Reflections and questions about the class projects

1. Erin Reitz – http://epicromance.blogspot.com/

I would first like to start with Erin Reitz’s work. In her relational piece she asks us to participate in an online blog project. Our interest is piqued when read the first line of the instructional text which says, “Got something dirty to share?” I followed the instructions and plugged in a relatively innocuous sentence with very dirty overtones. After getting my binary code, switching some numbers around as she asks, I received an utterly unintelligible new binary code. The next instruction says simply to submit your result to dirtynumbers.blogspot.com. This was confusing for me for a number of reasons. Was I supposed to re-plug the numbers back in and receive something totally different? Both the code received and the code decoded really had no meaning, at least nothing I could ascertain. My original sentence was – “I like to eat polish sausage.” The code received was - “0100100100100000011011000110100101101011011001010010000001110100011011110010000001100101011000010111010000100000011100000110111101101100011010010111001101101000001000000111001101100001011101010111001101100001011001110110010100101110.” The altered code was – “1011011011011111100100111001011010010100100110101101111110001011100100001101111110011010100111101000101111011111100011111001000010010011100101101000110010010111110111111000110010011110100010101000110010011110100110001001101011010001”
Then the decoded code number 2 read as "∂ fl a fl 9 ê fl a ~ 9 fl è ê R fl R ~ ` R ~ ‹ a —." What does it all mean? Much art today is spoken of as being a variation on a theme, a recoding, and the like. Is she trying to say that in the process of recoding we are actually failing as artists if this is the type of work that we do?

2. Ryan Fenchel – http://cosmosapersonaljourney.blogspot.com/

For my relational aesthetics project I chose to do a Tiravanija style cook-fest. We baked BROWNIES and ate them and talked and had a beautiful, convivial, Relational Aesthetic moment. Ryan Fenchel’s project seemed to be in a similar vein. For his project, he and some friends went to a Mexican restaurant. I could ascertain what he was going for in the work, however, the lack of specificity or elucidation makes it seem a bit problematic. Like my BROWNIE project, was Ryan involved in a relational performance of eating (or attempting to eat, for that matter) with friends? Was the piece performed specifically for the assignment, or did he retrospectively place this specific quotidian event of eating as art, at a latter time? This relational piece also was performed with only a small group of his close friends, whereas, many relational artists will choose to make it an open event, or at least one which allows for future open-endedness. My question to Ryan would be, can you invite me the next time you get a burrito?


3. Steve Nyktas – http://stephennyktas.blogspot.com/

For Steve’s project he placed objects/gifts in various public locations. These objects like quarters, pens, and the like were set out in order for others to pick them up. In his statement about the project he seems to feel that this project is ‘art proper.’ However, I question whether the lack of an artistic context – that which would be apparent to the lucky quarter finder – belies the purpose of the project. Does it work given the fact that Steve has posted information about it on his blog, even having photo documentation to boot? Should he leave clues next to the various objects, therefore informing the chance participant that they were being involved in the creation of art? Is it fair to them – the participant, that is – that they are now a part of an open-ended artistic project of which they had no knowledge that they were participating in? It would seem to me that the finding of the objects is such a critical part of the work. In this case, I don’t know if this work should necessarily get the Relational Aesthetics stamp of approval.