Pen Palism
Project Abstract
To discover a mutual interest on which to develop a research project, Ric Royer and Temple Crocker sat in Royer’s attic discussing issues, aesthetics, and practices that were of personal concern. Locating the intimacy in art and the art in intimacy was a topic they considered important to explore in an art world that seems to follow the impersonal current of the modern business-driven world. Their feeling was that life needs more art, but also that art needs more life.
The research event included a distribution of postal assignments, a dinner, a site-specific interactive installation, and this research paper. Some of the areas of research that were followed during the process of the project include gift-exchange rituals, mail art, site-specific art, contemporary poetics, economics and anthropology.
The process that began in the attic was eventually completed there with an installation that included relics of the postal exchanges, ritual paraphernalia, dessert and other related elements that unified the various threads of the research. The final presentation took place on December 9, 2003 at Ric Royer’s apartment in Baltimore, MD.
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