“Home Sweet Home” (Originally “This Country Tis of Thee”)
A handmade wooden machine that lays down American flags in sugar, with white and graphite-colored black sugar.
This work spawned from placing chalk ground on the floor from the last piece that I did. I enjoyed the temporary and easily destructible nature of the chalk. I began researching Kolam or Ragoli drawings, sometimes referred to as mandala sand drawings, to a greater depth. I enjoy the idea of the meditative action of drawing being as important as the final drawing, and the idea that the drawing stood for a symbol of mortality. The temporality of the drawing shows the temporality of life. I also like this type of drawing in because it does not try to fight entropy, but rather welcomes it as natural aspects of life.
Last semester I had been working with sugar as a symbol for American society and history, so when I started thinking of what exactly I wanted to do with this reference of Kolam drawings, I thought of using sugar instead of sand or rice flour. For some strange reason sugar is one of the most symbolic substances that exists in my mind. In working with it as a symbol for the past year, I now realize that it is very dull to everyone else in the world and I should stop using it. The connections that I see in the substance are either not viewed in the same way by anyone else or are just overwhelming obvious and unexciting. I find sugar to show a strange timeline woven into American history. It begins with Columbus, had a large effect on the victory of the Revolutionary War, continues into the slave trade, feeds ideas of outsourcing labor and resources, lead a huge shift into the processing of food, and helped Americans gain the reputation of “fat and happy” thus representing gluttony. There is something so important about the irony in the sweetness of taste and bitterness of exploitative governmental practices that surrounds sugar and it’s processing. Furthermore, the idea of artificial sweeteners seems so post-modern and contemporarily American. We don’t need real sugar anymore, lets just make something that resembles sugar, something artificial.
I knew I wanted to use sugar and wanted to work with an ephemeral drawing on the ground. I worked with what substances I could use to dye the sugar. In researching the Kolam drawings, the monks and housewives usually use pigment to color sand and rice flour. I started with charcoal and chalk to color the sugar. These worked okay but their colors were very pale and washed-out. Then I tried graphite powder and it worked splendidly. I began to think of exactly what drawing I wanted to do. I wanted to do something referential of American society and my place within it. My first thoughts were of bad pornography or a McDonalds, neither of these conveyed the correct meaning at all when drawn with the sugar. I thought of a self-portrait, but realized that would internalize the work. Then I thought of the American flag as a symbol for America, completely baseline and simple. I had reservations because this was very linear in thought and the American flag carries very little meaning to me. I thought of times when I was a really young and burning the flag because that’s what my friends and I saw on music videos on MTV. I realized the meaning that it does carry to me is the idea of something to revolt against when showing dismay at the government and American society. It’s meaning is strangely re-ignited when it is being destroyed. After this thought strand, I was excited about the flag. It fit in perfectly as a symbol to show my disillusionment. I believed others would be excited by this work because they would be able to walk on the flag and ride over it. I believed it would be a fun interactive way of playing around with current state of national pride. I always imagined it would be somewhere public, where I would stay up all night drawing the flag in the traditional Kolam way. I started to imagine the possibility of this being really large, and thought how formally beautiful it would be if it spanned across Broad Street. I thought of putting it other places but I didn’t want it to exist only as a video or as pictures for the class. Existing in this way would be so removed and offset from the experience, that it would kill the idea.
However, putting it across Broad St. was dangerous because of legalities. That’s when the idea of making a machine to lay down the flag came into play. The advantage of the machine would be of quickness. But the making of a machine creates limitations in size. The machine functioned a lot like a silk-screen, where the sugar was strained through cuts in containers holding the sugar, and pull along a track as the sugar fell to the ground. The machine had way more problems than I anticipated, like all machines. The machines print was lackluster in comparison to my practices with Kolam style drawing with the sugar. The actual machine was quite interesting though. Creating something that was action based was new and challenging. The machine also had the advantage of image replication.
On the other hand, from an outsider’s point of view that didn’t know the back history of this piece, the idea of building a really crazy, bulky contraption to print the American flag is kind of convolutedly interesting. The machine becomes the important aspect, where machinery exists that only performs this one seemingly useless function. Sort of like building machines that butter your morning toast or tie your shoes. The idea of machines as ideally faster, timesaving, and useful, when in actuality they are full of glitches. Machines also shape the way the product looks, just like a print is just as important as the type of printer/ printing technique.
In the class critique of the machine and the flag product, many of my ideas were not conveyed. It was in the critique room, which is like a traditional gallery space with four white-walls. Being in this space, the audience knows there is a no touching policy due to artwork fragility. The flag then became this fragile crappy drawn image in sugar, that no one would consider walking on. It probably didn’t help that I was simultaneously trying to show the machine, which acted like a fence keeping people away from the sugar drawing. I could have made a sign or something showing people they could walk on it, but somehow in all the transitional points of this piece it didn’t occur to me. By the end, I didn’t know what was the important thing to show, the machine that had become a very important part of the final work, or the dwarfed pathetic version of my original idea of a drawing.
Sometimes works just don’t come together like one would hope. It could be all for the best. The general consensus was that a black and white flag in sugar on the ground is just uninteresting. I was thinking that it would be interesting to the mass populous by exciting thoughts of lost patriotism. But if everyone in the class already realized and doesn’t care about this paradigm shift of being able to trust ones government, than it is unjust for me to consider the mass populous as naïve and somehow affected by this. I suppose this shift in the favoring of the government has been massively happening since Reagan, but with the failure of Obama it seem ever present as problematic. I feel like there is a trickling down effect to have a distaste and distrust for the government. There is distrust of companies and businesses, a distrust of organized groups, and a distrust of strangers. Every person is becoming more and more of an island.
Sorry that this is so ramblingly long. This is kind of why I didn’t want to write about it. It’s a lot of thought for bad art.
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