A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, "May I photograph the interior of your fridge?" to asking someone to pose nude for the camera. Each fridge is photographed "as is." Nothing added, nothing taken away.
Mark Menjivar - http://www.markmenjivar.com/ - make sure to check out his taglines for each photograph, too.
This is a very interesting concept, and definitely a form of new aged art. Recently, it has come to my attention that many artist are choosing to move away from the principle elements of art and into a form of realistic representational art. More on the basis of documentation rather than creation, Mark Menjivar captures the realistic mindset of most Americans. The refrigerator and its contents are one of the purest forms of consumerism. Going on the notion "that we are what we eat" the contents that remain in ones fridge largely demonstrates who we are as people, our habits our likes, interests and wants. A fridge largely dominated by carry out containers and styrofoam boxes demonstrates that a person takes larger priority for their job then their health. The vegan baker clearly finds food consumption to be of greater interest than materialistic spending or entertainment. Who we are as people is largely defined by what we buy, this includes what we eat. Personally finding health to be a top priority going out to eat or carry out are very low on my list of wants and needs. I find it to be wasteful spending, unhealthy and added waste to the environment. However, many people beliefs differ from my own because their priorities differ. Our personality and identity are not defined by what we buy but are instead demonstrated through our personal things. The contents of a refrigerator are one of many aspects that outline the parameters of who we are as people and our role in society.
ReplyDeleteMark Menjivar took an approach at this topic that I probably wouldn't ahve thought of nor done. This process was definitely informative in two ways. Photographs of your refrigerator could either show the life you live or sort of an opposing lifestyle (as far as your eating habits). For instance, the barender that went to sleep at 8AM and woke up at 4PM everyday. This person barely had time to eat any of the food that was more than likely brought home from work over the week. For the "Middle School Science Teacher", you can clearly see that she'd chosen to eat healthy or to get food from a market. For the people who barely had food in the refrigerator could be either spending less time in their home or less time eating there. The same applies for those who have a lot of food, they could either spend time in the kitchen often or a lot of time eating. To a certain extent the contents in the refrigerator can tell us who these people are as well as what they look like. There are plentty of things you can do similiar to this to get sort of the same result such as: emptying pockets, emptying purses, or taking pictures of the inside of someone's home.
ReplyDeleteLindsay Avino
ReplyDeleteADP III
Weekly Statement 10/05
I was very intrigued by Mark Menjivar’s series of images of the insides of people refrigerators. Although I do not agree that taking a photograph of the interior of someone’s fridge is comparable to asking someone to pose nude for a picture, I do agree that it is personal and can tell you a lot about a person. Whenever I would watch the show Cribs on MTV, they would always show their kitchens and the inside of their fridges. What I found fascinating was that almost every athlete had the same contents in their fridge, it was filled with water and Gatorade and hardly any food. This is because they spent little time at home during the season and had enough money to go out to dinner or hire someone to cook all their meals for them. However, most Americans do not live like these famous athletes and the contents of their fridges are very different. I know that in my own family the contents of my fridge tell a much different story than a lot of my friends. My mother or father cooks almost every night of the week so there are a lot of fruits and vegetables and other ingredients for cooking. However, a lot of my other friends order in take-out almost every night of the week so they have a lot more premade items and take out containers. The differences between these items tells a lot about our families and the way we live, and most likely how things will be for our children, which is something that I would have never considered before.
Sam Goldman
ReplyDeleteADP response
Lecture response
10/3/10
Fisheries
In the last lecture we talked about fisheries and over fishing problems. I found this really interesting. One part that really caught my attention was the problem with large fishes. Since fisherman have to put back the small fish and only take the large, the small fish are the only ones that are surviving. This is becoming a problem because of Darwinism and survival of the fittest. Since all of the smaller fish are surviving they are evolving to become a smaller species. This makes it bad because there aren’t large fish anymore. This will cause MAJOR problems because the demand for meat will stay the same but since the fish are smaller they will need more of them to make up the same amount of meat. This could end up wiping out a whole species. Another interesting part of this lecture was the part about mangroves. It is a really hard question to think about, because the mangroves protect the inlands, and the species living within them. If there was a tsunami the mangroves would protect that area. The problem is that they are being destroyed to make shrimp farms. I think that to fix this problem there should be a happy medium of shrimp farms and mangroves, that for every shrimp farm there should be at least a certain number of miles of mangroves left alone. I believe that this will somewhat help the problem, especially because mangroves are so important to the ecosystem in that area.
