This Artist Makes Some of Her Best Work in the Airplane Bathroom
If you dread flying — and it’s hard to think who doesn’t — take a tip from the artist Nina Katchadourian, and try to do something creative with your time.
Like many successful artists these days,Katchadourian spends a lot of her flying, working on exhibitions and projects. In 2010, she was on her way to Atlanta and decided to do something with the hours en route: she challenged herself to create some art using only materials at hand and her phone’s camera.
That was the start of Seat Assignment, an ongoing series that she continues whenever she flies. Katchadourian (whose work withbirdsong was covered on Studio 360 previously) reports that she’s been on some 150 flights since the project started, and has created hundreds of works. Are her row-mates ever suspicious? No, she says; they just think she’s playing with her phone. Which is true.
She’s surreptitiously taken portraits of fellow passengers in the shiny buckle of the seat belt:
She’s made weird landscapes using magazine photos altered with bits of in-flight food or, in some cases, lint:
She captured supernatural emanations:
She recreated the bold geometries of early-20th century Suprematist painting:
Most ambitious of all is a group called Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style. Katchadourian used airline blankets, paper napkins, and scarves to improvise exotic head coverings and clothing like those found in Old Master paintings. Then she photographed herself in the tiny restroom.
More wonderful still, she donned her Flemish outfits to make videos in which she lipsyncs pop hits of yore. If you’re anywhere near New York, by all means get to the Brooklyn Museum before January 3 to see “In a Room Full of Strangers,” her video singing the Bee Gees’ “Nights on Broadway.” It’s a triptych that shows her acting out each Gibb brother’s part separately. You can see a still at the top of this page, but although these videos would kill — and I mean kill — on Youtube, Katchadourian won’t post them. She wants them to be seen in the context of Seat Assignment and her determination to use time instead of letting it pass; she wasn’t being funny and weird for the sake of funny and weird. She’s okay not going viral. Go make your own art project on the plane!
But P.S.: I have video of her performing “Under Pressure” on my computer. Bring me a cup of coffee or a sandwich and I’ll let you watch.