KIOSK: P.S.1

I woke up one day and went to the office - I.e. I stepped out of the bed. I made myself a coffee and before I could grunt the first morning sound we became artists and KIOSK was the only piece or work. No not really, but sorta.

By then, KIOSK had moved to LaGuardia Place and us to Greenpoint, so we had to take the train to work . While we had long considered what we did a creative endeavor, making money at the speed of artists who still worked as assistants to other artists, I personally couldn’t call KIOSK art. Sculptures in stone are art, oil paintings and etchings are also. A shop? After a few cocktails maybe.

Our friend and his friend stood looking around the shop with a smile. After the usual chit-chat he introduced the curator and soon they mentioned that they wondered if we’d be part of a group show? Uh-huh, yeah, that sounds interesting I probably replied.

The curator was organizing a survey of the arts that defined NYC the past five years in his mind. Repeating every five years at MoMA P.S.1 it’s called Greater New York. They would very much like to include us!

We already knew we needed to find a new place for our store as the current space had long been promised to a sandwich shop. Our wonderful landlord had given us the space in the interim for cheap, relatively speaking, so this could be a great thing to do while looking for something else.
We started dreaming up what we could do for such a show, and the low hanging fruit was to show the archive of our things. Maybe it was they who asked, I can’t remember, but I would prefer to say it was our own brilliant idea.

Plinths were out of the question. No-one would make around 1400 of them, besides, isn’t it a bit of a stuffy concept? And laying it all out on the floor would also take so much space and make it impossible for people to pick up our things - yes, pick them up as we were always a touchy establishment unlike most museums or galleries.

Shelves. The cost of the build had to be considered, and while building shelves seemed smart it quickly became apparent that wood for a few hundred shelves would be wildly expensive. The next idea was to get those cheap IKEA shelves as they are so cheap that you wonder where they get wood for them. But that was also too expensive. Especially since we realized that each level of each shelf needed some sort of lighting to see the displayed items.

We had samples of those channeled hard plastic boards that are used to build green houses, and they could be cut and folded into an open cube. Turns out the material was cheaper than wood, and since it’s transparent we could make do with normal space lighting.

We could stack them and build a labyrinth easily. Probably with transparent packing tape even.
When we finalized the math we were still at double the budget, but we had good sales in the spring and art is priceless, so we said we’d take the cash hit.

The sheets had to be ordered from Ohio and came in 16” uncut size, but we found friends where we could spend a few days cutting them down to strips suitable for KIOSK origami.
We had to employ friends as well as staff from P.S.1 for the two weeks of assembly line work to make about 6000 of the cubes needed. It was a massive undertaking, but it happened and happened well.

Somewhere in the process we realized we couldn’t use our usual cards where visitors could read what went on in our heads when bringing these objects from our trips - there would be a sea of white squares in our installation!

I had been playing with making phone menus for fun and to get rid of pesky sales calls to the shop. “Listen carefully as our options changes every day. To reach THE MANAGEMENT press #9 repeatedly until your finger hurts. To reach the ditzy shop clerk, just touch any other number you like” - something like that. (That worked by the way - spam calls be gone!) So we figured we could make #extensions on a phone call to hear a robitic voice read the description of the thing they were looking at. It worked! The robot awkwardly read mine and Alisa’s personal stories like the lover you don’t want. Sometimes a word couldn’t be pronounced right, but that just added to the vibe.

Finally we could place the things around the space and start mounting the neons that would make colorful refractions in the transparent plastic. A soundtrack of bird song mixed with the Blade Runner soundtrack was installed and it was all ready to let people in. But we were late… The show had opened half an hour earlier and we were still on ladders. Some people were waiting outside the door when we walked those ladders out and said

Welcome!