The windy city survived an inflatable invasion. After a little hold up in traffic I exited the East Monroe Parking Garage around 12:04 with my suit and battery pack in hand. Stephanie Anderson of Time Out Chicago met me at Grant Park with her camera. She followed along snapping pictures for most of the performance and put up a nice photo gallery on The TOC Blog. As I started to inflate You Wear What I Wear a passerby, Brad Bretz, asked if it was an art project, to which I replied, “Sure, why not?” He decided to tag along with his camera and put up a Flickr gallery of photos from the performance. I popped into the suit and crossed Monroe over to the Art Institute’s new Modern building where some school children were having lunch. They soon forgot about food as I bounced past the large glass windows. Many of the children jumped from their seats and ran back and forth with me along the length of the windows.
Andrew Hickey, a baker and photographer, caught up with the commotion on Michigan Avenue. Andrew and I missed each other in Grand Rapids during ArtPrize, so I really enjoyed meeting him during the Chicago performance. He also brought his camera and put up a nice Flickr photo set. Early into the performance a group of teenage boys asked if they could pass out my business cards. They did a good job handing them to every person on the sidewalk. The streets of Chicago had a lot of pedestrians which meant that try as I may we were going to bump into each other. Most took this extremely well and enjoyed the experience laughing and smiling. A friendly police officer even asked if I needed any help navigating traffic.
Nothing stood in my way including buses, scaffolding, street signs, stairs, fire hydrants, subway entrances or shoppers’ heads. I bumped into them all. Upon sight of the suit bums stopped jingling their coin cups and stared with a puzzled smile on their faces. Even a street shouter droning on about the wretched state of the economy took a reprieve to exercise his grinning muscles. In various restaurants spoons full of soup paused on the way to their respective happy owners’ mouths. Traveling along the line between the shocking and the absurd the performance was not categorizable and therefore penetrated the thought patterns of the audience allowing for new human connections and interactions. I had a lot of fun too.
