Overview
I’ve created a recipe box, filled with recipes that I’ve invented or adapted, and notes and drawings that are all my own. My goal is to create a kind of heirloom to be handed down to a friend in this class.
Physical Process
I’ve spent the last few years learning to cook, standardizing my favorite dishes, and writing them down as recipes on my computer. For this project, I’ve taken those recipes and made them into notecards in a recipe box. So the artwork I’m reproducing is actually a re-reproduction: from food, to computer file, back to a physical form.
I dyed each notecard with coffee to create an aged appearance, hung it to dry on a clothesline, and ironed it to flatten it. Then I copied my recipes onto notecards, added drawings and notes, and placed them in alphabetical order in the box.
I dripped food (where possible, appropriate to the recipe) on specific notecards for verisimilitude. I aged the box by filing the edges and throwing it around a little.
Thought Process
I always wanted a feminine education I never got. More specifically, I wanted to learn the arts of the kitchen. My mother, although armed with a recipe box handed down from her own mother, hates to cook.
In addition to a relaxing hobby, I see cooking as a way of nourishing and pleasing my family, my friends, and myself. Although I distrust such seemingly anti-feminist sentiments, it means a lot to me when a friend stops by and eats my leftovers rather than picking up a slice of pizza.
It was important to me not just to create this object, but to pass down the recipe box and the information it contains. I’ve chosen a female friend in this class who has lost her mother. From the first moment, I created this object with her in mind.
Class Concept: the Aura of Originality
I’m counting on the idea of the aura as described by Walter Benjamin. The recipe box is an authentic, unique original. The recipes, my handwriting, and especially my notes and drawings communicate a part of me. I hope that the time and energy I spent on it have infused it with something like aura. More precisely, I’ve put love and accumulated knowledge into these recipes and their physical manifestation. I want their new owner to feel that love.
On the other hand, I’ve constructed a functional object, not a fetishist symbol like the artworks described by Benjamin. I hope that my friend will actually try out the recipes in the recipe box. Although each iteration of a recipe is in a certain way a dimmer copy of a delicious, Platonic original set down at the time the recipe was written, it’s also different and original each time. Unlike a postcard of the Mona Lisa, a favorite meal cooked after you’ve had a chance to miss it loses none of its aura. If anything, the dish becomes more nostalgic and comforting with each reproduction or reworking. And like Benjamin, I’m comforted by the fact that new channels of distribution will allow my recipes to meet a larger audience halfway. If someone else cooks or shares a recipe I’ve invented, I’ll reach the people those people serve the meal to, probably without even knowing it.
Class Concept: Reappropriation
I’m also drawing on the idea of reappropriation, taking a mass-produced recipe box, identical blank postcards, and a plain black ballpoint pen, and using them to conjure something much more authentic and personal.
I’m employing reappropriation here more in the style of Sherrie Levine doing Marcel Duchamp than like Duchamp himself. That is, I’ve taken a mass-produced object and altered both its content and its context. Duchamp recontextualized objects mainly by placing them in a new context. His art was as much about the dialogue it unleashed as the physical objects themselves. As proof of their non-art status, many of the readymades managed to fall back into obscurity or into their original uses. But Levine and other artists like her have added new layers of meaning to this process of recontextualization. Her works add both new context, and new content to the objects represented. By pointing to more than one ideology, art criticism, or artwork, the “contingent object” takes on complex and shifting levels of reference and meaning. I’ve altered the card file’s content by supplying it with content (both physical and conceptual), and I’ve also altered its context by declaring its status not as office supply but as art object.
On the other hand, I’m more in line with Duchamp’s method of evoking of mass production. His readymades were serendipitous, almost arbitrary finds. Similarly, when I conceptualized the project, I knew that I wanted to use a card file, it didn’t matter whether its brand was Rubbermaid, 3M, or Staples. In contrast, because she was quoting a specific work with her Fountain, Levine found it meaningful to seek out the specific model of urinal Duchamp had used in his.
Summary
I’ve taken advantage of this assignment to create a personal object for a friend. I’ve imbued it with a lot of care and also with the thoughts and ideologies we’ve been exploring together in class. I hope she likes it.