Contemporary Artists Invite You to “Do It”

The Manchester Art Gallery, not to be confused with the Manchester Museum of Spinning Statue Infamy, has been running an exhibition called Do It, a 20-year-old project in which contemporary artists invite the public to stop saying “I mean, I could do that” and start saying “I mean, I could do that.” Via the Guardian:

Ai Weiwei offers instructions on how to disable an overhead CCTV surveillance camera, using a can of spray paint (to squirt over the lens) attached to a long stick, operated using a corkscrew and a length of wire. He gives full instructions about how to build the device. Every home should have one! An unsmiling uniformed guard stands in front of a door. You can only enter if you are humming a tune as you approach. This is Adrian Piper’s 2012 Humming Room and, once inside the empty room, there’s nothing to do but carry on humming. Louise Bourgeois instructs us to stop and smile at a stranger when we are out walking, though I am unsure how much cheery bonhomie Bourgeois ever indulged in herself. Tracey Emin asks us, following Bourgeois, to hand a stranger a note that shrieks, among other things: “You Don’t Give Me The Love That I Need.” That’ll make them run.

The Do It project exists virtually as well, with public archives of photos and videos. Artist instructions can get a bit arcane (“Walk slowly into the field. Keep your eyes absolutely focussed on the clovers”), but others, like Yoko Ono’s, are populist as anything (“Circulate a picture of your smile to say, Hello. How you doing?”).