From left, David Young, Anida Yoeu Ali and Dan Schwarzlose, The Temple Is a Body, 2008.

Art doesn’t have to hang on a wall or sit on a pedestal: Sometimes, it teaches you how to act like a cowboy. Such is the unique appeal of TICTOC, which Columbia College calls a “showcase of time-based work in performance, spectacle and installation.” The Friday 16 event—which mostly will be held on Wabash Avenue between Harrison and 11th Streets—is part of the school’s Manifest Urban Arts Festival .

TICTOC features 22 artists or teams of artists engaging in activities that may bewilder passersby in the South Loop: Filmmaker Chris Hefner will play a sound collage made from old 78 records. Erika Mikkalo will roam around with a bullhorn, dishing out advice to the lovelorn and her own potential suitors. Writing students will tattoo (temporary) poems on volunteers. And then there is the workshop How to Act Like a Cowboy, which Justin Kaufmann organized with the comedy troupe Schadenfreude.

Created by graduate students in Columbia’s Interdisciplinary Arts department in 2002, TICTOC became an official Manifest program in 2003. Today, it attracts proposals from a broad cross section of Columbia students and alumni. “[TICTOC] began as part of the DIY culture that is so much a part of Chicago,” says the series’ curator, John Rich, an Interdisciplinary Arts alum who first worked on TICTOC last year, when he collaborated with its former curator, Julie Caffey. When people encountered TICTOC in 2007, Rich recalls, their responses ranged from engagement to utter confusion.

“Performance art leaves a lot of things unanswered,” Rich explains. “It’s really flexible in allowing for ambiguity, for not knowing the conclusion.” That unnerves viewers, he adds, because “as a culture, we tend to be very greedy for answers and clarity. When people encounter something they’re not familiar with, they automatically ask, ‘What does this mean?’ ”

It doesn’t help that performance art acquired kooky associations in its heyday: the 1960s and 1970s. Jim Dine drank from a bucket of paint during his 1960 performance The Smiling Workman; in her landmark survey of the genre, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, RoseLee Goldberg writes that this piece “ended with [Fluxus artist] Dick Higgins counting in German until everybody left.” In 1971, California artist Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm. In 1974, Joseph Beuys flew—wrapped in felt—from Düsseldorf to New York, where he spent several days living with a wild coyote at the René Block Gallery.

Yet good performance art is much more than a stunt. (Beuys’s piece, I Like America and America Likes Me, criticized the persecution of Native Americans and explored the concept of freedom.) Rich notes that many performance artists received a traditional visual arts education but found they “need a broader context to explore ideas than a two-dimensional canvas allows.” Still, the works Rich selects for TICTOC must have “a very strong visual aspect,” and he juxtaposes performances that involve audience members in different ways. Some performers—including a group of zombies organized by cultural studies major Nicole Huser—will roam the streets. Others, such as Hefner, will be stationed in the lobbies of Columbia buildings or on the sidewalk outside. And while some pieces are not interactive, others require a viewer’s presence: In The Temple Is a Body, three artists serve a Cambodian meal as they explore a woman’s Cambodian-Muslim identity through dance and Khmer music.

No matter what you encounter as you walk through the South Loop, don’t worry about understanding the artists’ intentions, Rich advises. “Just be open to the experience.”

For a complete schedule, visit www2.colum.edu/manifest_2008/tictoc.php.