Seat Assignment

From 2010 to 2011, I faced a self-imposed challenge every time I took a flight: I had to make art by improvising with the available materials and document the results using only my cellphone.

The project began spontaneously on a three-hour flight when contemplating the time ahead of me. It already didn’t count; it was simply time to kill. That’s a terrible attitude, I thought, for an artist who advocates for the potential of what’s often overlooked. If I believed that, then something had to be possible even within the temporal, spatial, material, and social constraints of an airplane cabin.

What resulted from that working hypothesis is “Seat Assignment.” Over the eleven years I worked on it, I made more than a thousand different images and several video works until the problems of pandemic travel brought a natural end to the project.

Most of “Seat Assignment” was made on my tray table, working with things like snacks, candy, leftovers from the airplane meals, in-flight magazines, sweater lint, isolated parts of my own body (especially fingers), my own clothing, and materials discarded by other passengers. On some flights, I tried anything and everything; other times, I limited myself severely. What can I do with a single cocktail napkin? Sometimes, I discovered new techniques: for example, pressing a printed page up to the bright airplane window merges the image on one side with the image on the other. Many photographs resulted from this chance collision. I quickly learned to build images for the camera’s eye. A tiny situation on the tray table could become a vast space. Looking down at my sweater, the phone revealed the face of a gorilla, but the person next to me saw only a passenger photographing a sweater in her lap. Over eleven years, only three people ever asked me what I was doing.

My fellow passengers became my subject too. I could, for example, capture their image in the reflective belt buckle in my lap.

Sometimes—as carefully and tenderly as possible—I photographed my sleeping seatmate, moved by the intimacy of falling asleep next to a stranger. I turned the camera on myself as well: once, I decided to make a costume in the lavatory by putting a tissue-paper toilet seat cover over my head. The resulting picture reminded me of fifteenth-century Flemish portraiture. On a subsequent flight from San Francisco to Auckland, I utilized the fourteen-hour flight time—the lavatory was often empty and there was never a line—to make a series of photographs called “Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style.”

Playful improvisation may drive the project, but "Seat Assignment" doesn’t exclude anxiety-provoking subjects such as natural disasters, plane crashes, terrorism, and racial profiling. Sometimes, a spontaneous gesture like standing two wafer cookies on end that I only then recognized as the Twin Towers, underscored the pervasive power of the mediatized image.

“Seat Assignment” puts many of my own premises to the test. Is there always more than meets the eye? If I can’t be in my studio, can an airplane be my studio? Could a cellphone be a serious artistic tool that redoubles my engagement with the world rather than distracting me from it? Can I make something out of nothing, working under conditions where art doesn’t seem likely or possible?