by Bryce Bolick and Sam Woodruff
“Frickin’ Dishes” manipulates and repeats fewer than 20 audio recordings to illustrate the never-ending task of cleaning dishes. Much like a song, its auditory theme cycles often enough to be recognizable and represents the mechanical routine of taking dishes out of the sink, scraping off caked food, rinsing, and throwing them into the dish washer.
To add a common human sentiment towards the chore, moans and complaints of the one washing the dishes are heard. The tempo and volume of the repeated noises intensify as the frustration and annoyance towards the task increases. Ultimately, the audience can appreciate the great amount of monotony of this ever present task.
Upon capturing all the isolated noises, we couldn’t help but notice the musicality of some of the noises. Although it wasn’t in the original plan, a musical hip-hop beat (compliments of Garageband) was added to the machine. The up-beat tone it adds may have appeared contradictory to the more obvious agenda of the work, but does it?
First, a quote from Thomas C. Foster in his book How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Here Foster is talking about symbols in literature.
“Is that a symbol? Sure it is…. Seriously, what do you think it stands for, because that’s probably what it does. At least for you….Here is the problem with symbols: people expect them to mean...something in particular. Exactly. Maximum. You know what? It doesn’t work like that… in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing.”
As our piece becomes more noisy and abstract, it gives more room for interpretation. It doesn’t have to mean the same thing to everyone and thus our change in overall tone of our piece was part of what came out in our creative process. We have found it meaningful as an added layer of emotion to our piece on dishes.
So is this abstraction appropriate? The Mercandante’s Routines 09 answers this question. The process of getting a haircut is documented in an abstract way. The abstraction sends the film through the kaleidoscope of human emotion making it more internal and unique for each individual. When we watched the video we noticed the noise of the weed wacker and it made us think of haircutting as a violent process stripping one of their identity. Was this the artists intention? Quite possibly, but maybe not and that is okay because the experience was symbolic and individual.
Abstraction represents realities of emotion. Most people hate dishes. This is what we showed first. Monotony is pressed upon us but the abstraction brings room for interpretation. As the clinks and scratches repeat themselves frustration can sometimes give way to fun through the little hip hop melody. Possibly on the other side of that, the emotion invoked is how much I hate it when people try to make a process fun when it isn’t. The point is it can mean different things to different people. We tried to express emotions we feel and realities of the process with noises that invoke memories of doing dishes. What people get from it is up to the listener.
Sources:
http://vimeo.com/12552164 Routines 09
Foster, Thomas C. How to Read Literature like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading between the Lines. New York: Quill, 2003. Print.
https://soundcloud.com/sam-woodruff-3
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