If a student tried to park in the San Jose State Parking Lot 4 on Wednesday, they would have found the SJSU marching band, barefoot, dressed in farmer’s clothing, playing music and walking on 3,000 pounds of clay dispersed on a white canvas.
This artistic event called “Phones, Tones and Bones” originated about one year ago when Shaun O’Dell, assistant professor and program coordinator of the pictorial art department, asked Futurefarmers to help create the project.
Futurefarmers is an art collective founded in 1995 by designer Amy Franceschini in San Francisco. Futurefarmers includes artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, writers and farmers who collaborate to create work “relevant to the time and place surrounding us,” according to its website.
“I’ve known Amy since such a long time, so I told her ‘you should come and do a project [at SJSU],’ ” O’Dell said.
He then introduced Franceschini to Alena Sauzade, gallery director and collections manager at SJSU’s Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery.
“Their idea was ‘We would love to see the marching band stamp on clay,’ ” Sauzade said. “That was a pretty open ended situation.”
Organizers said the event was the beginning of a much bigger art project. All the artistic components from the performance will be used for an exhibition at the gallery on March 1.
“A lot of this is material being produced that would go into the gallery,” said O’Dell. “The sound will be in the gallery, the video [of the performance] will be in the gallery, the print too.”
Adam Shiverdecker, SJSU associate professor of spatial art said his ceramics students will collect the clay shaped by the band’s footprints, and transform it into hollow vessels. An independent sound artist, Chris Cooper, will add an electronic mechanism inside the vessel and tap the inside to produce sounds.
“So when you walk into the exhibition, I think there’s going to be different sounds happening from the different vessels that we’re making, ” Shiverdecker said. “I’m just thinking about how many layers are created [from the event].”
The pictorial art department will create a limited edition vinyl recording along with a video produced at the performance. O’Dell said overhead shots of the clay might be used for the vinyl cover.
“It’s a huge collaboration,” O’Dell said.
Sauzade said it was challenging to organize an event with so many moving parts and university resources. She said she ensured the art department’s involvement in the project and managed futurefarmers’ expectations in regards to what facilities SJSU would be able to offer.
“And now, this is it,” O’Dell said, motioning to the ongoing event in front of him.
The university marching band played their instruments and walked on clay carefully at first, laughing quietly about the unexpected situation. As the event progressed, the band started smashing and wedging the clay on the ground without hesitation.
Two kinds of clay were spread out on the white canvas: one from the San Joaquin Valley, and the other was volcanic ash similar to soil from the moon. The first represents the Central Valley’s agricultural history and the “current reality” of the California drought which affects 37.2 million people in the state, and the second form of clay represents the “possibility of life beyond earth,” according to the presentation of the project.
“The idea is thinking about land use, our impact on the land, and so the clay is kind of representative of that,” Shiverdecker said. “Wedging the clay kind of records our impact on Earth.”
Craig McKenzie, SJSU assistant director of bands and director of athletic bands, instructed the musicians through a microphone.
“We’re gonna keep the tempo, even if it’s free improv,” McKenzie said to the marching band. “Some of the clay feels lonely here!” he added, pointing to empty space on the canvas.
The music played at the event was composed by McKenzie, who based his work on data points from the clay. Each of the notes the band played corresponded to a measurement taken from the clay they were marching on.
“We play at basketball games, at football games usually, but we’re musicians and artists also,” McKenzie said.
Lillian Escobar, music education freshmen, is a marching band member who played at the event.
“Most people can find it a little bit weird, but I think it’s really cool and fascinating,” Escobar said after the event. “It’s nice to get so many people to come together to do one thing, it creates a sense of fellowship. ”
At the end of the performance, the clay spread on the ground became flat as a result of the stomping, creating circles of different shades formed by the marching band’s footprints.
The event was an artistic event and an in-site production process for the larger creative project.
In line with Franceschini’s artistic approach, a full understanding of the event was not required to appreciate it.
O’Dell said he didn’t know the whole meaning of the event, but it didn’t stop him from being fully involved in the project.
“I think, for us, it’s always exciting as artists to kind of have a space of surprise, because if we know what we’re doing, we just become producers,” Franceschini said at the end of the event.
Before creating a product, the producer has to plan every detail of it. Before an artistic performance, space is given to the unknown, and to human interpretation and interaction with the environment. Rather than churning out a product, planned and methodical, Franceschini was excited to give students a space to improvise.
SJSU Interim President Steve Perez who also attended the event said the students, faculty and staff’s work was “unbelievably creative.”
“We’re the university at the center of the innovation capital of the world, and this is it, right here, innovating and making art just in front of us,” he said.
