The Service Project: Winfield Mounds
David JP Hooker and Greg Halvorsen Schreck. 2011
more work by Greg Schreck
This is the first time I’ve written about this project, it’s taken me most of a year to understand it this much…
The Service Project is an ongoing exploration of place, ritual, and identity. It involves a performance in which I serve tennis balls in a particular space for an extended period of time. Sometimes the space is of special significance (Winfield Mounds, above, is an ancient Native American burial ground, all but forgotten in the Western Chicago suburbs).
I love tennis. I played tennis competitively as a junior, and still enjoy playing tennis today. Hitting tennis balls is so much a part of my muscle memory that it is practically in my DNA. But I also recognize it is a sport fraught with tension: it is primarily seen as an “elitist” sport, played mostly by the upper classes. As such it is a sport which calls in question the distribution and use of resources: environmental, economic, and temporal (in this way it is not unlike art).
By hitting serves in different locations, I hope to find a way to personally commune with the spaces, to call attention to them, to perhaps even sanctify them through ritualistic action. At them same time I want to acknowledge the tensions inherent in the action.
The pun in the project title is intentional. To me, this project asks fundamental questions about the nature of art: What is the nature and purpose of art? Does art serve a purpose? Can art be of service? It is my hope that the work is paradoxical, perhaps even ironic, without being cynical.
more about this project, including some video excerpts, are available from my website.
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