Every day, mailboxes throughout the land are flooded with catalogs, each packed with pages of colorful, eye-candy images of mass-produced items designed to tempt a consumer-products-hungry culture. This month, artist Conrad Bakker will fill more than 2,000 mailboxes nationwide with his own rendition of this marketing masterpiece: "Untitled, Mail Order Catalog."
"This project is a conceptual artwork disguised as a mail-order catalog," said Bakker, a professor of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who conceived and designed the project. Part art/part functional catalog, the project explores "the complex relationships that exist between people and things," along with questions of "equivalence and commodity," or "art objects vs. real objects, and art prices vs. real-object prices," said Bakker (pronounced BAH-kuhr).
"I've always been interested in exploring how people identify with objects, and how our desire for an object says something about us as well as about that particular object," Bakker said. "The catalog creates a context for an art experience, but it is even more about the experience of looking at a catalog -- looking at images of things that we don't yet have but imagining having them and using them."
Bakker's catalog features 32 one-of-a-kind art objects that resemble actual consumer products -- from an electronic nose-hair trimmer to a windproof cigarette lighter. Each piece is hand-carved and painted by the artist in what he calls a "rough or loose, painterly style."
This isn't the first time real-world marketing practices and consumer behavior have inspired Bakker's work. His 1997 installation "Garage Sale" featured a collection of more than 100 objects, displayed at his house; a similar installation, "Sidewalk Sale," was exhibited in 2000 at Detroit's Revolution Gallery. "In both cases, the objects were for sale, but at 'art world' prices," Bakker said. In the new project, "objects are priced according to what the actual gadgets might sell for, rather than according to how big they are or how long they took to make."
"If Bakker simply offered us artworks resembling ordinary objects, his 'Mail Order Catalog' would function no differently than any other exhibition document," artist and critic Buzz Spector wrote in the catalog's essay. "But the pricing model he has employed appears to be an insult directed against his own talents, an apparent mortification of the value of his production methods. Through this radical gesture, Bakker offers us the scandal of art as commodity by means of an equation that forces the value of art and commodity into unexpected confrontation."
The project is funded in part by Illinois' Research Board and the Creative Capital Foundation, New York City, a national nonprofit organization that supports artists pursing innovative approaches to form and content in the media, performing and visual arts, and emerging fields.
More information on Bakker and his work is available on the Web:http://creative-capital.org/artists/visual/bakker_conrad/bakker_conrad.html.
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