The goal of the Organic Art Factory’s experiments remains what is was in 2005: a complete fusion between our art and our life. The daily, repetitive process of creation incorporates the materials of making into our daily activities to bring about a unity of material and being. In this respect, we have defined our lives as perpetual performance, where normal activity is transformed into stage directions and environments and objects become props.
The Organic Art Factory continues to exist as a testing ground for some of our current artistic interests, including consumption, production, and waste in daily life/art; and scale, value, and time in daily art/life. However, its name also functions as the “umbrella” for all of our current work – that is why you are probably on this website.
The Organic Art Factory was conceived of as an experimental entity where the main goal is the refinement of a process of work to a point where the natural byproducts of living is “art”.These byproducts are evidenced in three broad categories:
1) Identity as document
2) Body as art object
3) Residual traces of living objects, or tolos.
The manufacturing of the miniature paintings, of which we currently have over 2000, is a prototypical example of tolos production in the Organic Art Factory. What follows is a map of the logic used in their creation:
Hypothesis: Altering an everyday action can transform the waste of that action
Method: Action x produces amount y of waste daily. Action a produces amount b of waste daily. By combining action x with action a, the combined waste can be transformed into a tolo, (z)
Where:
x = smoking
y = used cigarette filter
a = painting
b = used sketchbooks and leftover paint
z = miniature paintings
Result: Combining the productive action of painting with the consumptive action of smoking transforms the unusable waste products of both into miniature paintings.
The miniature paintings were created through a time and labor intensive process designed to recover the excess raw materials of our art-making. This process includes selection, smoking, purifying and ageing. In this way, certain of our daily actions shape the art in a continual work cycle of generation/ de-generation/ generation. The miniature paintings were the objects originally used for Phase I of The Universal Patronage Project in 2007.
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