Idea for a conceptual art project…
1: Invite members of the public to write letters about important personal issues to their friends and families, and send them to you along with the address details of the people they’re meant to be delivered to.
2: Put all the letters into stamped, addressed envelopes, ready for posting.
3: Place the envelopes into an elaborate machine in an art gallery which displays them one by one and has two buttons – “Deliver” and “Destroy”. If the “Deliver” button is pressed, the envelope is dropped into a hopper, collected at the end of the day and posted. If the “Destroy” button is pressed, the envelope is put through a shredder. Allow visitors to the gallery to press the buttons at will.
4: Give the whole arrangement an incredibly wanky name like “Thoughts and Memories of Olympus Mons”
5: ???
6: Profit!
The shredded letters could go to the ‘dead letter office’, where members of the public could choose to:
A) have the remains of the letter composted, put under a sapling fruit tree, then post the resultant fruit to a) the original addressee or b) homeless people.
B) Shreddings distributed via ridiculously over-engineered vacuum tube to homeless people as kindling for their barrel fires.
C) send it to a crack team of ancient manuscript restorers for reconstruction.
Also, I couldn’t agree more with point 5.
No no! You see the point of the work is the choice between redemption and destruction in the public arena. Once a letter is sentenced to destruction by the unthinking court of public opinion, it is destroyed. Nothing more happens to it as it has ceased to be. It is an ex-letter and the fate of its physical remains is not a concern of the piece, the artist, or the audience.
(Good god. If I can write that crap off the top of my head then I’m in the wrong industry…)
That said, a conceptual art piece where people write letters to their friends and loved ones, the letters are shredded, used to grow fruit, and the fruit is sent to the addressees is Turner-worthy by itself!
I could so make a sociology experiment out of this. Hmm, that gives me an idea for a possible thesis. Thanks guys 🙂 lol
If you make a thesis out of my ideas I demand a share of the profits!
(A thesis is a kind of bake sale, right?)
😀
Of course old friend! 🙂