Altered Parking Block is a re-designed parking block that operates within the formal language that skateboarders read in the urban landscape when searching for places to ride, while at the same time it appears as a normal background object to non-skaters to escape notice from property owners. It can also be read as pure sculptural form.

Installed without notice in locations throughout Los Angeles, these objects quickly attracted skateboarders to create new underground nodes of recreational/social use in the city by a normally unrecognized subculture. Several times I drove by and observed groups of skaters using the blocks. . . but I never spoke to them. It was evident that they knew all they needed to know about the object if they were using it, and pointing it out as “art” would not add anything to their experience or mine.

This is an older project but I am including it because in some ways it was prophetic of the trajectory that I have pursued since then. It is formally complex, speaking three different languages (cultural, subcultural, and formal) simultaneously. It is performative, in that it is only given meaning when it is put into use and adopted into the wider culture. It is public art in the best sense, in that it engages the public on it’s own terms without relying its status as art. It creates a new relationship between people and sculptural objects that I have continued to define in the ensuing years. And, it creates new social spaces and personal experiences for the people that use it. . . which I can only imagine.