Jackie San Fillipo
ReplyDeleteADP III Rotz
Weekly statement 10/5
We as people are defined by the things we do. How we create an identity for ourselves can be in several ways. I like that the photographer used the approach of “you are what you eat” as a way to help define this. A peek into someone’s fridge is a peek into his or her lifestyle. I agree that to have your fridge photographed is almost like having a naked picture of you taken- it’s revealing. One fridge had only take out containers in it- we therefore know that person is probably lazy, extremely busy, or does not know how to cook. The schoolteacher’s refrigerator was filled with natural and healthy foods, which reflects his or her ability to set a good example by being healthy. Others were more mysterious, for example the carpenter from Texas whose freezer was stuffed with red meat and a bottle of Alcohol. These are two things that are not healthy, and one could assume this person is probably an indulgent one. As artists we are constantly trying to explain and communicate ideas. I really liked this approach at revealing a small piece of who someone is.
Ben Paskus
ReplyDeleteWeekly Statement
ADP Section 3
10/5
Mark Menjivar takes an interesting peak inside a facet of personality that reflects your habits and determines your daily choices. Food is such a vital, consuming thing. Your day could be planned intending to allow time to go home and grab a bite to eat, especially if you can’t afford to eat on the go. Personally, my food needs to be able to travel and last throughout a good portion of the day. If you question the contents of someone’s fridge upon meeting them, trying to get a picture of what kind of life they live, I think you’d be surprised at how much you can infer. It’s definitely not comparable to posing nude, but to say a fridge is personal space is spot on. In my case, I make trips to buy groceries seldom so if something runs out, it’s not going to be back for a while. A picture of my fridge would tell you I scrounge for meals. Too often I find that nothing is very compatible or suitable to combine with other food. You can’t make a salad with an old cucumber and no Italian dressing. And in some cases, you could find some wild stuff in fridges. The fridge of the chick that was a short order cook and could bench over 300 pounds had a snake in her fridge. And some habits are a bit different and a little kooky. Something as simple as putting beer in the vegetable drawer is bizarre from my point of view. Does he know something that I don’t?
ADP III – Weekly Statement 10/4
ReplyDeleteLyle A. Murphy - Sec. 003
This is a startling insight into people’s personal lives through the very foods they eat and what is in their refrigerators. A person’s lifestyle can be seen through what they eat. These extremes can be seen through the amount of vegetables and grown produce in comparison to the heaping stacks of take-out food. What helps viewers to see beyond just a refrigerator full of groceries is the artist’s byline of the type of household and what the person does for a living. With these bylines we can understand why there is almost no food in the refrigerator of the Street Advertiser who only makes a fixed income of about $400 dollars a month. It’s also possible to understand why lower shelves have meals ready to be eaten for the disabled man in Marathon, TX.
Not only do these images tell us about the people they also tell us about things that have happened in their lives. A freezer full of packaged venison tells the story of a buck recently shot. A rattlesnake tells a story about a rough woman who can bench 300 lbs. A freezer with clothes in the bottom drawer tells us the person likes their clothes cold, probably the hot climate or summer. Each refrigerator
gives us insight into a person, let alone their lifestyle. It’s a unique and engaging concept that this artist has been able to capture and share with the rest of the world.
¬
Teresa Dennis
ReplyDeleteADP III
Weekly Statement 10/5
In lecture, we have discussed that as we farm and fish, we take the strongest and biggest of the lot, and leave the sickly and weak behind. This has been something that has been stuck in my mind, because with this comes the debate of are we just doing Darwin, or is this unnatural and harming to the environment. I personally believe that by doing this we are harming things. By killing off the strong and leaving only the weak, we are creating a sickly species, more prone to disease and birth defects. While the birth defects may not pas on, when we eat this diseased meat, we are poisoning ourselves, all because we wanted the largest cut of meat. As consumers, we need to regulate all of our meat intake seriously, not just deer.
