Alan Kaprow

(Footnotes on the way)

Aspects of the Portable City have been deeply influenced by the thoughts and creativity of Allan Kaprow, who was especially well know for creating art experiences based in real time and he possessed an interest systems of exchange and storytelling.

For Allan, the modernist practice of art was more than the production of artworks; it also involved the artists disciplined effort to observe, engage, and interpret the process of living .

Portable City follows the tradition of using art as an experience and it is a reflection and a celebration of the philosophy set in place by Allan Kaprow. Allan was influenced by the writings and musing of John Dewey.

In his book, Art as Experience, Dewey states that experience occurs continuously, because the interaction of the live creature and the envi roning conditions is involved in the very process of living. In an experience things, and events belonging to the world, physical and social, are transformed through the human context they enter, while the live creature is changed and developed through this interaction with things previously external to it.-John Dewey

In Kaprow's art activity called Trading Dirt (1983), Allan began by offering a bucket of dirt to someone in exchange for theirs.

Anecdotes accompanied the trades, which took place every now and then for nearly three years. It occurred to him that it might be fun to trade buckets of dirt with unsuspecting, or somewhat suspicious, others. He would dig a buckets worth of dirt from his garden and place it, along with a shovel, in the back of his pickup truck.

Kaprow integrated storytelling as an aspect of the work: as part of the exchange that occurred between people, he told his trading partners an aspect of the journey of trading buckets of dirt, a tale of people and place,of where and a story of how he'd gotten this or that bucketful, where it had come from, what (or who) was in it, who he'd traded with to get it, and the like.

Like Trading Dirt , the Portable City builds a story that based on the poetry of everyday experiences, and realities of human exchange, both projects are about t making connection, and about integrating art with life and experience.

In the long term through the "building" of Trading Dirt, Allan Kaprow created dialogue. Portable City will also attempt to create a dialogue and tell a story about the experience of building that dialogue.