maneating obeast sideshow banner

Man-eating Obeast Sideshow Banner, circa 1941.

acrylic on grommeted canvas, 6 x 8′

Obeasts in the Fat Studies Journal

I’m very excited to be included in a great article by art historian Stefanie Snider, titled “Fatness and Visual Culture: A Brief Look at Some Contemporary Projects”, published in the first volume of the Fat Studies Journal, edited by fat scholar Esther Rothblum. Yay for academic writing that highlights art– especially fat art — especially my fat art.

Check it out here:

Stefanie Snider Fat Studies Article January 2012

pet portraits (not)

Some sketchy critters I’m working on using archive photos from the Library of Congress.

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fatty day planner

The fabulous queen of fatties, Marilyn Wann (see also, Marilyn’s site), is working on a fatty day planner. She has graciously declared the month of July to be Obeast Conservation month and asked me to design the pages. Here are current versions of this project.

open house @ Bonded Llama

Here's my contribution to the open studio marketing materials.

My studio mates and I are hosting an open house shindig on Sunday, November 13, from 1-5pm. Anyone in the Raleigh area should swing by and check out what the talented Llamas have been up to! As if fab art weren’t enticement enough, there will also be snacks. For directions and information about all the Bonded Llama members visit www.bondedllama.com.

Can’t make it this time? No worries! Bonded Llama hosts open studio days in both the fall and spring.

Here's my image, improved by Derek Toomes' gorgeous design! Hats off to Derek. The old timey text really makes it.

art, stress, life balance, & art

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” — William Gibson (novelist)

Gibson’s quote popped up on facebook recently. It was useful reminder that it is emotionally draining to notice the world, and that feeling sad and stressed regularly has legitimate environmental causes.  It’s tempting in our medicalized culture to medicalize our emotions rather than stopping to feel them and implementing the systemic lifestyle changes it would take to actually eliminate stress and anxiety.

This is something I’m thinking about a lot lately as I’m dealing with the ordinary stress of making financial ends meet while leaving myself enough time and emotional energy to make my art. The main trouble seems to come from the fact that my part-time job is surprisingly (or maybe not at all surprisingly) draining because it requires working one-on-one with remedial college students for ten hours at a time. So in addition to taking up my art time in the most straightforward sense, my part-time job also seems to require that I now take days off to rest and recuperate from it– which cuts even further into art time, but without which my nerves and immune system (apparently) crash and burn.

Ok, maybe the main trouble is that I’m a workaholic with no absolutely boundaries between work and life. I’m not used to this idea of “days off”. Just thinking about it feels like peeking over the edge of a cliff. I grew up on a farm where there was never, ever a full day off. This every day work routine is deeply embedded in me, and yet it is unsustainable in my current life configuration (as a recent minor illness reminded me).

So, freshly admonished about the importance of taking care of oneself, I’ve been doing some number crunching to figure out a new schedule/lifestyle. In terms of days spent not making art, my part-time job has become a full-time job because it requires “off” days where I sleep and recover and do whatever people do on days off. My concern is that this new, healthy life balance I’m trying to achieve, relegates my art days to just two or three a week. If I’m being candid, the piddly income generated by this part-time job (which I like doing and excel at) starts to not seem worth it compared to what it costs me and my art career. However, drum-tight finances necessitate that this small trickle of income continue.

Occasionally, I feel like a brat when I get cranky about lost studio time; I don’t think of art as optional and as such I take it very seriously. Still, it’s difficult to know how hard to fight for an art career in the face mounting bills. Frankly, making conceptual art is a great way to spend all your time going broke, and yet I can’t imagine doing anything else. I have come to understand why it is that many successful artists have come from wealthy families, or starved for their art; it’s all about making sure there’s enough time for art. That’s the key. But since I’m neither wealthy nor willing to starve, there has to be a middle ground that will work for me. After some brainstorming, possible solutions include: getting a large art fellowship (possible if I maintain the hustle in my bustle), finding a pot o’ gold (chances slightly less good than the fellowship), getting a platonic sugar daddy (could happen), or hiking up my panties and getting on with finding a sustainable life balance (sigh) while accepting that working more slowly is not the end of the world.

Or I could keep working nonstop till I die.

 

obeasts on the radio, part two

I had a lovely chat with Molly Matlock on ‘Inside the Artist’s Studio’ back in August.

Hear the podcast here: http://insidearts.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/rachel-herrick.mp3

 

 

recent studio doings

I’m making historical artifacts documenting the strange and strained relationship between humans and obeasts. At the moment I have two projects that I’m actively working on (and dozens more in the hopper): The History of Cornhole and obeasts in sideshows.

