Art Shanty Guide 2009

Put on a dozen layers and trek out to the quirky ice-house installations that make up the sixth annual Art Shanty Projects on Medicine Lake.

Equal parts post office, library and poetry retreat. Get your Hemingway on and pen a six-word short story. Cop a dimestore novel at the no-questions-asked book exchange. Or give serendipity a challenge with the shanty's hand-delivered mail project, which involves letters addressed with vague clues instead of physical locations.

Manned by a crew of rogue cartographers, the Radical Mapping Shanty charts borders both imagined and real. Paranoids can study the "routes of least surveillance" in Manhattan's post-9/11 panopticon, where security cameras spy from every street corner. Techies can find their position on the "global map of online communities." A snarl of colored thread tracks real-life commutes though the Twin Cities on a floor-to-ceiling map.

A great place to stop for a cup of Joe, but you'll have to work for it. The Glidden siblings -- Felicia, Colon and Veronica -- have pitched a half-bubble of polyethylene sheets and filled it with stationary bikes. A few minutes of hard pedaling gets the 200-watt coffeemaker going, which provides a bit of caffeine fuel for the next batch of pedalers. Talk about a perpetual motion machine.

Mike Hague -- whom few will recognize as the mayor of Mount Holly, Minn. (pop. 4) -- has created a giant Yahtzee roll on the frozen lake. Each of five oversized dice houses a picnic table and an impressive battery of old-school games (including "Don't Break the Ice"). Says Hague, "If you get six people playing a game in one of these dice, it will raise the temperature 15 degrees, simply from the warmth of their conversation and camaraderie."

If you're hungry, you can get a hot dog here. If you're nice, you might get a ride to shore. And if you ask why proprietor Mina Leirwood is wearing a polar bear costume, you might get a primer on global warming and energy consumption. Look for the car with the not-so-ironic XTINCT vanity plate parked outside.

This Canadian Quik-E mart is doing double time, hosting both Art Review Preview's library of zines and alternative press, as well as Art of This Gallery's absurdist tribute to the Québecois separatist movement. Expect ketchup-flavored potato chips, smoked meat sandwiches and a cranky David Petersen yelling, "Fermez la porte, s'il vous plait!"

A shanty made entirely out of paper and paper-related products. Dip inside and make some origami.

The most conceptual of the shan-

ties. Envisioned by Lucas Kaski

and Peter Sowinski, the three-story structure is "an observation tower, in both the literal and figurative sense." Think of something that's haunting your life -- Catholicism, say, or Gatorade -- and then climb the ladder. You'll find enlightenment when you get to the Third Level.

Bedlam Theater's tiny performance space returns, featuring live music, puppetry and other spectacles.

A mini-chapel on ice. Kneel at the altar and write your dark secret on a slip of paper. Then step outside and see the secrets of others stapled to the outside walls: "I night eat," "I was drunk when I voted for president," etc. The only unauthorized shanty this year -- hard to believe they were denied a grant -- the Confessional Shanty folks may have some confessing of their own to do.

The bluntest of ironies: a heated room made out of old refrigerators. Shanty regular Mitch Redepenning warms up here in between his "bi-cicle" races.

Art Shanty Projects organizer David Pitman is living and sleeping for the entire six weeks in the loft of his shanty, which doubles as the studio of micro-radio station K-ICE (97.7 FM). His strategy for staying warm? "A 30-below-zero sleeping bag and a 90-pound dog." Stop at the cow-spotted box and bring this man some food.

The Surly Pugsley: This bike kicks ass