Cost, Value and Worth

I have been working on creating an edition of 100 Petition Box books with coptic bindings for some time now. They are really sweet little books. The pages are made from the ridiculous amount of paper that comes into my life. Most of the materials I use are what is already a part of day to day living. The largest cost is for the return envelopes and stationary, but the per book cost is relatively little. Yet, my time in making each book is quite extensive. I haven't really figured out exactly what it is, but if I were charging my design rate, even I wouldn't pay that much for one. Which made me think about the relationship(s) between cost, value and worth... actual, relative and arbitrary come to mind. The gaps between them so large their meanings seem ridiculous.

Here are some petitions from Cleveland, OH

And some from RIT, in Rochester:

Call to Participate

The Petition Box Project is a social art project of a sort. It is meant to create a nontraditional aesthetic experience for participants. I am interested in expanding the scope of my project and have devised a self contained book with the last page being a self addressed mailer. The goal is to write a petition in it and pass it to someone who is willing to continue the book on its journey,  to another also willing participant. When filled, or no one to pass it to, the last person pulls the stamped, self addressed envelope out, seals the book in it and drops it in the post. If you are interested in a book for gathering petitions for this project, you can snail mail me a request to: 

The Petition Box Project

PO Box 40182

Bay Village, OH 44140

Please include your return address and I will send one off to you. Thanks

Six Degrees of Separation

The nature of the books I am making, is to read them, write in them and pass them on to another willing participant. I imagine that most of the time, the next person will be known to the individual. Eventually, not so directly. And yet, if it is true that we are part of the human web where everyone is on average six steps away from knowing any other person on Earth, than each book will have multiple webs happening. ooooo aaaaah.


To read more about the Human Chain:
 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-9894881-80.html

Prompted by Snippets

I was talking to a friend of mine about my books and he offered that placing imagery opposite a blank page would give people a prompt in what to write. It's an interesting idea. I can't think of anything that 'fits'. I am hoping images created by clipped text and images of life's detritus will be enough. These are from Cleveland.

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.