours – and it was framed. Having spent my requisite 30 seconds in front of the piece I moved on to the plinth in the middle of the same room.
Again, I was perplexed. There was a small box of tiny manila envelopes, the kind single keys often come in, a clear piggy bank (in the shape of a piggy, of course) half-filled with gold coins and a small plaque that said, Please ask the gallery attendant about today’s coin. Generally I avoid speaking to gallery attendants (very unlike my friend Heather, co-owner of Patricia Faure Gallery, who pledges to make a friend before she enters any gallery), but that day I had just enough curiosity and gumption to walk up to the attractive gallery attendant of indeterminate ethnicity and ask about “today’s coin.” She bobbed her head and said, Oh yes, I’ll get that for you right away.
She grabbed a ring of keys and with an exceedingly friendly smile, led me back to the plinth. Then she promptly took the framed schedule off the wall, slide the schedule out, marked out two squares and asked me to initial in the Friday, November 11, 12-1 box. Me?? My initials were suddenly going to be part of the piece? I was thrilled.
It got better.
She unlocked the plinth and took out both the piggy bank and tiny manila envelopes. I could now see that each one was sealed. She opened two of them, tipped out a coin from each and dropped them into the piggy bank. Then she handed me the third tiny envelope and said, This is for you. I opened it to find a gold coin that said simply, Micah Lexier. Turned out that nobody, not a single person had asked about “today’s coin” prior to me that day, so both coins were stashed in the piggy bank. The piggy contained a coin for every hour that work had existed and been ignored during gallery business hours during the course of the show.
With a single line of directions, an entire chain of human events were set into motion that I could have never foreseen. I was pushed out of my normal distant art-viewing mode, into a relationship with a stranger and then also given a gift from an artist I had never met. I was so pleased with the gift that it has sat on my computer ever since.
Now I find that the same Micah Lexier participated in the show As Told To: structures for conversation curated by Daina Augustis at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre just four years prior to Janet Cardiff’s residency there. He is also the co-editor of Sound by Artists (which I can never find, because I keep forgetting that the title is written in braille) which was published only a year before Cardiff’s first audio walk.
What is this Banff Centre – some kind of Xavier’s school for Gifted Youngsters, except for Canadian artists involved in sound and human relations?
here’s the proof.