• The History of Cornhole: If you don’t know (I didn’t until I moved to the South), cornhole is a lawn game that involves tossing bags of corn or beans into or toward a hole in a board. In my experience, it is commonly favored by lower and rising-middle class men. It is also coded as ‘white’ in my experience, but my research on this has not been exhaustive by any means. There is some mystery about how the game of cornhole came to be; it loosely resembles a game played by Native Americans. For my Obeast Cornhole project I am reworking the history of cornhole to be about the clash of obeasts and Midwestern corn farmers around the turn of the 20th century. I just finished making a set of cornhole boards that are reproductions of the original boards. The plan is to incorporate these in an installation with historical photos and an 20′s style animation of a farmer shootin’ himself some pesky obeasts.

• Sideshow Obeasts: Before reality tv and facebook, sideshows offered the American public opportunities to gawk at the strange and unusual. In addition to the human ‘freaks’, sideshows drew crowds by exhibiting animals from exotic places as well as animals that were rare specimens of familiar species. Since obeasts were as familiar to Americans as black bears and bison, the specimens that traveled with sideshows had to be something special. To that end I am making an Albino Obeast banner and a Man-eating Obeast banner. This latter banner will be accompanied by historical information about an obeast that caused all kind of trouble in the Catskill Mountains by attacking humans. The banner’s advertisement of a ‘man-eater’ would have likely been a convenient exaggeration of the actual events.

obeasts on npr

What, what?! I was on NPR’s The State of Things today! Listen here: http://wunc.org/tsot/archive/Origins_of_Obesity.mp3

Photo by Jim Crawford.

 

fat-phobes, intention, & the emperor’s naked ass

A particular comment keeps occurring about my art, one I am very interested in. It’s been said many times in many ways, but here is a quote from the comments on Big Fat Blog that represents the idea well enough:

The thing that bothers me about [MOCS] is that most fat-phobes who view it will not get it all – it will go right over their heads, and they will use it to reinforce all their nasty stereotypes about fat people. This isn’t going to enlighten them or educate them or shut them up – their minds are closed too tightly for that. If even science can’t change their minds, how the hell is satire going to do it? And fat people telling those fat-phobes that they just don’t get it and are too bigoted to get it isn’t going to change anything either.

This is an astute concern and observation. The MOCS project can  absolutely be mistaken as aligning itself with fat stereotypes rather than combating them. (It wouldn’t be very good satire if it didn’t.) Yes, people might use the ‘obeast’ concept as fodder for further fat phobic behaviors. But here’s the thing: I know this and I think of it as part of the art. Let people act like fat-hating douche bags, and let others see them do it. I want these bad behaviors done right out in the open, rather than snickering behind our fat backs.

Let’s not pretend that fat phobia doesn’t exist (although people do), or that my art could even make it noticeably worse than it already is. If fat phobes mistake my art as a call to wave their ignorance around, they are simply confirming the very system of discrimination that I am critiquing. This performance of ignorance is part of the art as much as the fat-positive conversations that have been caused by it are.

What does it change? I honestly don’t know. What does running a fat-positive blog change– or for that matter commenting on a fat-positive blog? Maybe change can be measured not in the ways that we impact other people’s ways of thinking or behaving, but in the way we impact our own ways of thinking and behaving.

I have no trouble laughing at fat phobics who don’t get my joke and I do think there is something cathartic about doing so. Maybe it’s as simple (for me) as deciding that I’m not the butt of their jokes anymore; they are the butt of mine.  Fat phobics are people with metaphorical spinach in their teeth.  Or to switch metaphors to a slightly better one, they are the nude emperor sauntering through town in his new clothes. The emperor might think he’s making a fashion statement, and his devotees might agree for awhile, but it comes down to it he is buck-ass naked. I for one am not going to pretend I see his clothes anymore.

On another note, questions of intention in art have been raised– another topic of great interest to me. How does intention shape works of art– does it? should it? Damn right it does. Intention and context are accepted features of Postmodern art. (Thinking that a piece of art should stand alone and be context independent is so Modernist, no?) Why were Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes art and not just packaging or marketing materials? Because he intended for them to be art– and specifically art that commented on the commercialism and mass production that he was mimicking. Why is Fred Wilson’s museum work brilliant satire rather than straightforward exhibition design? Because he intends for it to be.  I haven’t invented a new genre of art here. Artists like Fred Wilson and  Jimmie Durham have been doing work in this vein for over thirty years. However, what is new here (at least for the art world) is the assertion that Fat is a social identity worthy of  noticing and defending in the same mode as race, gender, sexuality, and so on.

If you have thoughts please comment! oxox