I just got home and was amazed both at the incredible souvenir reduction and at the amount of souvenirs I needed to process. Tom made every reasonable effort to reduce while I was away and each days’ bag was remarkably small. Still, it took me five hours to sort out paper, wrap each souvenir in that days’ New York Times and hang the lovely little packages at OPENSOURCE. That was with the help and company of my friend Chantelle. One thing I like about this project is the notion that I have a time consequence for every souvenir. I went to dinner with Chantelle and I accidentally used a paper napkin. I will meet that napkin again today when I washed it and added it to my paper pulp. For hard goods I meet them again when I wrap them. By the time I am done wrapping an object, I love it. This becomes a fetish finish. I notice the serendipity of the newpaper pattern on the objects and admire every enticing graphic oddity that inevitably happens on the surface. I also remember how I acquired that object. In this sense, this collection is like every other, a trigger for past experience. These objects are in fact a collection of souvenirs.
2 comments:
How does the "loving" the object, making a fetish out of the object, once you have gone through the process change it for you? I understand the time spent with the experience of each object and this as being a part of a project, you liking your work and all, but don't you think it becomes a bit problematic when you go from talking about the weight of the daily souvenirs to their values? I like this moment of simultaneous love and disgust in your souvenirs.
I think I can answer this question through eyes of my 11-year-old daughter Natalia. When we are dealing with the souvenirs, yes there is that aspect of disgust, both the yucky part of handling the trash and the guilty part of having amassed it. When Natalia saw the display at OPENSOURCE she said, "This does not seem like the project I am involved in. It looks so neat." All of the emotional stress of the project is stripped away in the finished surface. When it is suddenly about the finish, the way the words appear, the way an image is cropped, the odd look on Bush's face as he asks for patience on the date commemorating the beginning of the war in Iraq, I begin to see the object differently -for its formal values and I like it. The visual value changes. But yes, this transition only seems to occurs for those folks dealing with the labor of the project. I am always interested in the changes labor brings.
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