Yes, That Was Really A Clydesdale

Ted Kennedy bought his house on East Kingsley in May, and is interested in how people react to the stuff he puts in his yard. He’s hung empty picture frames from trees – you know, that kind of thing (more on that later). On Wednesday, he did a performance art piece that involved a petting zoo, which looked a lot like … just a petting zoo.

Now, if you’re driving or walking through downtown Ann Arbor’s residential streets, you might not expect to encounter, say, a Clydesdale – especially not in someone’s front yard, with an alpaca, two goats, a duck, chicken and Shetland pony named Bronco. You’d probably stop to look. You might think, “Huh?” Or you might take some photos and send them to The Chronicle, which is what Ari Sussman did.

People were pretty confused by it, Kennedy says. Which was sort of the point. Plus, it was fun.

First, the fun. Kids loved it. Bronco the pony was especially popular. Kennedy did this intentionally on a Wednesday, a day when the farmers market is held (he’d originally planned for Saturday, but the weather forecast was crappy). A group of kids from Northside Elementary walked by on an outing to the farmers market, and many of them hadn’t been that close to these kinds of animals before.

When Kennedy took Duncan the Clydesdale for a walk around the neighborhood, some kids thought it was somehow related to Obama winning the election – a celebration? A symbol of change? Who knows.

Kennedy, a 28-year-old artist in film and photography (you might have seen his photos of roadkill at the last Shadow Art Fair), says he used the guise of a petting zoo to get farm animals into the city and see what happens. He did it “to question what we deem as acceptable in different environments,” he says, whether by law or social norms.

It turns out that having a petting zoo isn’t as much of a problem as having those picture frames in a tree. In fact, as he was waiting for the animals to arrive (hired from Chamberlin Animal Rides & Mobile Petting Zoo in Dexter), a city worker came up and told him he’d have to remove the frames. The trees were on city property, a neighbor had complained and the frames weren’t “traditional decoration.”

The petting zoo? Apparently, no complaints.

When asked what distinguishes the petting zoo as performance art from just a plain old petting zoo, Kennedy conceded that this was a complicated distinction. When people asked what he was doing, he’d sometimes say it was art. He’d sometimes say “just because.” He’d sometimes just go with whatever their assumptions were (see the Obama celebration above). It became performance art because he was trying to provoke a reaction rather than make people feel comfortable, and was paying attention to the way in which people responded.

That said, he’s also looking for ways to connect people within his neighborhood, and for that purpose, the petting zoo might make a repeat appearance in the spring – this time, just as a petting zoo.