According to Fredric Jameson, the awesome totality of Los Angeles is impossible to view head on without going mad, so Raymond Chandler's fiction allows us safely to glimpse it from a series of minor, slantwise positions: an image here, a narrative detail there.
Houston Texas, a smaller metropolis, suffers an inability to be seen that is not so much dramatic as indifferent. The residents don't care about it (there is no zoning) and no one else does much either (no movies or movie industry drawing tourists). Like most of America, if not the developing world, it's an aggregation of pavement shat onto the ground to give people a place to work and sleep, a collection of malls connected by freeways, etc.
Enter The Art Guys® and 12 Events [Internet Archive], a project harking back to '60s-'70s Fluxus activities, conceptualism, and performance. No one would mistake these slight actions and interventions as magic rituals, but in a sense there is an imposition of sacred geometry on the urban sprawl of a typical American gigantic city, to make visible that which is unseen because it's so damn boring and ordinary.
Thus, for example, February's event:
The Longest Street In Houston [second image from top, above --tm]
Time: beginning at 7:00 a.m. until completed
Date: Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Location: Little York Road, Houston, TexasDescription: - Beginning at the farthest east end of Little York Road at Mesa Drive in Houston and proceeding west past Fry Road,
The Art Guys walked the entire length of Little York Road, the longest street in Houston.*
*The Art Guys concluded their walk where Little York Road ends a few blocks west of Fry Road just past Hemmenway Elementary School at 20400 West Little York Road in Katy, Texas.
The distance is approximately 29.6 miles.
Or September's event:
Intersection [top image, above --tm]
Date: Friday, September 20, 2013
Time: 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.
Location: the intersection of Westheimer and Hillcroft, Houston, TexasDescription: The Art Guys will repetitively traverse the busiest street intersection in Houston, first in one direction for four hours (clockwise), then in the other direction for four hours
Or this month's:
Loop
Time: 5:00 p.m. until 5:00 p.m. (24 hours)
Date: Saturday, November 9 through Sunday, November 10, 2013
Location: Interstate 610 Loop, Houston, Texas, beginning and ending at I-610 (North Loop West) at North Shepherd DriveDescription: - The Art Guys will use a van or bus, utilize drivers, and drive the I-610 loop around Houston for 24 hours - 12 hours in one direction, then 12 hours in the opposite direction. While in transit, The Art Guys will make themselves available to all media to share the experience with as wide an audience as possible.