Imagine where you live. You may be there right now. Hopefully you are warm.

Now imagine that it is winter and it is rather cold outside. Now you are there. Outside. You have the chills. You wish you were wearing more layers of clothing. Here you are. Put these on. A sweater and a stocking cap. Long underwear. A very heavy jacket and some snowpants. Fashion is out the window. As is agility. You have never worn three pairs of socks simultaneously, under such clunky boots, until now. Some fancy gloves, made out of a mysterious substance called “Gore-Tex,” aren’t doing shit. Your fingertips and toes begin to ache, even burn, and balling them into fists does nothing. You are shivering now, hard, and your chest clenches. Your bladder has shrunk too, and you have to pee every fifteen minutes. In a Porta-Potty. Did I mention the wind is blowing thirty miles per hour? You overhear someone mention something called “wind chill” and what it is –50º Fahrenheit. You wouldn’t believe that person, except you have become so cold you are incapable of considering concepts such as temperature and Truth. It is too freaking cold. One last thing, though. You are having the best time of your life.

If you are still here, you have just begun your first visit to the Art Shanty Projects on a somewhat average January afternoon near Minneapolis, MN. Located on frozen Medicine Lake, Art Shanty Projects is a six-week exhibition of sorts, featuring exhibitionism of all sorts by exhibitionists out of sorts.

The physical portions of the project are the twenty-some shanties, each free and open to the public, conceived and created by winter-loving artists and other creative types. Each art shanty is structurally and thematically unique. Many resemble the fishing houses that also reside on the lake each winter, squat and square with four walls and a roof. Others are not so utilitarian. Take, for instance, the Nemo Shanty, aka the USS Mondale. Rather
than encountering an immobile box, one finds the front end of a submarine hull emerging from the icy depths. Or the Knitting Shanty, a humble yellow yurt with walls so packed full of insulation you wouldn’t hear a gas-powered auger if the inhabitants were using one to drill a hole inside. Instead they just knit and let all visitors join in the quiet fun. The Snapshot Shanty is rectangular, but it is made completely of plastic to let in ample light for portraiture. The Paper Shanty is not rectangular, but is of course made exclusively with paper products. Step inside for some delightful origami.

Then there are also the shanties with “performers,” individuals or groups that have taken on alter egos to fulfill the concept of their shanty. Like the cranky proprietors of “Le Dep,” a French- Canadian convenience store. These poseurs are former members of the Quebecois Liberation Front. If you dare enter in search of ketchup-flavored potato chips, you don’t want to get on their bad side and please, Mon Dieu, shut the door behind you. Instead of putting up with these grumpy old men, you might want to fall in love with three of the loveliest bearded ladies you ever did see. Everyone else did. Dressed as the bedraggled sailors of Ernest Shackleton’s failed adventure to the South Pole in 1914, these women not only traveled hundreds of miles to participate in the project, but they
built an overturned rowboat from scratch too, matching the specifications of the boat inhabited for thirteen months by Shackleton’s abandoned sailors. And then these costumed characters lived in their own rowboat for six weeks. If you were lucky enough and didn’t mind sharing some close quarters, you might have even been invited to spend the night with them and eat pancakes and hash browns at dawn.

Not all of the activity of the Art Shanty Projects takes place indoors, though. You might want to play a game of cribbage inside one of the dICE Houses, which are five dotted cubes fully outfitted with all your favorite board and card games. But you might also desire a more challenging environment, such as the World’s Largest Cribbage Board, a half-mile long “board” drilled into the lake’s ice. It’s just you, your opponent, and pair of chairs with a small table, a deck of cards, and the heaviest pegs you ever used to score two and two is four. Or maybe you need something a little more athletic to get your blood hot. That’s when you enter yourself into one of the Bicicle Races. Run every Saturday at 2pm, the bicycle races are real crowd pleasers, as four-to-eight daring competitors take two exhausting laps, slipping and sliding around the icy track that is the perimeter of the shanty grounds.

If you would rather avoid competition altogether, join in one of the many group projects, like an attempt at the world’s longest Bunny Hop, or a Retroactive Minnesotan Lesson, or a reenactment of an epic battle between Antarctic Explorers and a gaggle of angry dancing penguins, or a sing-along at the radio station K-ICE, 97.7FM; or take an ice-core sample with the scientists from the Biology Shanty; pr test your strength and/ or agility on Feats of Strength and/or Agility Day; or eavesdrop on the sounds of the Norea Bang Shanty until you want to sing your own karaoke version of “Born to Run”; or tag along on a research project with the members of the IAMER Research Lab – the Institute for the Advancement of Metatemporal Education and Research. They like digging for stuff and
flying kites to take pictures of the activities below.

Such documentation is crucial because this is all occurring simultaneously, for six winter weekends, every Saturday and Sunday for hours on end. The frenetic energy doesn’t make much sense, considering the frigid weather. To most visitors on any given day, the Art Shanty Projects most certainly resembles the world’s largest and coldest outdoor insane asylum.

If you saw hundreds of artists frolicking around on a frozen lake in sub-zero temperatures, dressed as carelessly, frumpily and tastelessly as they are, you would probably think they same thing. You wouldn’t believe such stories, including my own, as anything other than exaggerated Minnesotan folklore. Which is another reason for all the
photo, video, and sonic documentation: to make believers out of those who haven’t bundled themselves up on an average January day in Minneapolis to brave the at times absurd elements that exist on a not-so-average frozen lake and to have the best times of their lives. And often that isn’t quite enough to fully explain the legend that has become the Art Shanty Projects. You will just have to be there. I trust you will be soon.

by David Petersen