Kevin O’Keefe is artistic director of Circus Minimus, which brings the magic of circus arts to kids and to schools.
BRATTLEBORO-The bland office park on the edge of Brattleboro isn’t where one would expect the revolution to start. Its tenants are mostly low-key: lawyers, a tax assistance service, and a pilates studio. The setting seems more appropriate for a new branch of Dunder Mifflin, the fictional name of the paper company in the television show The Office.
But a recently completed and joyful community art revolution erupted over eight days, thanks to the Brattleboro Museum of Art and Tape Art Mega Corp.
Tape Art Mega Corp. is the brainchild of Michael Townsend and Leah Smith, two painters’-tape artists from Providence, Rhode Island, who’ve now completed their third residency at BMAC.
The museum’s publicity describes the creation of this fictional corporate office world with colored painter’s tape as “part immersive installation, part comedy, and all community artmaking.”
The project’s ethos is simple: Anyone can create.
Smith, a thirtysomething who sports a shullet that tucks into her shirt collar to maintain a more corporate presentation, says “Some people, myself included, may have left their middle school art class feeling like a failure. This is the antidote for that.”
Townsend says, “We’re injecting this corporate workspace with potential. Our job is to inspire engagement and manage the creativity of participants. We’ve been constantly surprised at where the public has taken this project.”
His eyes light up as he surveys the hum of creativity in this office suite of 12 rooms in the office building that used to be the Marlboro Graduate Center.
“When Danny [Litchenfield, director of the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center] showed us this space, we decided to lean into the setting as much as possible,” Smith says.
It’s the first time they had the opportunity to use an office setting for a tape project. The muzak and pistachio-colored walls stayed, but eight days after opening the doors to the Tape Art Mega Corp., the suite had been transformed.
* * *
As I head into my first session, a friend was leaving the lobby with a dreamy smile animating her face. She told me she’d planned to go in for 45 minutes, “but it easily turned into four hours,” as she lost track of time and maybe even herself in a flow state of quiet reverie.
Tape Art Mega Corp. gives anyone walking in the door unlimited rolls of blue and green painter’s tape, provides a few simple instructions (courtesy of a videotaped “New Employee Orientation”), and offers some open-ended prompts to get started.
The two artists supervise, as any mid-level manager would, inspiring, assisting and supporting their “new employees.”
After orientation, and making a tape tie for appropriate corporate wear, everyone is free to roam the halls and cubicles of the suite of rooms to find their work niche.
The resulting work liberates this dull, Muzak-playing, soul-killing space into a wonderland of surprises.
What did the entire community create over the past eight days? Everything you’d expect to find in an office (except, here it is made or covered in blue or green tape).
There are neat cubicle workspaces filled with lamps, desks holding computers screens projecting the year’s profits, fish bowls, tape dispensers, pencils, pens, scissors, file cabinets, coffee mugs, and a coffee maker. Above a copy machine are portraits of two butts and a face. (Every office has a jokester.)
There are house plants, pets, portraits of children and, in the R&D room, graphs of projections. Against the back wall, a sculpture of an office worker gossips with a silhouette of another by the water cooler.
Two other workers show their pets to one another while hovering above them is a UFO ready to beam somebody or something up.
Additionally, we see everything one wouldn’t expect in an office setting. In a room with the wide-open prompt — Animals A-Z — there’s a bow-tie-wearing flamingo strutting across the wall, a turtle and llama cavorting in the corner, monkeys and birds filling the sky.
Close observation reveals what might be a life-sized portrait of the late Carlos the Ox from Retreat Farm. A life-sized green moose with a full rack of antlers is mounted on one wall.
Another room announces a prompt: “aquarium.” It’s chock-a-block full, with whales breaching on the windows, sharks pursuing schools of fish, jellyfish floating by, a number of octopuses sporting 3-D suckers on their tentacles.
A 7-foot eel comes out and off the wall. In one corner is a sunken ship; nearby, a pirates’ treasure. Above that, a scuba diver investigates.
Yet another exterior room is a wig design factory. I’ll leave it to your imagination.
In the lobby, next to the elevator are what look like the hands of God. Across the hall, birds hop from impossible plants.
In one corner suite, a skeleton rises from the Earth surrounded by three circles of tape candles, real tea lights, and a bonfire as high as my head in what the fourth graders inside describe to me as “a creepy forest.”
Down the hall is an entire office filled wall-to-ceiling with eyes, over 1,000 eyes, all watching you. And I’m not just being paranoid.
Another corner office is occupied by the boss, a pint-sized blue-green sculpture sitting at a desk. There are no details to their face.
Smith tells me this is part of their trademark. Many forms on the walls are silhouetted. The figures could be anyone, anywhere, any gender. The blue and green colors aesthetically unify the rooms, but the forms are as varied as can be.
* * *
Greeting any “new employee” at the door are one of the two artists or Kate Milliken, BMAC’s manager of educational programs, who says, “This has been the best week of my life — the smile won’t go away.”
All week, friends, coworkers, classmates, families, knitting circles, bowling teams — groups of any size — have trekked to the site to get hands-on tape-art classes.
After-school hours were filled by grandmothers with their young charges, adults looking for some diversion or inspiration, and local artists drawn in by the wide-open, pedal-to-the-metal challenge of making.
On the counter next to a flat cake — made of tape and with one slice missing — is an assorted pile of cardboard, aluminum foil, wooden skewers/dowels, and empty toilet paper rolls, all waiting to be called into duty by one of the emerging artists. Another area has community tables and chairs set up for planning and collaboration.
One aspect built into the project is what Leah Smith calls “relational aesthetics” — an art term that includes interactive experiences and encourages dialogue, community, and active participation.
“Anyone can improve upon anything someone else has started,” Smith continues.
The result is that objects morph as new details are added on by others. Preciousness is tossed aside as, for instance, an 8-year-old applies eyelashes to the eye their grandmother started.
* * *
Michael Townsend wears copper-lined glasses and looks like he could actually be a mid-level executive — he’s fiftyish, gray at his temples, and wears a crisp man-tailored shirt with a blue tape tie.
He tells me the story of two kids who came to him seeking a task. He asked them to create a compass to measure some circles on the floor for their creepy forest.
In just under one minute of work, one kid in all sincerity exclaimed, “Wait a second! This isn’t fun.” He said it as if he’d been duped.
Townsend sensed the child was uncovering the existential dread that is mind-numbing office work. Welcome to the work-world, kid.
* * *
The entire project is intentionally temporal — the office held a pizza party on closing day that served as a tear-down and celebration.
Kate Milliken hopes the momentum from this project “continues to inject collaboration into the community.”
As we survey the room, it’s evident that relationships are being built and/or strengthened, strangers quickly became co-creators, joy was obvious everywhere one turned.
Unlike in most corporations, the “profits” at Tape Art Mega Corp were shared with the workers. On top of a crate box big enough for two washing machines is a literal money-pit of green-tape bills.
“Here, every artist gets paid,” Milliken says. She hands me a bill for my two-hour “shift.”
The revolution has started.
This Voices Essay was submitted to The Commons.
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