Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

store to the lack of strong interracial communication, the Grievance Board soon came to be a portrait of the neighborhood-After some two hours my drawing hand was starting to cramp up and I knew it was time to go?I needed work on my endurance. I waited for the fluctuating crowd around me to die down long enough to rip my sign off the brick wall and start folding up my easel. A few minutes later I was back on my bike, heading home with the satisfaction of having drawn 30 portraits, the elation of giving them all away, and the weight of a limp left hand and a thousand new ideas.

Further Articulation

Portrait Exchange 416

It took me a little while to comprehend just how successful the experiment had been. I'd been unsure if people would embrace me or beat my ass, but I put myself out there, and in doing so 1 was completely transformed. An experiment became a launchpad. It was immediately apparent to me that this project was ripe with potential far beyond what I had expected. I viewed this concept of a Portrait Exchange as not just a self-contained artwork, but also, and more importantly, a tool, a simple but potent invention teeming with uncharted uses and destinations.

For many reasons, my portrait-drawing enabled many different people to open up to me, to allow me inside their lives during a three- to five-minute blip in their daily routine. Their grievances were a documentation of existence at specific points along my path, specific points in specific neighborhoods of a specific city that is supposedly indexed thoroughly by the Census Bureau. Life-affirming and captivating as the personal interactions between myself and those I drew were, I wanted the 'Exchange to fulfill a greater function. My ambition was brewing. I began to think of myself as some kind of bastardized statistician, some Census Bureaucrat with an unhealthy human streak and a penchant for accuracy.

The next step in tiie process for me, the tangent I decided to follow, was to "test" the Census data for the city of Pittsburgh neighborhoods. I did a little research at the pubhc

library in a room devoted to local and state-based information. Taking a look at the portraits that the Census draws of different neighborhoods, I quickly realized that, whoever those people are, they can't draw for shit. Neighborhoods and boroughs are categorized by a few simphstic statistics, revolving around race {black, white, and other!), income, and level of education. What can possibly be learned from such portraits? I began to think about the ones who look at those statistics ... property owners? businesses? politicians? Perhaps it would be wrong of me to call these statistics outright racist and clas-sist, but they perpetuate a system of categorization that ends up being racist and classist. Either way, I realized that with my shiny new tool, the softly sharpened 3B pencil, I could gather data about neighborhoods that would be more representative of the people as individuals. By offering to take down people's grievances about their community I could accumulate "data" that would be insightful and relevant to humans, not just business. I could reshape the landscape of the city by presenting information that would completely dwarf the significance of the census. It could lead to a new convention, even, of the city hiring rambunctious portrait artists every few years to gather the con-census.

I had to start small, though. I chose the most statistically dramatic neighborhoods as my first destinations. The richest, the poorest, the blackest, the whitest, the most educated, the least. I brought a different Grievance Board to each place, labeled with the name of the neighborhood. I set up in spots that appeared to have a lot of foot taraffic, mostly near commercial areas, and I opened my big mouth and asked if anyone wanted free portiaits. The range of responses was tremendously diverse. Here follow a few anecdotes

As a white guy in tiie blackest neighborhood (98.6% black), the skepticism was thick as I walked along the road looking for a place to set up my easel. As I found out later, white people in that neighborhood are most often police. Once I found a good spot to set up my easel, a young man approached and asked what I was doing. I told him I . ,

was drawing free portraits. He started to get agitated, assuming it was a business stiat- 4^7 ""^ ^''^ ""^^

egy . . . "Oh, I see, so you draw a few for free, and then we gotta start paying." Makes sense?why the hell would someone from outside the community come in and draw free portraits? I explained that they really were free, and he immediately read that I was being honest, and expressed complete support of my endeavor.