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I have been thinking about the art people put into their homes. Not just ‘Art’ as we define it in the art world, but the everyday images and objects with which people surround themselves. People use these images to become artists of the meaning in their own lives; often, the more ordinary they are, the better. You can give people nothing but K-Mart or Aaron Brothers dreck to choose from and they will find myths, concerns, loves, and aspirations.
Our homes are the carapaces that protect us from the outside world, keeping at bay the dreary monotony or threatening otherness beyond our walls. At the same time, homes are the symbolic wombs from which we enter that world. Images are important to both these aspects of home. Invisible psychic threads reach out from every photo and souvenir to friends, relatives, and places now distant, but present to us as potent forces that define who we are. These objects are the props of our identity, as basic to us as REM sleep, in the words of Jean Baudrillard. When they work, we use them to restore our force before going back into the breach.
The three short pieces that follow start from simple objects: a track of bubble
gum music, a calendar image by Robert Mapplethorpe, and a group of Thomas Kinkade
collectibles. But complex narratives can grow from simple seeds. In the art
world, we all know that. This sampling from some very interesting people’s
self-curated environments is part of an ongoing research project; I am particularly
interested in the homes of people unschooled in the arts.
Peter Samis
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