Imaginary Gift

Every time I entered or left my McDermot Avenue studio I was confronted by people requesting change. My instinct was to shrink away and demur, but this isn’t what I thought was right. All the same, I was irritated and befuddled by these requests. I would stop, take off my backpack, and rummage around for a suitable amount. What is a suitable amount? What amount is neither insulting nor self-congratulatory? These questions plagued me.

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Could I really afford to give anything away? Was it terrible of me to expect thanks? These questions boiled down to problems of power. The recipient of charity is in the giver’s debt. It is this debt that binds people with bonds of mutual obligation to form a society. Were these bonds that I wanted to form and power that I wished to wield?

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My tactic was to give from a place of selfishness: Imaginary Gift is an interactive sculpture in which the push of a button produces a slightly assaulting gift of food from an unseen person above. Imaginary Gift gives the sense of being automated, thus the necessity to recognize the giver with thanks is removed.

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From my fourth-floor studio, I dispensed gifts both useful and wonderful (coffee, which Cliff Eyland characterized as traveling at terminal velocity, a flurry of popcorn, a spray of water from a toy whale’s mouth, a stream of bubbles, a note on a penny whistle, a peanut that travels to the ground through the body of a sock monkey) to people on my street, at my convenience, and without creating the bonds of debt a face-to-face transaction would create.

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The conventions around the gift - gratitude and indebtedness - were further disrupted by the annoyingly imperfect nature of the gifts that I dispensed. The hot coffee tended to splash one’s hand; the popcorn was maddeningly difficult to catch in the provided bag.

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I often think of the artist Shimabuku’s mantra for art: art should be cheap and it should be magical. Sleight of hand, like the out-of-sight operating Imaginary Gift is magical.