No more writing on bathroom walls, at least not for students observant enough to discover that the strange structure next to Evans Laboratory on College Road is actually a public chalkboard.
From the street, the structure looks like an architectural embellishment, but a step closer reveals that it is an elaborate piece of interactive artwork. Stepping inside uncovers a shallow corridor of mirrors, red enamel, black chalkboard and a sliding ladder. The panels slide back and forth in tracks letting participants frame and reframe the piece to their liking.
The piece, called “This Artwork,” was was created by artist Mary Miss of New York and was commissioned about six years ago by the Ohio Arts Council and a committee at Ohio State.
The chalkboard, which was finished at the end of summer quarter as part of the State of Ohio Percent for Art Program, gives students freedom to anonymously write or draw whatever they want on movable chalkboard-like panels that stand about 12 feet high.
And boy do they write.
Nearly every square inch of the work’s writable surfaces bear markings and messages written in colorful chalk. Top to bottom, edge to edge – proclamations of love, hate and ambivalence abound.
“I think people write whatever they feel like writing,” said undecided freshman Natalie Fountas-Davis. “It’s not really profound.”
Fountas-Davis, who struggled to sketch words with a speck of chalk the size of a BB, said finding secret places within the structure is a big part of the appeal. She said she likes to climb the sliding ladder in order to write higher up where there is less of a chance her writing will be erased.
“It’s like graffiti – erasable graffiti,” she said.
Julie Karovics, campus graphics coordinator at OSU and chair of the committee in charge of commissioning and installing the work, said the chalking activity has been left to the devices of the public.
“We’ve never put chalk out there, and we’ve never taken anything away,” Karovics said. “The only thing I’ve put out there has been erasers.”
“The whole idea is if you want to leave a message up there, just erase what’s up there,” she said. “It’s not sacred to any group. If you feel like doing a complete mural on it, go erase what’s up there and draw something new.”
Karovics said she passes the chalkboard structure about once a week, and each time she invariably changes the positions of the panels.
“Because I don’t like the way it looks, I’m going to make it look the way I want it to look,” she said.
The chalkboard structure was a result of legislation, overseen by the Ohio Arts Council, which mandates publicly-funded building projects costing more than $4 million and allocates at least 1 percent of the total cost for public art. The chalkboard reflects renovation projects in McPherson and Evans laboratories. In all, “This Artwork” cost $279,000 to create and install.
Irene Fink is the coordinator of the Percent for Art Program with the Ohio Arts Council and has overseen many commissioned works at OSU.
“The basic goal is to get public art in the public arena for people to start to get an understanding and an appreciation for it,” Fink said.
But, she said, Mary Miss’ work is by far the most interactive.
“It is the first piece I’ve seen that was designed to have viewers inside it,” she said. “It’s the first one that really invites the viewer in and really participate.”
For a lot of people, the chalkboard gets overlooked as such. Even Kevin Dill, the building coordinator for Evans Laboratory said he was under the impression that the piece was being “defaced” with chalk rather than serving as an artistic forum.
On the other hand, Karovics said Mary Miss’ piece is actually highly conceptual.
“The way that the piece is constructed creates the ability to change things and see things in different ways. If you noticed, one of those major panel systems is reflective, so you can actually see into the piece and see back out of the piece at the same time,” she said. “If you close the whole thing, it looks like a spectrometer, a bar graph reading that comes through on a spectrometer.”
Karovics said the chalkboards have been cleaned only once, and that was after OSU played Michigan in football last fall. Every writable and non-writable surface was completely covered and had to be powerwashed.
“There should really only be one spot you write, which is on the rolling chalkboards,” Karovics said.
But students have taken a lot more freedom with the piece than that.
Fountas-Davis said she was excited upon discovering that the gray outer panels of “This Artwork” would also accept chalk. She quickly told her friends, who immediately came out from the structure to see.
