Other String Activity in Los Angeles

Follow my friend Casey Rentz for her stringy project! Last November, she walked the 6.4 miles from the Machine Project in Echo Park to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) leaving a trail of a single string behind her….

I asked her for a few reflections on it all:

The walk both exhausted me physically (it was an unseasonably hot day) and was a tad emotional, as if my sense of idealism was in tension with reality all along.

Several parts of the string that stretched across the city for days were recognized and handled in the aftermath…..one end was picked up and wound up very carefully into a ball by some random, middle-age passerby who left it for me at the gallery a few days later. The middle parts were spotted by many many others–i got scads of email comments through the gallery, one about two guys who had pledged to paint a stripe across the US in response. When i first reached lacma, i got a lot of attention walking through the courtyard, but a few hours later, security judged it dangerous and lenght of string that lay on lacma grounds was cut and torn down.

Iguess you could say it was both disheartening and inspiring–no surprise since the work was about personal narratives and memory where perceived continuity is our most useful faculty and all the intervening factors just make life (and the project) interesting.

Was there a moment when it was all connected? Maybe.

–Casey Rentz

This was part of a special program of projects at LACMA in collaboration with Machine Project. Have a look at all of them starting here. LA Times story here.

-cvj