ADVANCED DRAWING: Destruction Project

When assigned this project I was at a complete loss on where to even begin. The directions made the assignment seem so open-ended that there was no wrong method, I soon learned that was in fact, not the case. I realized that my need for control or a goal for the end game was the one thing that kept me from letting go in the destruction of my work. I was able to wrap my head around the idea of destroying my work (although it did take a while) but was not able to let go of my urge to create something that was neat, organized, and had aspects of uniformity.

Before I got deep into my research, some of my ideas for my project were as follows. Shred my work, then reorganize it and tape it together as to resemble what it looked like pre shredding. Tear one of my figure drawings up and then attach parts that have been torn to another figure drawing in order to create texture and increased value. Have my dogs rip up the work and then sort the parts into categories which I would then place into plastic bags. And finally, burn part of my work to create holes in it and then overlap the pieces which were burnt. While all of these were interesting ideas, they were not really speaking to the project which was focused on the gestures of destroying the work rather than the look of the end piece.

My research was very informative and allowed me to think outside of the box in terms of destroying and recontextualizing my work. The history of destroying work or the act of destruction as art has a long history. Artists which have created in this way include Robert Rauschenberg, Ai Wei Wei, Michael Landy, and John Baldessari. Out of all these artists, the two that interested me the most was Michael Landry and John Baldessari. Landry’s work titled “Break Down” and Baldessari’s “Cremation Project” were very similar in their process and ideas. “Break Down” consisted of Landry some home ruining every object he owned, 7,227 in total. He did this with a team that did whatever it physically required to dismantle everything from his car to his own artwork. “Cremation Project” was similar in the sense that the process was out of Baldessari’s control and that he destroyed a significant amount of his own, valuable, artwork. Both of these performances were based on putting an idea in motion and sticking to it no matter what as well as destroying things that are meaningful.

After reading about these two pieces I wanted to do something similar. I decided that I would destroy all of my work (that was not digitally rendered)up until to this point in the semester and contain it within a jar. I would do whatever it took to make it all fit even if that meant shredding, soaking, or burning my work. This exercise would be both destroying things that are meaningful and also succumbing to the gestures that would make it possible to fit all of my pieces into this jar.

Fragment from Hoage to New York, John Tinguely (1960)