Συλλογή από
Εργασία 01_ Αρχική προσπάθεια
Συλλογή από οικοδομικό τετράγωνο
Η κίνησή μου έγινε γύρω από το οικοδομικό τετράγωνο της Φαβιέρου- Μαιζώνος -Νόρμαν- Κατερίνης. Κατά τη διάρκεια της κίνησης γύρω από το οικοδομικό τετράγωνο έλεγα από μέσα μου την αλφαβήτα.
Κάθε φορά που κάποιος πέρναγε από δίπλα μου ή άκουγα κάποια κόρνα από τα διερχόμενα οχήματα, σταματούσα την αλφαβήτα και συνέλεγα το πρώτο στοιχείο του περιβάλλοντος που έβρισκα εναλλάξ μπροστά-δεξιά-πίσω-αριστερά (σύμφωνα με τη φορά των δεικτών του ρολογιού).
Έτσι δημιουγήθηκε ένα νέο είδος αλφάβητου.
Γράμμα Αλφαβήτας συλλεχθέν στοιχείο Φορά ρολογιού
Κ κόκκινη κολώνα ↑
Β air- condition à
Y Χριστουγεννιάτικα φωτάκια ↓
Λ κλαρί δέντρου ß
Μ πλάκες πεζοδρομίου ↑
Α δέντρο à
Δ σκουπιδοτενεκές ↓
Π κάγκελο ß
Ε άσπρο αυτοκίνητο ↑
Ρ ασημί μηχανάκι à
Εργασία 01_
Συλλογή από οικοδομικό τετράγωνο
Η κίνηση μου έγινε γύρω από το οικοδομικό τετράγωνο της Φαβιέρου-Μαιζώνος- Νόρμαν-Κατερίνης.Κατά τη διάρκεια της κίνησης μου γύρω από το συγκεκριμένο τετράγωνο ήμουν συγκεντρωμένη στα ηχητικά ερεθίσματα.
Κάθε φορά που άκουγα μία κόρνα κατέγραφα με την ψηφιακή το πρώτο αντικείμενο που θα βρισκόταν εναλλάξ μπροστά-δεξιά-πίσω-αριστερά (σύμφωνα με τη φορά των δεικτών του ρολογιού), και με το μολύβι την πρώτη σκέψη στο μυαλό μου με την εμφάνιση του αντικείμενου.
1.δοχείο εναπόθεσης νερού για γατες 2.κολώνα με επιγραφές 3.air-condition 4. χριστουγεννιάτικα φωτάκια
/καλά δεν το καθαρίζουν ποτέ? /γιατί είναι τοσο μεγάλη αυτή? /μια ομορφιά! /τα λαμπιόνια μας έλειπαν!!
5.τσάντα ώμου για μεταφορά φορητού 6.παρκαρισμένο όχημα 7.γυρτό δέντρο 8.κυγκλίδωμα
υπολογιστή
/μία τέτοια πρέπει να πάρω!φαίνεται /άλλο ένα.. /το καψερούλι..έγυρε.. /doing!από που ξεφύτρωσε αυτό?
πολύ βολική
9.opel 10.μηχανάκι
/ένα λευκό opelακι είχαμε και εμείς.. /γεμίσαμε μηχανάκια στα πεζοδρόμια!!
μου λείπει..
Εργασία 02_
Claes Oldenburg_ The store_ Mouse Museum_ 1961
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/taking_stock
http://www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m651.htm
http://www.michaelluethy.de/scripts/claes-oldenburg-the-store-history-of-sculpture/
http://www.scuolalcinema.it/rosselli/monica/popart2.pdf
“The original idea of The Store was a simple one—to fill a space with objects such as those in any kind of store, but this was not satisfactory as I proceeded. The problem became how to individualize the simple subjects, how to surprise them—fragmentation, gigantism, obsession. My piece is called a store because like a store it is a collection of objects randomly placed in space.” Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, Something Else Press, 1967.
