Wednesday we discussed the Dinner project. There was alot of good response to this project, perhaps influenced by the way the class all knows each other. People generally seemed to find it interesting that a project like this seems to work so hard to blur art and life. There were references to Allan Kaprow, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and several other conceptual artists that concerned themselves with where “life” stops and “art” begins and vice versa.
There were two things mentioned that I found really provacative. One individual said that the fact that this dinner was presented as an art project made her hyper-aware of her surroundings, suddenly she was examining this experience the way one might examine a theatrical performance or gallery installation. Another person said she thought it was strange that at the actual Thanksgiving dinner the next day she was completely reminded of the expereince the previous day, and started thinking differently about her own relationship to that event.
I loved that such a simple, almost obvious recontextualizing of something makes people think differently about it. I guess this is what is at the heart of conceptual art. Stripping the work of all it’s media attachments seems to leave you with nothing but the idea to think of. The unfortunate thing is the problem of credibility. Some conversations with people outside of the experience often began with blank stares and ended with a kind of disgust at the idea of taken something that has been done so many times and claiming it as art. The unfortunate thing is that my interest in facilitating a thought process gets unnecessarily coupled with me claiming a kind of ownership over an idea, despite the fact that precedent for this work dates back to Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal work over 80 years ago.
At any rate, this is the lovely thing about graduate school, and something I might miss when I’m done. Such room to experiment and ask questions about the boundaries of my occupation is hard to come by in our culture.
