I've been playing with taking letters cut out of books, skewering them with pins, and putting these pins all around the place so that they spell out my name, similar to the stamps.
I first have to say that I am endowed to both Harry C. Walters and Jeremiah Teutsch whom were putting odd things (hair, matchsticks, pill capsules, pin holes, masking tape, balloons) on walls, etc, for people to find by accident much much earlier than myself. I am not attempting to completely appropriate their ideas, but play and explore similar concepts. As for as it concerns me, they both are the originators of this little medium. I intent to fill it with myself.
I love how this photos came out. Some concepts I am trying to play with:
The letters are clipped from books, the actual book can be very important conceptually to the piece - much, in a sense how Cornelia Parker picks exactly what items to use (example, "Tarnish from the inside of Henry the Eighth's Armour, 1998"), but with a complete difference, as an uncountable number of books are printed en mass. The interesting part isn't the particular copy of the book, it's the book itself - what it contains in its text. I for one, think collecting useless garbage is pretty silly - not that I don't do it to some account, but I keep it well in its limits.
This is interesting if you take it with what you can make from the clippings. For a silly example, I could take The Bible, and clip the first, "L" I find, then the next, "i" on the page, then "e" and, "s", and then start over again. Once (heh, if) I get through the entire Bible, I will have enough letters to spell out, "lies" a few hundred, if not thousands of time.
You could read this two ways; You could hold the letters clipped out, and perhaps pasted onto a board and state, (with some truth), that I have found a thousand or so, "lies" in the Bible. Then again, you can show the board with pasted, "lies" and the bible with clipped holes everywhere and say that you have now purged all lies from the Bible - that this is now the true word of God. This ambiguity is very hot.
I chose for the above sketch to spell out my name using pins. I used my name because I think it's important to own up to public art that shouldn't be there - in harsh contrast to grafitti, which is basically anonymous to the majority of the people who see it, (most of the grafitti-like paintings I've done had my name anyways). This is similar to putting a drop of blood on the stamps, if you were so inclined you could run a DNA test on the blood and attempt to match it up - but, it's only a one cent stamp and doesn't really make any long-term destruction of the property it's on.
Same with the pins. I chose pins for their versatility - you can stick them into a wall, in a crack, prick a more organic material, like a leaf, a person, leave them scattered about; they're easy to manipulate with your hand, they create a frame for the letters themselves; you can use the pin as a "line" in compositions, and the letter itself as a, "shape" and they're cheap- 400 or so for less than a dollar. Pins hold things together temporarily, these little pieces are not supposed to be permanent - they're supposed to be easily removed if warranted. The pins also give a more sculptural quality to the letters, and will grab more attention.
So, with a lack of permanency, the photo documentation becomes the only lasting artifact and interesting pictures are themselves interesting. The pins and letters also give an excuse to photograph the given area, and a collection of photos will demand an interesting composition themselves.
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I am at the moment in a terrible rut. The ink in my pen has not run out, it's more that it seems I have forgotten how to actually think - it's almost a small depression. I don't know if it's the weather, a symptom of my (completely self diagnosed) mild bipolarism, or just the stress from trying to graduate this semester. Who knows or cares. I feel trapped and the lure of getting into my car and going far far away for a weekend and coming back with an adventure or five is overwhelming. It's most likely going to happen.
What I want to do is make enough of these pin and letter sculptures to bring with me on the trip - to disperse writing from one book all over the entire bloody country, document this with photos and locations and come back, releived.
Take one book, find hidden meaning in it (for example, I found my name 100 times in War and Peace - the title itself a diadic relationship), scatter this meaning in as large of an area as possible, with great care of placement, document the process. Smile at the end of it. Present documentation in an interesting way. Hopeful side affects: perhaps someone curious enough will look up my name and find out who I am.
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Mr Quintron and Miss Pussycat killed it on Saturday at the Larimer Lounge, with the help of the drum buddy.
