By Fred Camper
Piazza, 41, came of age at “the tail end of the hippies.” He read the Communist Manifesto at 15, “and I was suddenly branded as a communist.” He recalls that his freshman year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “was the first year there weren’t riots, which I was gearing up for. Streaking happened; fraternities became popular again; everyone was already distancing themselves from demonstrations. I felt incredibly let down.” Identifying himself as a “leftist anarchist,” he disliked “the top-down sort of approach” of most political organizations, and he found that he was increasingly drawn to art. Believing that the artist was “a part of society and not in some sort of ivory tower,” he became interested in collaborations.
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The projects often begin with something a bit less profound. When, for example, Piazza asked Fred what kind of things he’d like to make, Fred told him a volcano with money and candy bars. But then Fred got serious: “I looked in a book to see how you shape it. I drew it and colored it. Then we made a clay volcano.” Piazza has taken the clay volcano to be fired. “We are going to color it and put growing plants around it,” Fred says.
Others perused reproductions in an Art Institute guidebook. “Everyone labeled paintings they enjoy looking at or respond to,” Piazza says, “using the property tags that their possessions get tagged with when they first come in.” They wrote brief descriptions on the tags: “pure nature” for a Frederick Church; “it shows the power of the woman” for El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin; “the world, freedom” for a Claude Lorrain landscape drawing. These labels and the book will also be installed at N.A.M.E.
