[A]rt has turned heads for centuries, be it Edouard Manet’s 1865 courtesan paintings or Pablo Picasso’s 1907 cubist pictures or Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1988 controversial photographs. So what could the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center do to stop traffic in the seen-it-all present?
Hang a billboard in the first state in the nation to ban them.
Eye the back wall of the downtown museum — housed in a century-old former railroad station adjacent to train tracks and a busy road to New Hampshire — and you’ll see a white sign with “Mad Men”-era Volkswagen ad-style black letters asking, “Are You Here?”
“Highway driving is often a time when we use distractions,” says Brattleboro artist Jonathan Gitelson. “We listen to the radio or another audio device or attend to our own thoughts and worries, paying little attention to the changing sights and sensations whizzing by.”
In response, Gitelson has raised grant money to post the 10½-by-22½-foot billboard in more than a dozen locations (rental rate for the space: $600 to $800 for each monthlong stay) in New England and upstate New York.
“‘Are You Here?’ is a metaphysical question meant to encourage motorists to be more fully present and mindful of their experience at the moment they encounter the message,” Gitelson writes in an artist statement. “My hope is that the extreme simplicity of these billboards, and the unexpected and unexplained question they pose, will startle viewers into at least a fleeting moment of ‘being here.’”
Photographs inside the Brattleboro museum show Gitelson’s billboard in such places as Adams, Massachusetts, East Hartford, Connecticut, and Granville, New York. But the most provocative image is the sign itself, and not just because it’s currently displayed in a state that banned such advertising in 1968.
“It is meditation without a yoga mat or a pew,” says Mara Williams, the museum’s chief curator, “a mindfulness practice with a sense of humor.”
Museum Director Danny Lichtenfeld wasn’t sure everyone would share the feeling.
“We liked the whole billboard slant because of Vermont’s issues,” he says, “but I half expected somebody to get in touch and ask, ‘Where’s your permit?’”
Answer: There isn’t one. Authorities looking to issue a ticket have only a few days left, as the first and so far only scheduled Green Mountain State showing is to end Monday so the sign can move to its biggest venue yet: Boston, where it’s set to appear at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.
The moment of “here,” the billboard demonstrates, is only now.