The response for the Model Consumer idea has been great— have gotten lots of interesting replies from around the U.S. and a few other countries. Of course, almost everyone is like… what are you up to? Eidsvig, have you developed some strange dressing room fetish?
Sadly, no.
The only pseudo-fetish that I can even come close to pinpointing is my love of girls on roller skates/rollerblades. It is strange. I think it may come from the lead-in to Three’s Company where Jack ogles some ladies and falls over on his bike.
But anyhow. Back to the ideas behind Model Consumer.
As I thought about it at the beach the idea seemed to be a combination like Conceptual Multi-Impressionism. Here goes:
Sol Lewitt, who died in April, was one of the major conceptual artists I studied. I don’t remember where I saw the line drawing that was people over and over again trying to draw a straight line with chalk pieces— which of course resulted in a curvier and curvier line (kind of like the visual version of the game “telephone”— but this combination of people carrying out a task and a work getting their energy embedded in it has fascinated me.
The picture above is from the New York Times review of Lewitt’s retrospective at the Whitney (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/08/arts/08KIMM.html?ex=1183435200&en=76a979421c69e720&ei=5070).
One of the thrills of my life was walking into Paul Tucker’s office at UMASS/Boston for a talk and seeing this huge wooden box with a return address “Lewitt.” During our talk I asked… “that isn’t Sol Lewitt?” and Professor Tucker laughed, opened the box, and showed me this scale model Lewitt had provided of a sculpture for the UMASS sculpture park. I felt like I got to peek behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. It was incredible.
Lewitt is everywhere— most all contemporary collections have at least one of his pieces. Some are great, some not so much. But the idea of conceptual art— that is, the artist creating the concept while others execute, works wonderfully at times in his art.
Next— I’ve talked before about Monet and Impressionism. How a lot of my ideas about art return here over and over. How to capture truth in a painting that has been radically changed by photography— and this idea of the personal filter we all have being intimate and necessary and maybe more “real” through paint than the stillness of a photo…
Add to this my experience with DigArts— the project I did for Artists for Humanity at the Roxy in Boston in 2005, and the idea of a piece being constructed by many different viewpoints has started more and more to intrigue me. The night at the Roxy I took photos of people at the club, had them fill out surveys, leave lipstick marks on paper, etc.— and assembled all of this into a huge collage that was a combination of many different viewpoints in one moment. Afterwards I started to think of “happenings” connected by internet where people constructed different art works at locations around the world and fused them into a single piece via a huge monitor. Like a big quilt where many different quilters get assigned a square— or LiveAid, via visual art, and without Bono.
The pic above is from the Artists for Humanity event.
In my recent work I have been using images to make up other images (jet planes, comic books, scratch tickets, etc to make up female figures)…. I thought, why not turn it around and use people’s image of themselves in consumer America (via a dressing room) and collage these images?
This was also probably fueled by my trip to Old Navy (http://617midway.blogspot.com/2007/05/old-navy-no-to-paparazzi.html) where I was told by a woman working there that I couldn’t take photos. I guess it adds some intensity to have people all over the place in stores taking pictures in the dressing rooms after the people told me I couldn’t take pictures in their store.
As for the actual images themselves— I’m not saying a word. Integral to the piece, or series of pieces, is people being free to be as creative and honest as they can with their individual works. This is why I limited the entry to one image— it forces people to think about exactly one picture they can stand behind.
Which is what art is all about.
Maybe.
Thank you all for your responses… and good luck.
Sadly, no.
The only pseudo-fetish that I can even come close to pinpointing is my love of girls on roller skates/rollerblades. It is strange. I think it may come from the lead-in to Three’s Company where Jack ogles some ladies and falls over on his bike.
But anyhow. Back to the ideas behind Model Consumer.
As I thought about it at the beach the idea seemed to be a combination like Conceptual Multi-Impressionism. Here goes:
Sol Lewitt, who died in April, was one of the major conceptual artists I studied. I don’t remember where I saw the line drawing that was people over and over again trying to draw a straight line with chalk pieces— which of course resulted in a curvier and curvier line (kind of like the visual version of the game “telephone”— but this combination of people carrying out a task and a work getting their energy embedded in it has fascinated me.
The picture above is from the New York Times review of Lewitt’s retrospective at the Whitney (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/08/arts/08KIMM.html?ex=1183435200&en=76a979421c69e720&ei=5070).
One of the thrills of my life was walking into Paul Tucker’s office at UMASS/Boston for a talk and seeing this huge wooden box with a return address “Lewitt.” During our talk I asked… “that isn’t Sol Lewitt?” and Professor Tucker laughed, opened the box, and showed me this scale model Lewitt had provided of a sculpture for the UMASS sculpture park. I felt like I got to peek behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz. It was incredible.
Lewitt is everywhere— most all contemporary collections have at least one of his pieces. Some are great, some not so much. But the idea of conceptual art— that is, the artist creating the concept while others execute, works wonderfully at times in his art.
Next— I’ve talked before about Monet and Impressionism. How a lot of my ideas about art return here over and over. How to capture truth in a painting that has been radically changed by photography— and this idea of the personal filter we all have being intimate and necessary and maybe more “real” through paint than the stillness of a photo…
Add to this my experience with DigArts— the project I did for Artists for Humanity at the Roxy in Boston in 2005, and the idea of a piece being constructed by many different viewpoints has started more and more to intrigue me. The night at the Roxy I took photos of people at the club, had them fill out surveys, leave lipstick marks on paper, etc.— and assembled all of this into a huge collage that was a combination of many different viewpoints in one moment. Afterwards I started to think of “happenings” connected by internet where people constructed different art works at locations around the world and fused them into a single piece via a huge monitor. Like a big quilt where many different quilters get assigned a square— or LiveAid, via visual art, and without Bono.
The pic above is from the Artists for Humanity event.
In my recent work I have been using images to make up other images (jet planes, comic books, scratch tickets, etc to make up female figures)…. I thought, why not turn it around and use people’s image of themselves in consumer America (via a dressing room) and collage these images?
This was also probably fueled by my trip to Old Navy (http://617midway.blogspot.com/2007/05/old-navy-no-to-paparazzi.html) where I was told by a woman working there that I couldn’t take photos. I guess it adds some intensity to have people all over the place in stores taking pictures in the dressing rooms after the people told me I couldn’t take pictures in their store.
As for the actual images themselves— I’m not saying a word. Integral to the piece, or series of pieces, is people being free to be as creative and honest as they can with their individual works. This is why I limited the entry to one image— it forces people to think about exactly one picture they can stand behind.
Which is what art is all about.
Maybe.
Thank you all for your responses… and good luck.
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