Car Park

In the late 1970, a dancer named Susan (now I don’t remember her last name) created a dance piece in Los Angeles wherein dancers plugged parking meters and for the time paid for, they occupied those spaces. In the late 1980s, Lisa Rose, an artist based at that time in Portland, Oregon, adapted the idea and extended the idea to occupying parking spaces with its occupants doing many different activities – whatever they wanted which included one man putting a lounge chair in his space and reading the HELP WANTED ads to passersby, others just sat and had a picnic, and dancers danced, et al. Local TV news affilliates in Portland, Oregon covered the event and I likely have a tape somewhere of this report.My point is that this idea is not new and credit should be extended to the artists who first did this – and at that time, at least, received next to no publicity, interest, on the part of the art community let alone anyone else. Lisa to this day has failed to even get a piece accepted into even local shows and the dancer who started this whole thing received equally abysmal attention by the media, public, and art world. It is interesting to see that now – much later, the idea has garnered interest and even some $. Artists unfortunately seem to always be the last ones to get paid.