Friday, February 16, 2007

chicken-in-a-box


JS: Okay. Talk to me about what you’ve represented here.

MC: Okay, um, let’s see. This is supposed to be a chicken! (laughs). And an apple. Ah, I’m not really good at drawing stuff.

JS: When did you get the idea to write on the—I mean, when did you get that idea of writing on something that would decompose so even the writing itself would be lost? Where did you get that idea?

MC: That was pretty far in the beginning. Because it was in the sense of trying to make you lose something, you know? I was also trying to think of ways, like, to write things where it’s like they fade away and then maybe come back again or maybe fade away and never come back again like in mid-sentence. And then I was like, “Okay, how can I get this?” Like, “How can I make her lose this paper? Lose this writing? What’s a way I can do that?” And the only way I could think to do that was to have something that would self-destruct almost. You know what I mean? It would have to be something that’s alive so that it could decompose. And then, you know, it became a question of “Well, what is hard enough for me to write on that will decompose?” Okay, well, apples. Oranges would probably take too long, you know? So I was just going through different foods in my mind--da-da-da, da--but I was pretty much stuck on the apple. I knew an apple would work cause I’ve seen apples and used apples in my own creations before—not for decomposing reasons but just, um, for other reasons. I knew if you write on apples, well, the writing stays. And that might have been totally satisfactory but my brain kept going without my consent (laughs). It kept going and going like, “No, no, no, that’s not it; it’s got to be better than that!” It needs to be, you know, devastating. And then I’d think, “well, what’s so devastating about losing the words on an apple? Nothing!” Then, like all of a sudden it just popped into my head. I decided to use chicken. I made it so that there was lots of writing on the chicken but there was also writing underneath the chicken so like part of the objective was for you to keep the chicken for a long time until the chicken was totally decomposed which would, in turn, reveal other things.

JS: All right. With the—what kind of chicken did you buy?

MC: It was boneless breasts.

JS: Okay. Breast of chicken.

MC: Yeah.

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