'Mundane Journeys'
Ongoing, various locations

MUNDANE JOURNEYS IS an ongoing public art installation by Kate Pocrass that employs the answering machine as its principal medium. Call (415) 364-1465 and Pocrass's recorded voice answers, "You have reached Mundane Journeys. Variable locations alternated weekly. An eagerness to interact with strangers in common atmospheres." Each week Pocrass charts a short tour to a different San Francisco destination and calls attention to some otherwise easily overlooked, everyday phenomenon. She suggests people "walk, bike, or take public transportation when she sends them (at least in thought) to a specific location, where she's found something – however modest or personal – she deems noteworthy: a particularly steep hill beneath Coit Tower, a Slush Puppie machine behind the counter of a local bodega, a sign in the window of a Mission Street furniture shop offering "sofa and love" for a sum. Pocrass briefly shares her own observations by providing an assignment: stop halfway up the hill and think about the postal carrier who walks this route; purchase, consume, and consider the merits of the Slush Puppie (as opposed to its competitor, the Slurpee); enter the furniture shop and ask a salesperson how much it would cost if you only wanted the "love." The message concludes, "Feel free to call back and report your findings." I first discovered Pocrass's installation among the remains of an exhibition at the Spanganga gallery, where she had mounted on the wall several phones that played past recordings, and provided maps of the proposed journeys with graphics highlighting the featured phenomena. However, those contrivances seemed to be required only to translate her project into a form capable of being presented in galleries. As a study of place, her project finds its strength in its lack of physical presence. The audience is invited to fill this void with the imaginings and actions that give a place its concrete reality. The work is also an invitation to social interaction and artistic production. In her proposed journeys, Pocrass poetically shares her own experience of the city (under the guise of a formal art experiment). In turn, she welcomes her audiences' reports. Her answering machine is on. Her ear is open. The work provides a horizon against which one can poeticize one's own mundane experience as a proposed journey in an ongoing dialogue with Pocrass and her answering machine. (415) 364-1465. (Clark Buckner)