Rob Pruitt is a New York based artist working with multiple media and techniques.
"Pruitt acts as a conduit, shuffling images from mass culture to high art production. He also subscribes to the empowering and inventive ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude of visual design and art making" writes
Michelle Grabner in an article appeared in Frieze in 2001.
I find this work brilliant and astonishingly contemporary, showing how popular culture is becoming a way of talking and reflecting about who we are and how we approach our reality.
The mix of real and imaginary let the viewer be active part of the artwork which becomes alive and induce to dream and believe in the possibility of our personal conduct.
1. Tell the truth.
2. Tell a lie.
3. Change your name.
4. Make someone happy!
5. Make someone cry.
6. Fake laugh.
7. Fake an orgasm.
8. Fake your death.
9. Get plastic surgery.
10. Put make-up on body parts. Ear shadow, belly blush.
11. Put make-up on your face.
12. Make a painting with make-up.
13. Stay in bed.
14. Draw on your bedsheets.
15. Make a baby.
16. Kill yourself.
17. Sell a collector a key to your house.
18. Customize your refrigerator with paint, decals and locate in a place other than your kitchen.
19. Customize storage boxes and display as sculpture.
20. Make a painting on a lampshade.
21. Vandalise your home with spray paint.
22. Graffiti your bathroom.
23. Use a magazine as a sketch book.
24. Spread rumors.
25. Draw something small, scan it, print it out big.
26. Turn your TV upside down.
27. Turn your TV on its side to watch while lying on your side.
28. Watch your TV without sound or listen to TV with the screen covered.
29. Watch a DVD in fast motion, slow motion or reverse.
30. Make a drawing by pressing pause and tracing the image off the TV screen.
31. Spend the day in a costume.
32. Sit on the toilet backwards.
33. Make a sound composition when you pee by alternating the flow between the porcelain and the water.
34. Do an interpretative to environmental sound. Baby crying, vaporetti, pigeon cooing.
35. Wear diapers.
36. Sprinkle glitter.
37. Take drugs.
38. Shoplift.
39. Sneak your own merchandise into stores.
40. Collect stuff.
41. Curate a Netflix or YouTube festival.
42. Make a mix tape.
43. Take audio snapshots with a digital recorder.
44. Arrange flowers in unexpected combinations. Baby's breath & spring onions; buds, blooms and withered blossoms.
45. Make a monochrome meal.
46. Dress in monochrome.
47. Live in a monochrome house.
48. Be a photographer without a camera. Download images from the internet.
49. Buy something expensive and put it on a pedestal. Return it for your money back. Repeat.
50. Make mud. 2 parts dirt, 1 part water. Use as paint or clay.
51. Make a leaf out of paper and tape it to a tree.
52. Make a tree and add it to a forest.
53. Pour a glass of water to look at.
54. Draw yourself into your favorite comic strip.
55. Put everything inside outside.
56. Bring everything outside inside.
57. Fill a desk drawer with gravel and make a secret Zen garden.
58. Make a drawing by holding a marker in a place other than your hand, wherever you can. Toes, mouth, underarm, butt cheeks.
59. Make a drawing by highlighting as you read.
60. Translate from one language to another.
61. Frame a picture with a feather boa.
62. Hang a painting crooked, sideways, or face to the wall.
63. Go on an urban animal safari. Pigeons, rats, squirrels, cockroaches.
64. Paparazzi your pet.
65. Interior decorate your pet's habitat.
66. Make a valuable sculpture by adding a diamond.
67. Put things on pedestals.
68. Take things off pedestals.
69. 2 identical things side by side.
70. 10 identical things in a row.
71. Something cut in half.
72. Put googly eyes on things.
73. Draw faces on styrofoam wig heads, lightbulbs and eggs.
74. Point a treadmill at a painting.
75. Name all of the bricks that make up a wall.
76. Make up drag queen names. Amber Alert, Whitney Biennal.
77. Make up band names.
78. Name your plants.
79. Name household pests. Bugs, mice.
80. Invent a new color and name it. Francois Pinot.
81. Take things apart.
82. Put things back together.
83. Toss loose change into a pile on the floor.
84. Make an aluminum foil death mask.
85. An electric fan wearing a t-shirt becomes an easy figurative sculpture.
86. Make a portrait of someone by printing their phone number poster size.
87. Make a portrait/self-portrait by captioning a mirror.
88. Frame your credit card statement. i.e., the month of your trip to Paris.
89. Stalk someone.
90. Collect autographs. One per canvas or page. Think of as portraits.
91. Make a photo album of all your worldly possessions.
92. Record yourself talking for fifteen minutes, let your consciousness stream.
93. Save and transcribe your voicemail. Publish your emails.
94. Make a collage on an unopened wine bottle for the year of its vintage.
95. Don't clean your house and call it scatter art.
96. Make a scent installation. A pine branch in a mircowave, pour a glass of cologne, fart.
97. Write captions on the glass for the view outside your window.
98. Write lyrics to a classical music composition.
100. Title untitled paintings.
101. Title your life.