In Mark Menjivar’s work, there is a picture of a freezer full of meat. At first glance, this appeared grotesque and disgusting to me. But looking at this picture more, I read the caption stating that it was a buck shot for a three-person family. While a buck may be a lot of meat for a three-person family, the fact that it is being frozen and stored for future use is a good way for this family to cut down on their footprint. Upon looking at the picture further, I realized that other products in the freezer are organic, making this picture become a portrait of a wise family to me, instead of the repulsing image it was at first glance.
As a side note, the short order cook who can bench press over 300lbs had a whole snake sitting in her fridge…… that worries me.
Caitlin Murphy
ReplyDelete5 October 2010
Weekly Statement
In this country at this point and time, we are very wasteful of water as a natural resource. Having grown up in metro Detroit, I was always very oblivious to the lack of clean water that a lot of people from other parts of the country experience. Growing up surrounded by the great lakes, I never understood that shortages of fresh water exist. It is both scary and incredible that a fifth of the world’s fresh water comes from the mere lakes that surround our state. As the population of the world continues to grow and the need for fresh and clean drinking water increases, it is scary to think that these resources that I swim and leisure in will soon be depleted. Bottled water is a large waste of resources, a huge error in over consumption, pollution, and general misuse of resources. Bottled water is representative of capitalist ideals and is tied grossly to excessive consumption. Each water bottle is the equivalent to 1,200 calories. This is very wasteful and tragic. It is sad that the right to clean drinking water becomes a privilege when bottled and sold for a greater marginal profit.
It is hard to understand how the world uses water and how it uses natural resources around them. I have been thinking lately about mostly paper products and water. So many trees are cut down not only for paper but also for toothpicks, buildings, bridges and so on. I can’t believe all the items trees are used for. I was starting to think of more ways we can recycle paper products and how to limit all the paper we use. Its not like paper is cheap either. I remember my high school teachers complaining about how they have to supply us paper out of their own pockets cause the school will only supply them with so much cause its expensive. In the beginning of the school year in high school, us students would have to buy at least one packet of paper for ourselves cause we knew that the teachers would already have bought so much of it themselves.
ReplyDeleteWater I find is something we neglect. Not only do we neglect water in the ocean areas but also in rivers and lakes. I am from the Kalamazoo area of Michigan and not too long ago we had an oil spill in the Kalamazoo River out near the Marshall/Battle Creek area. The river smelt so bad and I was angry that the media didn’t make a big deal out of it. Of course it’s not the ocean but still, the Kalamazoo river is just trashed all the time. Back in the day when Kalamazoo and Plainwell had all the paper mills, they would dump all their waste into the river. Even still there is so much in that river that no one actually in his or her right mind would play in it. Every summer when it gets too hot there is a nasty stench that comes from it. I think before we try to save the whole world, we should try to save our country and our state.
Katie Klimkowski
ReplyDeleteWeekly statement 10/5
This Monday’s lecture we talked a lot about Dr. Suess and the Lorax. It’s an interesting story that I have explored before. The Lorax is a novel portraying human abuse towards the environment and it encourages the younger generation to do something proactive and protect the environment (Lorax). We also learned that this book is banned in some logging communities, and it was replaced with a book called “Truax” about how it’s necessary to cut down trees sometimes. I find it bizarre and interesting that authors are using children’s novels as a media to push political and environmental agendas. I know of quite a few graphic novels that are used to convery heavy, dark concepts and stories, but it seems to be taken one step further by actually using children’s novels. I think that the reason many of these author’s feel the need to use this media is due to the fact that a lot of the responsibility has been placed on the next, younger generation to do something about the environment. I feel that the environment is a unique social issue in that it is so heavily placed on young people. Is it really the children that should have to worry about this? Is it necessary for the children to be the ones to worry about it? I’m not sure that these questions have easy answers. If we continue on placing responsibility on others, will anything ever get solved? In the story of the Lorax, the character that destroyed the forests had the ability to repair everything with the seed he possessed for all those years, but waited until the child showed up and passed responsibility onto the child. I find it an interesting phenomenon, but very reflective of today’s society.