Category: vending machine art history

Orlan is best known for her plastic-surgery-as-performance-art pieces wherein she had parts of her body reconstructed to match the feminine ideal as depicted by male artists. She’s received the Mona Lisa’s forehead, the chin of Boticelli’s Venus, and so forth.

Long before she started with plastic surgery, she was still courting controversy, with an art vending machine:

In 1977 she was fired from a teaching job after she presented Le Baiser de l’Artiste outside an art fair in Paris. She sat behind a life-sized photo of her naked torso which operated like a slot machine. Customers inserted five francs between her breasts which dropped to her crotch. As it did Orlan leapt from her seat to give the customer a kiss. The performance prompted outrage. But the French art critic Catherine Millet likened the piece to “an X-ray of the frenzy of exchange of contracts in the contemporary art world where the merchandising of the artist’s personality replaces the merchandising of art”. Source.

I have developed a sudden and unexpected love for Yellow Springs, Ohio. Just look at the Yellow Springs Arts Council’s website, or the Yellow Springs Arts blog and see all the creative things that happen there. Now consider that Yellow Springs isn’t a big city. It’s a village of under 4,000 people!

It could be something in the DNA. Yellow Springs was founded by Utopian Socialist Robert Denton who believed that “all religions are based on the same ridiculous imagination, that make man a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite.” It was a final stop on the Underground Railroad. It’s the birthplace of work study, a program that allows many students to attend college who couldn’t otherwise afford it. It also has had an ordinance against discrimination based on sexual preference since 1979. It sounds like Yellow Springs has a long history of being awesome! I really want to go visit someday. Maybe we’ll make it a stop on our cross-country trip next year!

I never would have discovered Yellow Springs had it not been for Jafagirls’ Art Ball Machine.

Some fine products found inside the Art Balls (click to enlarge):

The Art Ball Machine is just one project of the Jafagirls. The Jafagirls are by Corrine Bayraktaroglu (aka Jafabrit),  Nancy  Mellon and a variety of cohorts. The acronym stands for “Just Another F$%#@*g Artist.” For a small group they’re very active. Their activities include knit graffiti and Free Art Fridays where they create artwork and leave it in the streets for people to find & take home. Take a minute and browse their site to see the fun things they’re up to. One thing I love about their work is it does something artists forget to do all too often: have fun. In these stressful times, perhaps the boldest statement you can make is to remind people the world doesn’t have to be a horrible place.

Yellow Springs and the Jafagirls really inspire me. When you live somewhere without a big population, you tend to make apologies and excuses, like, “If only we were big enough to have a real art scene…” But tiny Yellow Springs has an art scene that rivals much bigger cities! We also think that creative groups need to have a lot of members creating artworks that sell for lots of money in order to have any real impact, and yet Jafagirls’ works get featured in books, magazines, newspapers and other media.

I guess it’s time for us up here in Maine to get off our butts and makes stuff… and make stuff happen!

The folks at Pingo have (or had… the site doesn’t seem to have been updated much since 2009 so I don’t know how active they still are) a really cool machine. It’s one of those spirally kind where the capsules are actually spheres that roll and roll down a long tube, building anticipation for the treat you’re about to recieve:

Pingo is curated by Esther Yarnold for piCOt. piCOt is “a loosely joined collective of artists, writers, curators and researchers whose work inhabits the intersections of art, technology and critical theory,” with contributors based in London & South West UK and across Europe. Among their activities is the geekFest, “a two-day festival of digital, live art and time-based practices by cultural experimenters. geekFest presents work which is hybrid, interactive, relational and negotiates a space with the audience through technology.” piCOt sounds totally awesome! I hope they’re still around!

As you know, I’m compiling a history of art vending machines. Unfortunately, the record of such machines is often very spotty, sometimes consisting of no more than a rumor or picture. I’m going to start adding these as stubs, in case someone out there knows something more!

The first is this, a photo from the Flickr account of user upso, of Toledo, Ohio:

All we know is in 2006,  Joseph D’Uva sold 168 different original lithographs from a toy capsule vending machine. I love his tongue in cheek humor, since of course it would be impossible to collect all 168. Why did he do it? How long did it run for?

This appears to be Joseph D’Uva’s website, but there’s no mention of the project.

If you can tell us more, please get in touch!