What is Consumption?
I spend the majority of the year having my students explore a big idea of Identity. We explore and investigate various facets of what it means to be an artist and how we construct our own identities. For this unit, I would like to introduce the subtopic of ‘Consumption’ and have my students investigate how we individually consume, how we are targeted as consumers, and how we make an impact on our world as consumers. In addition, I want my students to examine the role artists take on when tackling the concept of consumption in our world. How do certain artists and designers raise questions about consumption and consumerism through their work? How does the role of consumer define our individual identity? How does it inform a collective identity?
For this lesson, I would like you to watch the Intro to the Art:21 episode Consumption created by the artist Barbara Kruger. Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist, designer and writer. In photograph-based images she examined the representation of power via mass-media images, appropriating their iconography and slogans and deconstructing them visually and verbally. How does this intro reflect Kruger’s knowledge of advertising and media? What tools does she use to turn the viewer into a consumer?
Your next guest speaker is the artist Chris Jordan. Watch his TED talk titled “Turning Power Stats into Art.” Photographer Chris Jordan trains his eye on American consumption. His 2003-05 series "Intolerable Beauty" examines the hypnotic allure of the sheer amount of stuff we make and consume every day: cliffs of baled scrap, small cities of shipping containers, endless grids of mass-produced goods.
His 2005 book In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster is a chilling, unflinching look at the toll of the storm. And his latest series of photographs, "Running the Numbers," gives dramatic life to statistics of US consumption. Often-heard factoids like "We use 2 million plastic bottles every 5 minutes" become a chilling sea of plastic that stretches beyond our horizon.
"As you walk up close, you can see that the collective is only made up of lots and lots of individuals. There is no bad consumer over there somewhere who needs to be educated. There is no public out there who needs to change. It's each one of us."
~Chris Jordan on Bill Moyers Journal
The last piece of your assignment is to think about what is it that you consume? Using a camera, document what you consume for a period of time you set for yourself such as 24 hours, 3 days, or a week. Share with us what you consumed. Reflect on the reasons for your consumption and if you were persuaded by any outside influences to consume (or not consume.)
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I find it completely interesting that my classmates photographed what they ate. I was think not only of what I ate in terms of what I consumed but also what type of products I bought, and what type of visual media I consumed. I wonder if that is because I set the constraint of recording the consumption with a camera. What would it have been like if I just said 'recorded', I wonder.
Here is my post:
My record of what I consumed:
Consumption Wednesday
As I was participating in this week's lesson, I realized I should have included as part of our activities defining the word "consumption" (which I did as part of my unit.) I found it interesting that each person's response centered around eating. In my mind not only do we consume food, but we consume media and visual imagery. So in my photo journal, I tried to record a little of the media I consumed in a day. It was kind of hard to remember to photograph everything.
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