Eric Ballenger, graduate student, spent Fall Semester 2005 making buttons with abstracted faces, leaving them in the Art and Journalism Building and Robert Bell for anyone to take. "Take Me," the card read. Behind the card was a Web address, giving clues to the curious who wanted to know what was happening. Online, people wondered who designed the buttons, what it meant and where they could find more.
Ballenger said he wanted to know what people thought of anonymous art. As a part of his assistantship last semester, he taught English 103 and wanted to keep quiet about his project from students who talked about the buttons, he said. Did they like that week's button? Why? Why not? He's still trying to find those answers. For now, he's giving the answers these observers sought.
Daily News: When did you think of the project?
Eric Ballenger: A friend of mine wanted to do, he'd written a novel. He either couldn't find a publisher or he wasn't really hip to trying to find one. What he was going to do was break it into chunks and to print out chapbooks and leave it laying around campus and I thought it was a funny idea. It's a weird little guerilla art thing, which sounded like a fun idea, and I can't write. I write commentary on the Book of Paul. Which, if you, see an academic text on Paul laying around here, you're probably not going to pick it up and randomly read it and look for the next one. It's not going to happen. And I don't know if you know anything about comic books.
DN: Not really.
EB: Scott McCloud published "Understanding Comics" in early 90s and one of his things, one of the reasons he thinks comics are so pervasive, why so many people read them and so many people enjoy them, is that when you have a very abstracted face, anyone can place themselves in it. It's why Peanuts is why so alarmingly successful. You look at Charlie Brown; he's a smiley face with a nose. People can look at that and go, 'that could be me.' And one of the things with abstract, you can abstract a face pretty far down because what humans do is that we're really good with pattern recognition and we're a little egocentric. So, we see something, and you see a face.
EB: So I thought that was kind of fun, so I combined McCloud's thing of seeing faces readily and easily and just sort of randomly distributing something artistic around campus and came up with it. A couple years ago I bought a button maker and pin backs with the idea of selling buttons to bands, but my buttons are little bit bigger. For some reason one-inch buttons are really en vogue and I have one and a quarter inch buttons...So, nobody wanted them. So now I have this do-hickey to make buttons and a thousand pins, I have a thousand pins. What am I going to do with these things? Well, either I could leave them sitting under my bed or make buttons and lay them around. Either way, I'm not making any money off of them. And at least, if I see something I made, it's kind of a hoot.
DN: When did you decide to mesh the blogging component with the buttons?
EB: I think it was the second or third week because I'd leave them around and I go back and, 'Oh, they're gone. That's nice...Who took them?' Do I want to put my e-mail address on there? No, no, that's asking for all kinds of trouble. Um, but I had blogs. I require my students to have blogs because journaling. ... But I wanted some way for someone who picked up the button and if they were vaguely interested in it, they could flip over the card, and go 'Oh, OK,' and could leave comments and find out what I did. Some of them at the end I thought needed a little explanation. The 10:01 button.
DN: Yeah, that's the one that I picked up and I talk to my friends about it and they can't see it. And I'm like, 'you can't see it?' The zeros are the eyes, the colon is the nose and ones could be the ears.
EB: Yeah, so that one I thought could use a little explanation. So, the reason why I put that one at the ninth spot, that's a binary clock. I vaguely understand binary. I'm like, 'That's a joke that no one would ever get, unless I tell them.' So I put that one there.
DN: Why did you decide to stay anonymous during the project?
EB: And I would still like to stay anonymous. I think part of it is that I like seeing people with these things that don't know me, and I want them to not know me. I want them to go, 'Well, that's neat,' and go pick it up. Not, 'Oh, Eric made those, I'll pick one of those up.' ... I know one of my students at one point picked these up and talked about them. I told them one day during class that I had been making these and I pointed out one of the buttons. 'You did those?' 'Yeah, I didn't want you looking for those. I wanted you to go, "I liked this thing, so I pick up this thing. Not that, I like this guy, so I pick up this guy's thing."'To a certain point, if someone found out who I was, it would be funny. I dropped in there certain clues as to who I was.
DN: How do you make them?
EB: You know those white erasers, well you're in AJ, so you would have to see those little white erasers. White eraser, a Sharpie and an X-ACTO. I carve the design in, get the stamp out and go to town.
DN: How did you decide what face was going to be that week?
EB: The general idea was that I wanted the face to get more abstracted as I went on. The first one was clearly a face...The idea was I wanted to make it more abstract as I went on because if people were actually paying attention, they wouldn't stop. ...
DN: Are you going to continue making these buttons?
EB: I thought about it. I largely ran out of ideas. Part of it is that I wanted to do is make sure they were as much as handmade as possible ... If some goober sat down with a white eraser and a sharpie, chances are, he's not mass producing them. But if it came out of a printer, I could crank out, change the setting on the machine and come out with a gross amount of buttons...
DN: If people found out who you are, how would that change the project?
EB: I think that would depend on how people would respond. If I got a lot of e-mails asking, 'would you do this, would you do that?' Nope. If I would get two or three of those, it would be nice because I could come up with more ideas for buttons. But it just becomes like spam, 'No. I'll just block all you monkeys and forget about it.'
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