Paul Schmelzer as signed by Merce Cunningham

Considering he's turning 88 this year, it's easy to overlook the fact that the "greatest living choreographer" misspelled my name.

Paul Schmelzer as signed by Cameron Sinclair

My brother, an architect interested in sustainable design, and I interviewed British-born architect Cameron Sinclair this Spring at a noisy dive bar in the University of Minnesota neighborhood known as Dinkytown. Over greasy fries and through the din of Dookie-era Green Day, he told us about Architecture for Humanity, the world's largest--and first--humanitarian architecture group, and how thousands of volunteer designers around the world have built culturally sensitive, aesthetically healing, and environmentally sound housing for victims of tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes. I'm especially fond of his plans for an "open-source architecture network," a way for architects to get paid for their work while offering free blueprints in the developing world to be modified as local conditions dictate.

While you may not know Cameron, I post him early in the blog in hopes that you will. For more, check out the book he edited for AfH, aptly titled, Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises. Our interview also appears in the Royal Society of Art's book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (December 2006).

Paul Schmelzer as signed by Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling's CV runs the gamut: prolific science fiction writer, Wired blogger, founder of the green-design "movement" Viridian, etc. But I'm a latecomer: my first taste of his writing was his recent nonfiction book Shaping Things, about how industrial designers can help our environmental woes by making truly transparent products that can be metatagged to make evident their chemical makeup, can be geo-tracked from store shelf to dump, and perhaps give us a new relationship to "stuff" (Sterling dubs this "the internet of things.")

I met him in March 2006 when he and Rirkrit Tiravanija were speaking at the Walker Art Center. On the left side you can see Bruce's tracings on a previous page: an outline of his hand with the note, "For Paul Schmelzer and his Moleskine notebook."

Paul Schmelzer as signed by Rirkrit Tiravanija

While I've met and mailed big-name celebrities for this project, it's the people lesser known to the general public that have most influenced me--the Paul Wellstones, Jeff Tweedys, and Noam Chomskys of the world (it's worth noting, some people--like rightwing politician Pat Buchanan--make the list because how they've negatively influenced me. Or pushed me toward opposite aspirations than their own). Case in point, Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Celebrated for art dubbed "relational aesthetics," Tiravanija is a Thai artist whose work--a little like this project--prizes social interaction over art objects. I've written on his work many times (here, here, and here), and an interview we did together appears in the just-published book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Royal Society of Arts, UK). While Rirkrit has achieved a lot in the art world, including a 2004 Hugo Boss Prize, what impresses me about him is that it's the way he lives, not what he produces, that makes him an artist.

I got this signature over dinner at the Walker Art Center this spring, where Tiravanija and futurist/author Bruce Sterling were giving a talk.

Hello, my name is...

Paul Schmelzer, as signed by Yoko Ono

Many years ago I had lunch with an 8-year-old named Spencer and his father, Ron. We were at an outdoor restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, and one of that town’s favorite sons, jazz musician Ben Sidran, sat at a nearby table. Ron urged Spencer—who has Asperger’s Syndrome, a milder form of autism—to get Sidran’s autograph, and Sidran, accustomed to such requests, gladly obliged. But when he handed the autograph back to the boy, Spencer scolded,

“Not your name. Mine!”

After regaining his composure, the musician scribbled out his own name and rewrote the boy’s.

Four or five years ago, inspired by Spencer’s impromptu deconstruction of celebrity, I began asking artists, writers and political figures to sign my autograph, either in person or through letters. A simple enough premise, my intention was to both critique celebrity (what does it mean that Yoko Ono signed the name of a complete unknown? And is there any value to that signature?) and celebrate those who have shaped my beliefs, by either their positive or negative examples (Studs Terkel versus, say, rightwing politician Michele Bachmann).

I’ve pondered what these responses might mean to me (it’s zenlike, this repetition of my name; it’s egotistical; it’s a transfer of energy from those I respect to me; it's a bit like the mantra-like repetition of a graffiti writer's tag; it fits into an art historical context alongside explorations by Richard Prince, Bruce Conner, Alan Berliner, and others), but always return to this simple belief: the autographs stand alone and don’t need all this intellectual justification.

More than 70 celebrities so far have contributed to the project, and another 40 either didn’t understand it, and signed their own names (Robert Redford, the late great James Brown), or left the autograph business to their handlers, who mail out preprinted 8x10s (a rare response: Mikhail Baryshnikov, took the time to write “Not interested. Thank you.”—a full four syllables longer than my name).

Last summer, I had the chance to meet the painter Chuck Close. When I asked him to sign my name on a poster featuring his 1968 Big Self-Portrait, he gamely agreed, but later in the day, during a signing session, he forgot and signed his own name. Funny to be disappointed to get a famous artist's autograph.

Those who have participated include some who have passed on (Sen. Paul Wellstone, Spalding Gray, Earth Day founder and US Sen. Gaylord Nelson), high-profile artists and architects (Matthew Barney, Frank Gehry, Maya Lin, Laurie Anderson), performers (Kim Gordon, Dave Brubeck, Henry Rollins), filmmakers (Peter Bogdanovich, Wim Wenders, Errol Morris), a few infamous politicos (Pat Buchanan, Jesse Ventura), and even the voice of Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta). Eventually, I hope to turn the project into, naturally, an autograph book.

Or would that be a biograph book?

Stick around as I chronicle my progress.