#kurt perschke

[jeroenapers]

The RedBall Project van Kurt Perschke gaat als een soort kabouter van Amélie Poulain de wereld over.

[skiderikknows]

The American artist Kurt Perschke will surprise passers-by with his RedBall Project, including cities such as Barcelona, ​​Taipei, London, Chicago and Antwerp. The artist invents the strangest locations to introduce people to his art project.

[domleb]

Red Ball  // Rennes // 2014

[ducotedelestaque]

Street art Giant red Ball by Kurt Perschke 

[sorrysomethingwentwrong]

Kurt Perschke, RedBall Project, Barcelona

[domleb]

Red Ball  // Rennes // 2014

[pennyfilth]

Kurt Perschke

[sitespecblog]

At the end of this month, residents of Memphis, Tenn. will have a big, bright red visitor.

Kurt Perschke’s RedBall, a globe-trotting public art project, will bring the eponymous red ball to 10 sites around Memphis between April 28 and May 7, in collaboration with the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. Memphis will join a long list of cities that have hosted the RedBall, which Perschke uses to explore and punctuate urban architecture and landscapes across the world.

Ahead of the Memphis launch, I got in touch with Perschke to talk about the RedBall’s interaction with different cities, sites, and audiences, and how his project has evolved since he started it in 2001.

He discussed some of his most memorable interactions with the RedBall (for ex. weddings, dancing, licking it), American public art siting processes (“often a disaster”), and illegal versus legal installations.

He also revealed that he is working on a book about the RedBall that will include exclusive photos, essays and interviews, and his own stories, with the aim to “put RedBall in context of a larger movement which it’s been at the front of.”

Our emailed Q&A is below, but first, some logistics:

The RedBall is 15 feet in diameter and weighs 250 pounds. It moves to a new site every day within each city. The project has visited more than 25 cities on four continents. There is only one red ball.

Site Specific: Has your understanding of how the RedBall engages with its sites/audiences changed since you started this project?

Kurt Perschke: Incredibly. It’s one of the amazing aspects of the work for me, it’s teaching me all the time, and I feed that back into it. It’s been 15 years now of finding and looking at sites around the world, and imagining what could work.

I’ve talked to a few public art consultants about teaming up, because the way sites get preselected for artists in American public art is often a disaster. I’ve been in the jury room behind the table thinking, “no matter who we pick, the ‘official prescribed’ site will kill everything.”

Site matters, a great site artwork starts with a great site.

SS: When you’re scouting RedBall locations in a new city, what landscape or architectural details do you look for?

KP: Scouting a big city, for example, is about being very clear and a bit ruthless in the planning of what will actually be covered. You can’t see it all. Then once on the ground [it’s about] going deep, wandering, feeling for flow, where are the walking patterns, where do people move quickly, where do they slow down. Then that bit is overlaid with architectural opportunism, creatively seeing the city as a sculpture I can play with.

RedBall Chicago at Spertus Institute

SS: Can you give some examples of how the RedBall took on a different personality in one city/installation site versus another?

KP: Personality seems to come from the work, but on the street it’s really the audience. And that audience shifts from the brash and playful in Sydney to the intense but shy in Taipei, it shifts again with each city. The charisma of the piece, its playful energy, ominous presence, they are all invitations to the public.

There is no one best site that can do everything, so in each city I try to create an exploration with the sites, a path that has something new, or newly seen. Some sites take a great image for Instagram but another might have an ideal vibe because of the angle of the sun and footfall patterns. The cities’ history and future, I try to wrap them in as I can.

SS: Any examples of particularly memorable audience interaction with the RedBall?

KP: Honestly memorable moments happen at every site. We have people who saw it one day in their city and will follow us on social [media] as it travels for years. So I want to clarify to me the work is about people as much as anything, and an experience is personal whether I as the artist was there or not to observe it.

But to try to answer, some of mine are around watching people decide if they are going to give themselves permission or not, permission to play, be seen to be out of their comfort zone. It is a huge thing to step towards that risk.

But someone else might answer, the guy who brought a red thing to the site each day for 25 days straight in Chicago, the people who pretended to steal it in red gimp suits and then fled in the UK, Japanese weddings, licking, cops pretending to arrest fans, dancing, it goes on and on. That’s why I’m writing a book.

https://vimeo.com/45960792

SS: What is the longest the RedBall has ever stayed at one site? Why is it important for you to keep it always on the move?

KP: So the very, very first site was in St. Louis and it was there for about a month. It was something I was fighting and I lost. I wanted to move it around the city but I couldn’t convince them. Now I understand sometimes you don’t wait for permission. But that frustration was important, it was the fuel that drove me to bring it to Barcelona on my own steam and do it illegally there in all but one site (the Museum of Contemporary Art) with no permission, and move each day as I envisioned. That set the stage for the global pattern it’s been ever since. It launched in St. Louis but it was really born on the streets of Barcelona.

Movement is an incredible tool. Most art is static. The work is always on the move because through iteration, through a journey, it builds and grows stronger. And it’s the risk also of a single day I like, that one day is all you get at the site, it brings you into the moment.

SS: Do you miss the days where the RedBall was mostly an illegal installation?

KP: I miss the direct action, less politics and process. I would say “freedom” but that’s a false trope, I can do way more kinds of sites in more cities with permission than I ever could illegally. Think blocking streets for a massive lift truck.

I understand illegal is romantic, but it’s less scaleable than you would imagine, even for street muralists this is true. That great street art piece you saw in a book? Probably done at a festival because it took weeks. Also I should say it’s not binary; the project can flip to illegal one day and back another. In Paris the local production team was so frustrated with permissions THEY wanted to start doing it illegally, that was a first.

SS: Do you have a favorite RedBall installation site?

KP: I never know how to answer this. I can fall in love over and over again with sites. Remembering has to do with the people, for me it’s often who I was with. So a site like the Sheikh Zayed Bridge by Zaha Hadid is memorable, but for me that’s because of what happened on that bridge, my team that was with me and what we experienced which was intense; the beautiful photo can’t capture that. Or the very first Barcelona site, waiting for the police to show up. Ironically the image I took from that site is still the most known image of the project after 15 years.

RedBall Barcelona

RedBall Abu Dhabi at Sheikh Zayed Bridge

SS: Do you envision each RedBall installation as a distinct public art project, or a new chapter in the same project?

KP: There isn’t really a model in public art for what RedBall is doing. Which frame do you use? The art frame is unique each site, the performance frame is a tour, the experience frame is the day. No site is ever repeated, no city has ever been repeated, no day is the same. But the global story is one work.

  Q&A With Kurt Perschke, The Artist Behind The Roaming RedBall At the end of this month, residents of Memphis, Tenn. will have a big, bright red visitor.