Iron Art Recipes and New Scheme

Unscrew the locks! Drowning!, 5.5 x 5.25, 2005

Ingredients: Old drawing, paint swatch, copy paper, pen, tape, spray glue, ruler.

Cut apart the old failed drawing-collage, pulling off layers until a strange hunk emerges. Spray glue down onto appropriately colored paint swatch taken from a hardware store. Let it sit on your wall for a week alongside other drawings.

Take a pink piece of copy paper, originally cut and placed on another drawing, and with a ruler draw a pink grid on it. Tape it onto the top corner. Let it sit another week where you can see it all day while you work. Take it down for a little bit. Put it up again and decide it's still confusing and it's done.

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Tom Moody had a post yesterday about the Iron Chef show and how it's aesthetic of mixing and creations can be translated into visual art.

...in fact visual artists lag behind chefs in the eclectic "mixing it up" aesthetic of current haute food prep. Musicians fare somewhat better in this regard because music software and gear matured sooner than imaging software and gear (i.e., it's been "there" longer to jack with), but both music and art improve when practitioners think outside the (software) box, that is, think like Iron Chef Sakai.

He gave "recipes" for 2 of his works and ended with

These recipes are mostly technical. There are content issues arising at various stages of the process, verbalized internally but ultimately best left for the individual to articulate (or not).

I think this is great, both the "recipe" idea (that skirts the tough part of adding content and making aesthetic decisions), and the idea of an Iron Chef like art making practice. Moody is more into the technical crossings and combinations, but I like the idea of recipes and art battle.

New Scheme - Iron Chef Art Battle. Like recent events such as Drinkin' and Drawin' and Monster Drawing Rally this would be an art battle based on Iron Chef. 5 artists get raw materials (general subject, some paper and pencils, some paint and some random things like chicken feathers and beer) and they have an hour to make art with it, which is then judged by the assembed crowd. The winner gets to keep all the art, the losers are beheaded.