In 1961 he opened a shop, The Store, in his workshop in New York’s Lower East Side, in the wider context of which the ‘Lingerie Counter’ also came into being. The shop was not only the point of sale, but also the place of production. Its stock covered the whole spectrum of everyday needs, just like the items in the over-filled shops in the neighbourhood, from foodstuffs through clothes and shoes to writing materials. Everything was made from the same material - plaster-covered muslin - and painted in strong colours, as if in an Expressionist style. Oldenburg’s portrayal of reality worked on several levels. First of all it related to the everyday object itself, but of greater importance to him, however, was the ‘imitation’ of the different fields of activity, which allowed him to become one with the pastry-cook, tailor, bridal wear designer, butcher, sign-writer and shoe-maker. As salesman it also fell to him to distribute what had been produced. The ‘political’ dimension, on which he set his sights, consequently lay in a return to the non-alienated craftsman’s existence of a pre-capitalist economy in the midst of an American society based on the division of labour. In the art world of The Store there was not a single thing that he could not potentially have been able to produce and sell - though at the price of the transference of the things into art, of the individual articles into non-consumable and dysfunctional statues, of the shop as a whole into an ‘environment’.
As has already been mentioned, all objects were made from the same material, whether it was a question of an envelope, a sausage or a gym shoe. The surfaces were also exactly the same; everything exhibited the same fissured surface, smoothed by the glossy paint; everything appeared slightly deformed, melted on and lumpy. Some of the objects depicted Oldenburg in relief. They shared part of an unspecified background, in front of which they presented themselves and appeared as if broken off from a larger, imaginary context. The continuum, which began to evolve between the things, did not originate from the objects themselves - what have gym shoes and sausages in common after all - but from the unchanging three-dimensional treatment. It transformed the variance of the objects and materials into a cosmos ‘of the same flesh’. The Store was, as Oldenburg said, a ’super texture super-collage’, a far-reaching and encroaching, pulsating organism.
Oldenburg’s osmotic world of goods loosened the relationship between signs and the designated, in their uniform shapelessness, the individual things were suddenly several things at once. The notices and drawings about The Store contain lists of form-analogies, which immediately allow the order that they purport to create, to collapse. According to Oldenburg the following ‘equate with each other’: ‘Hair and Bacon; Earrings, Airplane Wheels, Brassiere and Breasts; Obelisk and Ironing Board; Frankfurter in Bun, Airplane and rolled Newspaper; Hat, Lips, Banana Split and Gun; etc.’ The ‘de-formation’ of individual objects and the dissolving of their utilisation connections open up novel connection possibilities for totally disparate things. ‘The erotic or the sexual is the root of “art”, its first impulse’, said Oldenburg. ‘Today sexuality is more directed, or here where I am in America at this time, toward substitutes, for example, clothing rather than the person, fetishistic stuff, and this gives the object an intensity and this is what I try to project.’ The desire of the mythical sculptor Pygmalion was directed towards his marble sculpture of a young woman; Aphrodite took pity on him, animated her and gave her to Pygmalion as his wife.
Oldenburg’s desire is directed towards ice-cream cones and microphones, towards swimwear and pieces of roast meat. The ‘bride’, also on sale in The Store, was neither more physical nor more desirable than the gym shoe, the same sexual energy being present in everything. Thus, not only did Oldenburg bring about the collapse of the capitalist system in terms of the division of labour but also the pointed fetishisation of the world of goods, which for marketing purposes enhances saleability. His occupation of the object world was as complete as it was consistent in its intensity. ‘Store: 1. Eros. 2. Stomach. 3. Memory. Enter my Store’, is how he invites us in Store Days.
Oldenburg approached his goal of the convergence of art and life by allowing their energies to merge into one another. His ‘animism’, which gives life to things, follows in the tradition of sculpture, which since time immemorial has worked with the dialectic of inanimate material and living, ‘animated’ effect. He coupled this energy, along with the desire structure of the fetishism of goods, to his ‘erotical-political- mystical’ art. Oldenburg’s Store neutralised the tradition of plastic art in that he retained it and at the same time liquidated it. The ‘anthropomorphising’ of the world of things continued the tradition of plastic art, which for centuries had dedicated itself almost exclusively to the human figure. At the same time it was released from this thematic fixation, which, from the point of view of a living world shaped by things, had begun to become outmoded.
