Vulgar

Making these books are time consuming but also meditative. They create a kind of bizarre poetry of snipped directives, ploys, marketing nonsense, everyday banality. Vulgar comes to mind, in its original sense,  referring to being derived from the common people, way back in the 14th C.

It will be interesting to read the written petitions interspersed with the printed recycled materials....

Consumption

I had one of those bizarre memories that pop out from the mist of distant past while in the zen of collating pages to these books. When I was a very young kid, the elders in my world, would occasionally talk about someone and a disease called 'Consumption" in the same conversation. It was such a strange word, I imagined people being swallowed up like quicksand, only a hand is visible, then gone. I had to look up what it was. Well, as it turns out, Tuberculosis, aka Consumption, is a type of bacterial infection, that until the late 19th and early 20th C had no cure until the invention of antibiotics. It 'consumed' whole populations and is still a disease afflicting and even killing people all over the world, including the US.

I can't help but feel a connection between Consumption, as a word (noun) and a disease (verb) to that of consumerism. I am not making judgement on it, but making an observation, that in the process of consuming everything we want or see in our culture, we can become ill at ease (dis-ease) with the nature of who we are, literally and metaphorically......

Circles

I was making another version of my recycled books for this project, using junk mail, old test prints and various paper pieces that have made their way to me just from living in this world. Which got me to thinking...  These books of recycled paper are a snap shop of life, which is what interested me in doing them. It occurred to me, that they measure of a life within a place and time. It could be that of a number of people, but not everyone...who would 'they' be? People who fit my demographic, marketing profile, perhaps. That would not be everyone. What about those people who live much closer to the bone than I currently do? Definitely not, especially if they are not in the visual arts.  Been there, seen it. I am shocked at the kind of material I get sometimes and the assumptions they make because of age, gender or buying habits. What about those who live more extravagantly than myself? Or are part of other ethnic groups? Live in different countries? Couldn't tell you.

I used to believe that we all share common experiences and common life, and therefore there is not distinct stratification. That may be more of an illusion though. We congregate in familiar places, group ourselves and create unwittingly (?) circles of influence and confluence. Some circles rarely if ever meet. Is that really any different than the idea of stratification?

This project has made me much more aware of circles.