Sock Options Part 3: Nose Ring Cappuccino Road Sign Edition

Hello mailing list and goodbye 2025.

This trio - the last couple of pieces and this one - is a way to claim partly forgotten histories, at a moment when so many people want so badly to declare a single dominant story about [insert issue or history here] in order to make it absolute. These are little pockets I have been slipped into. I wonder where you have traveled through that might have been too easily set aside.

In 1995, I worked at an arts organization called The Field, which was founded by the very smart performance-maker and thinker Steve Gross, who, for a while let a group of us run the place as an artist collective. It was often chaotic, especially at our weekly staff meetings. But one thing we were pretty good at was managing The Field’s money. Regardless of how successful any of us were at balancing a home budget (I was not), The Field became a sacred trust and we didn’t want to let it down.

We were an unruly but dedicated group of cranky amateur philosophers who made art and helped other people make art, and we were running a surplus. The Field had a model for feedback called Fieldwork that was starting to spread to other cities. As funders sometimes do, some of ours had piled on to our Innovative New Model of the moment.

We knew we were in a bubble in New York City. We knew that the nature of touring was changing. Networks like NPN couldn’t accommodate all the artists who wanted to travel with their work, the NEA censorship of artists (we had that then, too) was constraining the landscape, and the coasts still dominated the discourse.

Our surplus was around $25,000, and we were interested in getting out of New York to see art in other cities. What if we went on a road trip, held town meetings, met artists, saw alternative spaces and made our own DIY tour network? We’d call it Far Afield, or Field Guide to Touring, or something like that. We didn’t totally have a plan.

We drove two matching, rented Oldsmobile sedans for six weeks and saw 26 cities, from an artist’s rehabbed laundry-room-as-performance space in Temecula, CA to a theater with decades on its boards in Asheville, NC. (Also: remember Oldsmobiles?). When we got out of the cars wearing our sunglasses, we felt like cranky secret agents of live art.

Hello again: something I miss most about pre-Instagram life is the sense that photographing a beautiful shape and the way light passed through it was not necessarily a call for affirmation from without, it was just a lovely thing to do.

Here are some images from around the time of this road trip and similar ones. Were we ever this young, loves?

Another thing: The Field’s mission was not to curate on an aesthetic basis. When Steve formed the organization, he felt no more qualified than anyone else to decide what art was good. Imagine that. Which meant that whatever we did had to be rigorous in other ways than just saying we voted this the best. The rigor of Fieldwork came from the questions and conversations it engendered, based on the belief that everyone’s an artist and everyone has an eye for art. I love this Platonic ideal to this day, even if it means supporting work I don’t always like to see.

One of my favorite people on staff at The Field was Fiona Marcotty, a choreographer who only spoke when she had something incredibly brilliant and usually also profane to say. Sometimes this was just, “FUCK” in exasperation at the NYSCA grant proposal we were working on. Once, against a deadline and trying to find language for another proposal, she turned to me with a quiet intensity and said, “Aaron. Everything is jargon. In grant-ese, fucking telling a joke would be ‘engaging a community-based humor initiative.’

Back to the road trip. One day Fiona and I were driving through Nebraska. We had just spent an afternoon in Lincoln, which, as a midwesterner I knew to be a college town with an interesting counter-culture, but which the New Yorkers in the cars, including Fiona, did not.

She said “I never would have expected that from Lincoln. That, like, every city now has a kid with a nose ring making cappuccino somewhere. They should put that on the exit signs, alongside the symbol for the hotel or the restaurant or gas? Just a big nose with a nose ring and the thing that steams the milk right next to it.”

Okay. There is no year end wrap-up, except that it’s been rich in practice and I’m so happy you’ve read this far.

There is no prediction for 2026, though there are things I’m looking forward to, and hope you are too, despite the number of things being taken away by people who clearly want to watch free people suffer. I’m amazed at the joy we are finding.

In 2026 I wish you road trips or other misguided paths. I wish you and the people you love all joyous protection. I wish the end of fascism, here and everywhere.

The Field’s DIY touring website was called GoTour and it lasted 10 or 15 years. Long enough to get some people on the road. The domain name is available. If you have a surplus you should go for it.

Fieldwork was spun off by The Field a few years ago, and absorbed into a loose network of sites in various cities. The workshop is a generous, precious gesture against competitive art-making, and I recommend you go to this site, download the guidelines and start a group, wherever you are.