pinata

For another sculptural forms assignment I made a pinata. The assignment was make a open wooden form. For a while i had been thinking about art in museums and galleries and the strange fact that once someone declares something to be a work of art it suddenly has this invisible shied around it and it becomes untouchable. This idea came from a visit i had to the MET as a child. I was about 4 years old and was at the MET with my mom and one of her friends. We had been in the museum all day and I was exauhsed. We were in an exhibition furniture from Versailles. Today i might have found this to be interesting and intriguing but whine was four i was bored out of my mind. Finally i lost it , some of the furniture in the exhibit was not blocked off in anyway just placed on small slightly elevated platform. I saw a love seat and flung myself on it whining. Immediately alarms went off and red lights started flashing, a museum guard ran over furious and yelled at me to get up. As it turns out i had flung myself on a 400 year old chair that belonged to a french king. As a child i did not a valuable piece of art , I saw a chair just like any other , a place suitable for my tantrum.
I find it baffling how once something is turned in to "art" or is said to be "art" by an artist it becomes something that we must tiptoe around. In museums we are quiet we whisper.Tap is placed on the floor so we dont stand to close to a piece,sensors put on that will go off with the slightest touch. I don't understand why we our culture is so sterile around objects that have had so much energy and emotion put in to them. We can touch objects that an artist created with his or her hands, making something out of noting, this does not seem right to me.
For this project I wanted to make my class confront this idea. I chose to make a pinata because it is an object meant to be touched and not only touched but destroyed , beaten blindly to a pulp and then pounced upon and and teared apart until it is picked clean and no longer resembles its original from. I wanted display a pinata as a piece of art because it would cause a confusion. Is it art that should be looked at from afar or is it a fun pinata that should be destroyed. I decorated my pinata lavishly with jewels and other flashy materials so my class would be hesitant to hit it and destroy it, i wanted them to confront the idea of art being something that should not be touched, let alone destroyed , physically by hitting my pinata. Alot of people in the class didn't want to hit and only a couple of people ended up beating it.

I filled the inside of the pinata with paper flowers i made. The idea behind this was for the class collaboratively to take the flowers and reattach them to the destroyed art to make something totally new. I wanted to do this to show that art cant always last and that it can be changed and remade over and over in to new things and that sometimes destroying or physically confronting art in a direct way is not always a bad thing!