Art - what is it good for?

Forgive the continuing obsession with the chicken theme, but it seems that on the second day of the Tiny Stadiums Festival, a pecking order has been established. Not amongst the performers themselves, or between the performative and administrative aspects of the festival but the perennial and troubled jockeying for position of human understanding and the meaning of 'Art'. Over the course of the weekend this relationship has ebbed and flowed: yesterday morning the mirrored pyramid in the park was quiet, an alien object. Those of us who approached it did so with caution, but a particular kind of caution.

It is the disquiet caused not by the object itself, but by the realisation that one doesn't know what to do with it. Confronted by such a situation, I looked for the familiar. A small, also triangular opening near the apex. A door? A window? Things we think of as portals. A way to get somewhere... I mentioned this before, but when I peeked in, a water balloon fell into the shelf at the bottom. So, it was a start. The art was interacting with me, but how was I to interact with it? What was the right thing to do? I threw it at someone. And I noticed the dribble marks of dye down the silver coating of the pyramid's face. Should I have given the pyramid its gift back? Did it know that in the face of social anxiety I would try to make a joke of art, and thus let it make a joke of me?

Cut to late afternoon, and the pyramid is surrounded by people running, thowing coloured dough, their clothes wet and rainbow soaked with dye. Children in swimmers and underwear, encouraged by adults, are trying to assail the pyramid's interior through the single panel which opens in the back. Did we break the art? Did it break us? Or did we just break ourselves while art peered out from its silver fortress?
J.M.D.