Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Quark Park - The Movie
Quark Park is the story of bohemian lawn care artist and dreamer Peter Soderman, and self confessed "cold hearted realist" Yale architect Kevin Wilkes. Together they created two distinct art collaborations on a Princeton NJ vacant lot, now being developed into condos. Both projects were recognized with awards from the New Jersey Society of Architects.
From his cell phone in a pick-up truck, Peter convinced Paul Muldoon, Joyce Carol Oates, Cornell West, Fran Lebowitz, and seven other literary luminaries to pair up with local architects and builders so they could be deified and enshrined in the bucolic paradise that Peter and Kevin called Writers Block. In a space of six weeks, each team erected a garden folly with all of those "talked into the project," still skeptical until its final completion.
Two years later Kevin and Peter stage an encore, returning to the same vacant space celebrating another home town denizen, Albert Einstein, and his annus mirabilis by matching twelve scientists, sculptors and landscape designers. This garden opus is called Quark Park.
This film is laden with interviews of academic celebrities, sculptors and average Joes who get caught up in the non stop action packed whirlwind of thought, work, and borderline delusional task mastering. About three hundred townsfolk from municipal workers to intellectual recluses, get involved in this town Renaissance. The soundtrack is provided by top tier musicians David Sancious and the Tony Levin Band, both of whom graced Quark Park's stage during its brief life.
With both gardens already gone, what is so exemplary and hopeful about this documentary film is what a community can accomplish for itself when a small group of people are willing to do whatever it takes by harvesting their own human capital. Its two-fold message is clear ~ the greatest love that you can give a community is your labor and that anything on that premise can be grown out of a garden.
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