The day of the presentation, I set up four different easels, displaying the final products from each of the locations. The easels stood next to a computer monitor, where the footage of soliciting people to paint and their processes of painting played in real time. My fellow ActLabbies were encouraged to walk around the space, viewing both the final art pieces and the video that tracked their creation.

Observations

I noticed a few peculiar trends during this quasi-sociological experiment.

Nearly 90% of the time, if there was a woman walking with a man, the woman would always defer to her companion and encourage him to participate before she did.

People are interested in money. Several Austinites asked if they had to pay to paint. One gentlemen on 6th St. demanded that I pay him money to paint. I paid him a few bucks, and he painted Jesus. When I asked if he minded being videotaped, he requested $20. I went elsewhere.

People tended to respect others' space. Surprisingly, people were careful not to paint or draw over someone else's work, even though they had no contact with the previous artists. Perhaps everyone is familiar with the unspoken codes of artists' courtesy.

An ACC cinematography student paints a Rose while we're stationed on 6th St. and San Jacinto. We attract a crowd, and people are dressed up for Halloween. She and her friend, after chatting with my roommate and me, invite us to spend Halloween evening with them by watching Shaun of the Dead and making cupcakes. Unsure if they are serious about the offer, my roommate and I change the subject.

The Case of the Greyhound

I began this project hoping I would get a varied sample of people. I went to the Greyhound staion, believing I would involve those other than the predominately white, upper-middle class, college-educated demographic I had encountered in the other three locations.

The Theory

In this project, I wanted to explore ways of thinking about the spaces we inhabit differently than we usually do. Going to different places in Austin allowed me to think of the city in terms of variations of artistic expression, rather than their geographic location.

This project was largely inspired by the essay written by Roland Barthes in the late sixties, "The Death of the Author." In the article, he argues against looking at biographical information of the author as a way to access the works he/she produces. Not too long after Barthes's essay was published, Michel Foucault continued Barthes's idea, and called into question the extent to which we can assume an individual author, or auteur.

In doing an exercise like this, I deprivilege myself as an author of any art. I am not responsible for the paintings; they are instead the labor of many random people. And the extent to which they can even lay claim to some kind of authorship is debateable since we all borrow from each other knowingly, or unknowingly.

The work in progress at Red Bud dog park. A pack of dogs nearly knocked down the easel. And about an hour into the session, we realized we were stationed near a huge pile of dog shit.

I left the Greyhound station with a zero success rate and a blank canvas. This led me to think about how certain groups of people are often made invisible—not necessarily intentionally so—and how we might be able to correct for that. This is certainly a central question for art and theory that we should keep working on.

IIf I had had more time to work on the project, and if I had a vehicle, I would have gone to several more locations. I'm hopeful that there will be a part two some time.