When he worked as a messenger for Facets Multimedia, Brett Bloom was responsible for stocking the theater’s dispensers around the city with film schedules. “I hated that part of the job,” he confesses. But he also saw how the dispensers, when filled, created a point of informal street-level interaction for passersby, and as an artist he appreciated the boxes’ design, which allowed for the efficient dis-play of images and informa-tion. When local artist and teacher Dan Peterman in-vited Bloom, a recent grad-uate of the University of Chicago, to submit a proposal for a public art project last year, Bloom suggested using the dispensers as mini art galleries. After convincing Peterman of their artistic properties, Bloom ordered 11 cheap dispensers from a company in Canada and convened a loose affiliation of artists to customize them. He dubbed the group Dispensing With Formalities.
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Bloom hasn’t included any of his own work in Dispensing With Formalities, though he hasn’t ruled it out. Meanwhile, he plans to expand the project to include more artists, more dispensers, and more locations, eventually branching out to other cities. In San Francisco he recently saw a vending machine stocked with art objects and saw potential in that concept as well. “Too many people are threatened by art,” he says. “I want to make art an everyday service.”
