Picture yourself at a cemetery, picnicking on a warm, bright Sunday–not the typical image of cemeteries in October, right? (Or any month, for that matter.) Yet that’s how urban residents during the 19th century spent their weekends before the City Beautiful movement kicked in and established open spaces for citygoers to enjoy. Up to that point, urbanites used the cleared land of cemeteries for activities we now associate with public parks.

That history informed Rebecca Blocksome’s “Socializing the Cemetery,” an interactive art piece featured in the Conflux Festival that took place this past weekend. For the work, Blocksome invited the public to the New York City Marble Cemetery on E. 2nd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues, where participants were asked to create a map of a randomly assigned section of the cemetery and encouraged to explain the symbols and names they used to mark their map. (The act mimics at least one service cemeteries provide: to offer a physical space where meaning and memory reside.)

Unfortunately, 10 a.m. on a Sunday is early for New Yorkers, and the piece never occurred. This is tragic, because of the poignant timing of Blocksome’s work: the cemetery is only open to the public three times a year. That festival-goers could have mapped and thus charted territory usually inaccessible to the general public raises questions about who owns memory, particularly when the cemetery, which serves as a repository for the dead and thus the past, was designated a local landmark in 1966. As land marked or recognized by the public as significant to our shared past, what does it mean that the cemetery’s gates are closed more often than not? Does it shutter history from those who would seek to claim it? And as the world becomes more populous, and as cities continue to struggle to preserve open space (for the living or the dead–try making that choice), where will history repose?

Such questions make abstract the real dilemmas facing cemeteries today: who maintains the grounds, let alone pays for the upkeep? Where should we locate cemeteries? Will they become relics themselves as more and more of us choose cremation? Grieving and burial practices continue to evolve, and fewer and fewer of us visit graveyards or, more to the point, no longer live in the cities where our friends and families are or will be buried. Despite its non-happening, Blocksome’s “Socializing the Cemetery” offers a meaningful introduction to such topics in absentia, as well as an exciting preview of what we might expect from this artist as she incorporates interactivity into her art, which has focused in the past on the book as a physical and conceptual form.

Photos: courtesy of the artist

Walking into the HQ of the Conflux Festival in the East Village, it’s easy to believe you’re at an arts festival. The white walls display squares of paper adorned with graphic designs and text in inoffensive fonts, and there are attractive and creatively dressed women and men sipping wine and the ubiquitous cheap beer that has become an unfortunate staple of art gatherings nationwide.

ecoarttech

Given such visual markers, you conclude: arts festival. Peruse the festival’s program, however, and your conviction might waver. Offerings such as Cline Delgado Kalin’s “What Kind of City Do You Want to Live In?”, which asks participants to build and then rebuild a miniature city, and Sheryl Oring’s “Happy Day,” in which the artist collects “gently used children’s clothing” from donors and then redistributes the items to low income families, destabilize commonly held ideas of art. As Eric Peterson pointed out in Urban Omnibus, Oring’s actions don’t diverge that far from what Goodwill and other charities do day in and day out, while “What Kind of City Do You Want to Live In?” cleaves closely to the design charettes and workshops urban planners are always trying to get neighborhood tenants to join.

Cathelijn van Goor "Metamorphosis"

But your confusion is, in some ways, precisely what the festival addresses: psychogeography, or what Guy Debord, famed Situationist, described in 1955 as the emotional and behavioral effects geography have on us. For instance, there in the seemingly art-bedecked Conflux HQ, you’re likely to think that you are, in fact, at an arts festival, despite pieces such as Oring’s, which suggest that uh, no, you’re at a fundraiser of sorts.

In other words, take the press you’ve read about the Conflux Festival with a grain of salt. As Christina Ray, the festival’s executive director, explained, some of the festival participants don’t identify themselves as artists, being instead architects, designers, and yes, city planners. That explanation resolves some of the cognitive static emitted by certain projects, allowing you to focus on those that provide clear signals of their artistic merit.

Turn your attention, for example, to Elizabeth Whalley and Marie Ucci’s “East Village Florilegium” and ecoarttech’s “Indeterminate Hikes,” two works in counterpoint. The first has participants document through drawing, photographs, or other means the living matter of the neighborhood; the second provides a downloadable app that users tune into to hear instructions, such as stop for 10 breaths, as they tour the East Village. Ecoarttech hopes such moments will prompt users to question what “wilderness” means in an urban setting, while “East Village Florilegium” underscores the traditional understanding of nature. Both make worthwhile the sometimes chaotic and occasionally dim spots of Conflux, which heads into its second day tomorrow.

(photos: 1 – 2 courtesy ecoarttech, 3 – 6 courtesy Pauline Tran)