I’m full of ideas. Some good, some not so good. Some I’m keeping to myself to use later. Some I’ll just never get around to do anything with. Today, I’m going to start sharing the latter.
Idea #1: Art in or with Phone Booths
Why it’s a good idea: I don’t know where to find them, but I’m betting if you could find out, you could buy a phone booth for cheap. Like cigarette vending machines when Clark Whittington was starting Art-o-mat, phone booths are highly functional objects that are being made irrelevant by changing times. People use cellphones now, and booths are becoming increasingly hard to find. Think of the creative potential if you had one of these and it’s liberated from its original purpose! When the door closes it triggers a switch that turns on a light. You could modify this to activate any number of electronic devices. The space is large enough to encase a large human or two, while being small enough to fit inside a building. Meanwhile, they’re weatherproof, so you could do an installation outside. They’re soundproofed to a degree as well, so it would lend itself to incorporating sound into the piece.
Beyond the sheer functional possibilities of phone booths as art objects, they’re symbolically charged artifacts. Phone booths are a sign of a changing culture. There was a time when people could assume a right to privacy, even in public places. The phone company actually provided tiny, private rooms that people could go into, close the door, shut out the world and have a conversation. This was seen as something valuable enough to public space were provided for it. Where are these private spaces now? With the loss of these spaces, we also seem to lose the idea that there are things that should be private. There was a time when we didn’t have to listen to half conversations about disgusting medical conditions, broken condoms or bad breakups while trying to enjoy our chai lattes. Beyond all that, think of the phone booth itself. A used phone booth may have been in use for decades. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of phone calls took place within those confines. They ranged from banal to life altering. If there were batteries that could store the emotional energies of those conversations, they would have reached atomic bomb levels of power by the time the booths were retired!
Things to do with the idea: Personal space, communication, privacy, respect, change… all good material for art explorations! A phone booth could become an art gallery, giving private showings. The phone booth itself could become an art object. Take out the phone, put in a comfy seat, change the lettering on the outside from “phone booth” to “calm” or “alone time” and just provide people with a place to go and take a break from the world.
The phone booth as a creative tool seems so obvious. Artists should already have done many projects with them, and yet a Google search provides surprisingly little about the subject. I did, however, come across this wonderful site, the Payphone Project. It started out as an art project involving payphones. As the availability of payphones has declined, the site has become an aesthetic appreciation of the payphones themselves.
Could it be too late for such a thing? Are all the phone booths already scrapped? I hope not. There’s still a lot of creative potential to be explored. Get on it!
