Box Office Planning

If you can't see the image below clearly (and I know you can't), simply click on it to see a larger view. It should be of great interest to you. Why? It's the results of being in an environment completely unrelated to my studies and the resulting clarity of thought.


Now that, assuming you looked at the image, you're probably wondering how to make heads or tails out of my chicken scratching. Well, let's start at the beginning.

I knew I was suppose to come into work for my first day back, but I didn't know what position I was to be in. I had a sneaking feeling I was going to be in Box Office. Either way, I would more than likely be behind a counter of some kind since two out of three of the jobs there require it. That's the service industry for you, I guess. My assumptions where proven true when I walked in and saw I was to be in Box Office because the normal weekday guy had the day off. And I was looking forward to asking him on his opinion on some of the movies we are playing, too. Particularly the movie about Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping titled What Would Jesus Buy? since I just learned about him in Public Art class.

Because it was Monday and high school exam week, nothing much happened until after 15:00. And I mean NOTHING. By the time I went on my break, we only had 150 people come through the doors over the span of four hours. That's not really a lot of traffic in theatre terms. Although we did make up most of the money we could have lost selling gift cards. I mean, hell, one lady came in and bought $900 worth of them. But for the most part, I did a lot of sitting around and thinking.

After Jason accepted my dare to deconstruct Pong (which I was very impressed with, but that's easy with me), I, being one of respect when it comes to a bet or a dare which acts like a verbal--or in this case, written--contract, revisited my big box-o-drawin's to restratigize my plan of attack.

Things started slow. Very slow. I listed the things that were expected that I failed to execute in one manner or another. Things like how I need to complete at least one stack of printer paper by the new year, figuring out an installation lay out, finding five established artists to cite as examples over the course of art history to provide a foundation for my work, and most importantly what my conceptual thesis is.

When I listed "cultural obsession," my brain remembered the term Jack used to describe me during a critique. He called me a "media junkie." I wrote that down in the margin and didn't revisit it until after a wave of lunch-time movie guests. When I did, another word popped into my head. Otaku. That's when things started to click into place. I was making a piece talking about my personal obsession with cartoons and comics. Not necessarily anime and manga, which is what the otaku culture is centralized about, but the whole gambit!

I went into a flurry of idea jotting having finally made sense of the confusion. Takashi Murakami was the first artist I listed because of his Little Boy exhibition he curated for NYC some time back, which I have the hardcover book linked here still shrink wrapped since I read most of it in one sitting while in the library for Contemporary Art History. Great book, too, if you can find it. Chinatsu Ban followed him pretty quick, as her Hello Kitty elephants deal with her obsession of maternal insecurities. South Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee followed her, not because of his animatus series (though that is what drew me to him), but because of his objectuals that were design to express his insecurity of being... well, short and small featured compared to the Westerners he's been exposed to who are all tall with big eyes and big hands. And obsession that brought him to contruct a suit that he walks around in so he has bigger eyes, bigger lips, and a slightly taller stance from what I was able to see in his video he had at the Biennale. Reverend Billy made the list of artists who deal with obsessive culture when I found out about his movie. Why? His intent is not only anti-consumerism but it is focused more tightly on obsessive consumerism. In other words, shopping because you want to shop because you feel the nead to shop.

From there, I began trying to come up with referances I could look up as foundation for contemporary obsession. The first one that came to my mind were the Gamer Widow Group, a support group for mostly women who have lost their husband or boyfriend to online games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft. I found out there are a few widowers in the group as well, victems of girlfriends who would rather play Guild Wars over going on a date or having dinner at a fancy resturant. From there, that lead me to the convention scene. Star Trek, Star Wars, Comic Con, and the like. The obsessive fanboys that dress up in costumes of high craft and detail as well as the nerds that have booth space just to show off their collection reminded me of another aspect of obsessive culture I knew about but never researched: the collection stores in Japan. These are stores that can go up to four floors of nothing but glass cases of figurines and collectibles, all of which rented out by collectors or sellers. They function more like galleries for the obsessed than they do store fronts.

The sociologist in me that was clawing his way out made me write down some topics of interest for my own trivial pursuits. Some of the things I plan on looking out for or at least trying to figure out on my own are the comparisons between the obsessive fan bases of anime and western media. I think they act the same way, just with a different media. I would also keep tabs on the difference between "East Otakus" and "West Otakus," the later being rather a new thing in the US since the anime boom. Which means it will be harder to look into, since Murakami said that East Otakus are easier to profile than terrorists post 9-11. He even classifies himself as a otaku in the book, complete with showing a photograph of his appartment. (If you've ever been in an international store and noticed that big wall of VHS tapes, that's what his appartment looks like.)

It seems only ironic in retrospect that I was obsessed about making this plan as flawless as I could, to link my project back into a bigger culuture of media obsession even if it is through one genre of entertainment. At least at the moment. I have a lot of electronic obsessions, and ideally, I would like my show to exhibit a good chunk of my said obsessions. How to go about that is another matter.

Even though I have a plan, I still have a big problem. Historically, research on a topic takes me just as long and just as much energy as producing a large artwork, which is essentially what I'm doing. The plan was originally a To-Do list, with the first priority to complete the damn stack of paper before 2008. The research was to happen after that, with the visual work production finished and all. But if you look at that scan, the research takes up 98% of the notes with only two lines talking about the piece's production itself.

So what do I do now? Go with the plan as originally concieved or figure out how to do both at once?