PEOPLE
Jason Hackenwerth prepares a balloon sculpture for ArtPrize.
(Photo by Jennifer Guerra)
Grand Rapids, MI Practically every square inch of real estate in downtown Grand Rapids is being transformed into an art venue. Churches, bars, even the river that runs through the city -- it's all fair game.
Jason Hackenwerth is from New York. He got to Grand Rapids a week ago and since then he's pretty much been living at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art. It's this funky warehouse-type gallery on the outskirts of town. When I caught up with him, he was standing in the middle of the space with his shoes off and a big, white garbage bag tied to one of the belt loops on his jeans. Inside the bag? Balloons.
"The long skinny kind that you would think of poodles, but I put thousands of them together to make huge forms that people think look like sea creatures," says Hackenwerth.
Hackenwerth calls them balloon sculptures. The one he's making for ArtPrize is a 20-foot-tall, red and pink sea creature type thing with zillions of balloon tentacles. It's called The Ecstasy of the Scarlett Empress. But that's not all he's gonna do to try to win the $250,000 grand prize. He's also armed with a serious strategy.
"Our plan is to go all over the place. You name it," he says. "We want to use a gym facility and do a sculpture there to meet all the people who are using that fitness center, we want to go to the mall and do an appearance there and try to meet everyone there to convince them to take the imitative to come down here, look at the work, and cast a vote. So it truly is a real campaign in every sense of the word."
He's even making giant, multi-colored balloon costumes for volunteers to wear around the city in order to get attention, and, hopefully, votes.
"If I have my way I'm going to get my friends on a bus and bring lots of people in," says Hackenwerth.
I found Julio Gomez sipping espresso outside a coffeeshop downtown. Gomez is a musician, and while the competition is open to musicians, he decided not to enter. He calls it a "popularity contest." Still, he's got lots of opinions about it.
"I think I know who's gonna win," says Gomez. "Rob Bliss. Rob Bliss will win. Hands down. Well, he's dropping 100,000 paper airplanes off this building down the street here. 100,000 rainbow color paper airplanes. And as far as art goes, it's okay. But as a spectacle, it's great. There's gonna be lots of kids, lots of people coming down to see it, everybody's gonna remember it. And he's gonna win. He's also super, super popular."
He's not kidding -- Bliss has thousands of fans on Facebook. And he's a local. All around Grand Rapids he's known as the event guy. He's organized city-wide balloon tosses, pillow fights, and zombie walks.
I caught up with Rob Bliss at his tiny apartment downtown. And he put to me work making yup a paper airplane.
"I wanted to do something where I made it rain something from above, I wanted to do something that of course involved thousands of people, something that was very colorful, that got lots of people to play music together," says Bliss.
Here's where the music part comes in: Bliss' paper airplanes have a bit of notation of them. It's the melody of a song called "Olsen Olsen," by the Icelandic band Sigur Ros. The idea just came to him one day.
"I was just laying on my bedroom floor and just listening to it and you know this big melody hits near the end of the song and it was just an epiphany," he says, "and it was like oh my god, this is what I have to do!"
An airplane floats down, someone picks it up, reads the music and hums or plays along. At least that's the hope. Bliss expects a couple thousand people to people to show up at his event, which, most likely, will translate into a couple thousand votes for Bliss.
Not every artist in Grand Rapids has such a brilliant audience-development plan. Tanya Aguiniga came to town from Los Angeles.
"I'm a little bit nervous because I don't know anybody and this gallery is relatively new, so they don't have a big mailing list or anything like that," says Aguiniga.
For her ArtPrize entry, Aguiniga is hand-felting chairs originally made in Michigan.
Felting is hard work. She drapes raw wool over a chair so it looks like a fuzzy monster, and then she takes some soapy water and rubs it down until it looks like the chair is covered in moss. Each chair takes over 20 hours to felt. She's been stuck in the gallery. Felting. She hasn't had time to collect fans on Facebook or update her blog.
"I'm hoping that the installation's just gonna be fantastic and everybody's gonna want to see it, hear about it, word of mouth or something. But we'll see what happens," she says.
Hugo Claudin, who has been a painter in Grand Rapids for 30 years, says, "The idea of people voting -- I had an article in the Grand Rapids Press about that, comparing it to America's Idol. I think I said America's Next Stupid Artist, or something like that."
Claudin thinks it's ridiculous artists should even have to worry about votes.
He's so against American Idol type voting that he decided to not even compete in ArtPrize. But he will still keep an eye on who wins.
"I'm terrified that it's going to be Jesus on a cross, or something that's more traditional to Grand Rapids," says Claudin. "A lot of my artists friends joke about like what if it's a pink flamingo."
But that's precisely why the balloon guy -- Jason Hackenwerth -- decided to enter: because no one knows how it's gonna end.
"When I show work in a gallery, they'll say, 'Oh I love this, this is nice.' Complements are easy to come by," says Hackenwerth. "But to get people to come in and vote for you? I'm curious. I think it's an exciting opportunity to learn something from general masses instead of the collectors from the art world."
This story originally produced for WNYC's Studio 360
© Copyright 2012, MICHIGAN RADIO
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