‘I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.’ Claes Oldenburg, Store Days (1967)
Oldenburg’s early plaster sculptures are protagonists in a classic American success story, but I wonder sometimes how they feel about that. I wonder what’s on their minds these days, so far from home, and whether they ever think about the old neighbourhood. Because they’ve done well for themselves; they’ve really moved up in the world.
Like a lot of renowned social climbers, these works got their start on the Lower East Side of New York. More precisely, they came into being in a narrow room at 107 E. 2nd Street, during a two-month period in 1961. Rent for this space was $60 a month - ‘including steam heat and hot and cold water’, Oldenburg noted in a prospectus for the project. The idea was to create a store, or at least the functional equivalent of one. Oldenburg constructed ‘objects after the spirit and in the form of popular objects of merchandise’ in the back, and retailed them in the front. You could buy a relief of a rumpled girdle for $249.95, a Big Sandwich (1961) for $149.98; the 9.99 (1961) hanging in the front window went for $399.95. The slapdash painted sculptures mostly replicated coffee-shop food and bargain basement clothing, but mannequins, bits of signs, a wilting red-ribboned Success Plant (1961) and even the cash till were up for grabs. Clearly this was a store where Everything Must Go.
And everything pretty much did. If these works grew up not knowing they were art, surely they must be aware of it by now. While some are currently missing in action - perhaps lost, thrown away, gathering dust in the corner of someone’s basement - most have found their way to museums and collections around the world. (It didn’t take long: MOMA was an early customer, grabbing Red Tights with Fragment 9, 1961, presumably at its original price of $395.99.) This is, after all, what happens to things in a shop: they get sold, are brought home. And, of course, it’s also what happens to art. Yet here it feels like some context is lost in this diaspora.
The environment surrounding the store was echoed in the works in the most literal of ways: the built-up plaster and heavily applied pigment were meant to recall the fixtures and mouldings of New York tenements, architectural details gradually losing definition as more and more paint is layered on with each succeeding generation of tenants. The choice of objects, too, is mired in time and place: they are the kind of things sold in the discount stores once common on the Lower East Side - the linear descendants of the rag merchants of the original ghetto, updated with the shoddy products of postwar America.
Looking at the store as captured in photographs actually feels like picking through a bargain bin - there’s an effort of sorting involved in simply making visual sense out of the jumble of puckered, spattered objects on display. Oldenburg piled his creations on tiered counters, hung them from the ceiling, set them out on plates, impaled them on makeshift pedestals. ‘Environment’ seems too precious a term to describe what’s going on. The chaos suggests what Manny Farber meant by ‘termite art’: ‘the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin’. Except here, the chopping and flinging have already occurred.
The difficulties of perception are compounded by the formal uniformity of materials and techniques. Everything is made the same way, from the same stuff - strips of muslin soaked in wet plaster, built up around wire frames - and distinctions get blurred. Oldenburg worked in unmixed enamel paints, using only eight or so shades in all. This restricted palette adds to the air of expendability. Neither naturalistic nor expressive nor arbitrary, the dumbed-down colours are simply adequate, beyond finicky concern. They gesture towards the real with a half-hearted shrug, the way you greet a neighbour whose name you don’t know. A string of sausages is exactly the same red as the trim on a housedress, which is precisely the same yellow as the yolk of a fried egg, which matches a pair of white running shoes. This chromatic shorthand offers up unsettling similitudes and overlaps, like the way a brown suit jacket continues a smear of liquefying chocolate.
At the same time the objects are irresolvable by design, refusing to cohere into a single scene. Scale shifts woozily from piece to piece: some are life-size, others blown up to clownish not-quite-monumentality. Sometimes within a single piece incongruously sized objects are yoked together by amorphous chunks of hardened ooze - a dripping ice-cream cone dwarfed by the heel of a shoe. Verisimilitude wavers: a dangling joint of roast beef, thick with creamy fat, approaches trompe l’oeil, while the till is almost an abstraction, its blocky shape merely sufficient to indicate its inspiration. Freestanding pieces are mixed in with flattened reliefs and rough-edged fragments, bits torn away from some absent whole. Within the world of the store, signs are as palpable as the things they represent, and prices take on a life of their own, as in the huge ‘9.99,’ suspended like innards on a meat hook.