Thank you for your comment on post #2 Jane. My reply is ending up a bit long so I thought I’d give it a post of its own.
For me the function of an object has become one index of its position along a continuum stretching uncomfortably between art-stuff and life-stuff. Isolating the function of an object suddenly makes the object appear as the physical thing it is, rather than being concealed behind its purpose. What you get then (says Blanchot) is like a cadaver – or (says Heidegger) is like art.
The Duchampian move has certainly been on my mind lately as I’ve been trying to put together some kind of art-stuff/life-stuff relationship that makes sense for my own work. I’ve also been reading Allan Kaprow’s Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, in which he rather sweepingly divides art practices into ‘artlike art’ and ‘lifelike art’. Kaprow and Duchamp both occupy the art/life continuum but I think even they create too clean a relationship between them.
I agree that painting the objects has changed their context while keeping it the same – unless I’m getting two distinct kinds of contexts muddled. The objects can’t be placed in an art gallery, they have to be left about the house where they began. Rather than take a non-art object and put it in an art context like Duchamp’s Fountain, I think what I’ve done is to paint an art context around the object itself – very very closely around the object, using the pigment of the paint – so that the art context is continuous with the art object (it’s painted onto it) but barely impinges on the physical space around it.
I find it interesting that paint is the material of this context, given the art historical weight of painting. It’s interesting because, as I wrote in post #1, I came to this project because I said I wanted to ‘paint things’, that is, paint pictures of things.
I think this ties in to your second point: that the painted objects simulate replications of themselves (they look like casts of themselves rather than the real things). They look like representations of themselves, like paintings of themselves, only lacking a canvas. The effect is that the canvas is the space around them, which perhaps means the art context infects the whole house?
As for your last point – I’m afraid I threw the apple away when it went miserable and soft. The paint did conceal and slow its degredation, but I didn’t want to look at an Anya Gallaccio going on around the other ‘real’ apples in the bowl and so I let that object carry on its existence in the bin. Perhaps I threw it away because I don’t want the infection to spread. I can’t have my house being an art context, it’s my house, I have to live there, and I can’t have my life being an art object, it would be irksome.
