Bright and Durable

Back in the 1990s, Lily and I lived in an artists cooperative in Minnesota. Basically, it was low-income housing loft living/studios for artists in an old warehouse by the Mississippi (we only had to sandbag against one flood in six years... a fair trade-off for a bossy apartment). We had a huge place with 20' ceilings (we installed a swing), an office for me (I had enough room to adopt an old SignPress flatbed printing press, type cabinet, etc. and do a lot of letterpress tinkering), and, for better and worse, an entire building full of artist neighbors.

One of those artists was a painter from Washington state named Stephen Rue...



We met, hit it off and started collaborating on a gang of different projects, some of which continue to this day. I think he's just mad that I still have his copy of Ways of Seeing and I haven't mailed it back to him.

These collaborations range from the cover of the first issue of this magazine he helped dream up...



to lending my pate for a portrait...



to the unfinished book from Rue's "Lent Series 2000" of 40 drawings on paper (I'm still trying to figure out how to make a book out of these, and I feel like I only have one chance, because they're originals... I screw up and it's OVER)...



to a bright and durable construction project...



To explain: at the time, Steve was working for an art shipper/transporter (think crating, insurance, delivery, etc.). Fun job if you like to handle rare works of art. Not a fun job if you're a butter-fingers. Anyway, he had access to a bunch of wood and a bunch of scrap materials, so we spent a couple weekends out at the workshop building 15 six-inch hollow wooden cubes, which we then primed and began covering with whatever interested us at the time.



We would get together for an afternoon, pop on some music, passing these things back and forth, writing/gluing/painting/taping/scraping/erasing/etc. Then we'd let 'em dry and get together again later to do more work (or undo what we'd done the week before).



The idea was to give ourselves something unusual to make, with little pressure to make it "mean" anything. We we would have a huge surface (45 square feet, altogether), and that each surface would become a microcosm of the whole. It was also necessarily interactive - you had to touch it to see the whole thing.






This fall, Stephen got in touch with me to tell me that he had been working on one of the boxes and he wanted to send it to me in Germany. I had no idea...



the box WAS the package. I got a note from the customs agents telling me to come down to their office to pick up a package from an S. Rue. I rode over the river. The agents couldn't find the package, until I described it... "Ah, so!" They referred to it as "that strange box," and one of them had it in his desk. Hot contraband!

They told me I couldn't take it because they had to "open" it. I told them that they couldn't open it without destroying it. They understood, and told me they could send it off to x-ray and that it would arrive at my house unscathed in the next couple days. Satisfied, I left.

Two weeks later, a taped up, splintered box arrived at my house...



Appears they'd taken a screwdriver to it.



The Customs Agents collaborated on the project without even knowing it. It seems they're never finished, these suspicious packages, Bright and Durable.