I have always found 14th Street to be a constantly evolving everchanging street experience in my life. As a lifelong New Yorker, I have observed its changing history. When I was growing up, my mother took me to the bargain hunter’s paradise, opposite Union Square Park, Klein’s department store, with its frenzy of shoppers, slopping floors, and the pretzel seller at the door. To this day New Yorkers wistfully recount their purchases from Klein’s. My father often brought home some household gadget he had purchased from a 14th street curbside vendor demonstrating its usefulness in sideshow style. I can’t recall if we ever really used these purchases. Union Square Park and its demonstrations figured prominently in my life too with my radical Italian American father talking about demonstrating in the Union Square Park against the execution of the Rosenbergs.
As someone who has performed in six Art in Odd Places (AiOP) festivals and curated AiOP 2019: INVISIBLE, I know every inch of 14th Street. In 2009, fascinated about the evolution of 14th Street, I researched and wrote a newspaper The Fourteenth Street Tribune distributing free copies as the 14th Street NewsBoy for AiOP 2009: SIGN, detailing its history and such facts that both Macy’s and the Metropolitan Museum began at locations on 14th Street.
For fourteen years, Art in Odd Places has inhabited 14th Street from river to river adding to the energy and tempo of the 14th Street landscape. In March of 2020, New Yorkers went into lockdown. For the first time AiOP didn’t take place in the month of October. Our lives became restrictive, and we all questioned when we would return to what we call NORMAL. Intimate artistic energy was missing from our lives—we could only dwell on Zoom. Finally, AiOP brought this vital energy back in May with AiOP 2021: NORMAL, curated by artist Furusho von Puttkammer with 100 artists questioning and challenging the meaning of NORMAL.
Returning to 14th Street after my enforced lockdown wearing a mask—I viewed the new NORMAL of street life including the demise of many local businesses. One of these was the especially beloved Rags-Au-Go Go at 218 West 14th Street. Rags’ owner Joshua Suzanne closed up shop and took off for Florida.
Photo: LuLu LoLo
Rags-Au-Go Go had become the Command Center for AiOP, hosting our Friday night opening pizza parties and Joshua Suzanne was always there to support the AiOP artists.
Photo: Paul Takeuchi
Walking in New York City one always notices the random quirkiness of the public actions on the street. AiOP always adds to that mosaic of the unpredictable and it becomes a NORMAL occurrence.
Making my way on 14th Street, I spotted chalk markings on the sidewalk—they are not proclamations of X loves Y or drawings of flowers, but careful deliberate patterns of labyrinths that continue along the street.
Photo: LuLu LoLo
I venture upon a pilgrimage along a labyrinth path. Up ahead I see someone kneeling on the sidewalk, chalk in hand, and with a few strokes another labyrinth appears on the sidewalk.
Photo: Josef Pinlac
Immediately I have visions of the great labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral in France, appearing in miniature on 14th Street. Not stopping with one labyrinth, Chris Kaczmarek, an artist who sees “the act of walking as a praxis for artistic production,” continues drawing one hundred labyrinths every one fifth of the mile along the two-mile length of 14th Street, moving quickly and with determined purpose. “Labor Lines: The Work of Contemplation” is a performance of “endurance and repetition”. It is comforting in this time of unpredicatableness to see this simple repetitive act of “resolute production.” It brings to mind the scrawls of the cave paintings—leaving a mark that we are here on this journey of discovery on 14th Street.
Suddenly a striking vision appears coming towards me. Is this the new NORMAL required Pandemic attire? Should not this fabulous persona be on the cover of Vogue? I encounter Gretchen Vitamvas, “Modern Plague Doctor”, images of beneficial herbs and phrases: “I’ll be fine” “Garlic 3-5 times” “How are you?” adorn her protective outfit.
Photo: Chloe Evan
Photo: Chloe Evans
The “Modern Plaque Doctor” offers me a prescription for Stinging Nettle Urticaria dioica. At the bottom of her pants legs (as if they are sticking to her) are images of the stinging nettles that you often find in the woods. I soon learn that this prickly plant will help restore my body’s overall energy and vitality, much needed after being in lockdown all these days.
The clock on top of her hat highlights my own insomnia, hourly marking my own nightly rituals of insomnia:
12: in bed reading, dozing off, put the book down, wide awake
1: still awake
Photo: Jonathan Bumble
The “Modern Plaque Doctor” instinctively knows all my Pandemic ailments and how to cure them, handing me a poem that captures my nocturnal musings:
“New York, I miss you.
Since you’ve been sleeping
I’ve been sleeping less.
Counting down the hours.
Sometimes almost to oblivion and then
Yanked back to consciousness like my
body is afraid to let go.
Night can bring dark thoughts.”
As I bid the “Modern Plaque Doctor” goodbye, I feel much healthier.
At the corner of Seventh Avenue, Georgia Lale, attired in a hospital gown with non-slip hospital socks on her feet, creates an intense oasis of vulnerable isolation, determination, and strength that captures a transfixed sidewalk audience. As she methodically handwashes the hospital gowns she wore during her one-week home isolation during her treatment with radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer plus the gowns donated by health professionals and well-cured Covid-19 patients.
Photo: LuLu LoLo
In this durational performance, she silently washes and wrings out each gown, holding them aloft above her head, and then cloaks herself in the garment—continually repeating the ritual. Her handwashing in public evokes the ancient gathering of women washing clothes in villages worldwide.
Photo: LuLu LoLo
This act of washing by hand affords Lale the opportunity to take control and cleanse her body of the toxins of radioactive iodine and cancer. As a cancer survivor myself I understand the need for this ritual.
The words that appear on the gowns are mottos of the four states that were hit the hardest by the pandemic: In God We Trust (Florida), Eureka (California), State Sovereignty, National Union (Illinois), and Friendship (Texas).
Photo: LuLu LoLo
This “Public Cleansing” performance addresses our national healthcare crisis beyond the Covid-19 pandemic bringing attention to the lack of treatment available to people with financial difficulties or because of their immigration status. For Lale this work’s central element is “the vulnerability of the body and the individual against viruses, diseases, and chaotic, impersonal cities like New York City.”
Chris Kaczmarek, Gretchen Vitamvas, and Georgia Lale have once again in the spirit of Art in Odd Places brought creativity, energy, and thought-provoking work to the public space of 14th Street—capturing this time in all our lives where we grapple with “NORMAL.”
