Callithump

Cheap Art Manifesto

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2009-01-04T08:36:43-05:00

I’ve been researching the history of vending machine art. Thus far I haven’t come across any actual manifestos, but I’m seeing recurring themes. There seems to be a desire to break free of the restrictions of the typical gallery system. There’s also a mission to bring affordable art to the masses.

Although they never (to my knowledge) used vending machines, the Bread and Puppet Theater issued their Cheap Art Manifesto in 1984:

As far as art manifestos go, this one seems to be holding up pretty well. Bread & Puppet’s Cheap Art Press is still going after 25 years!

Contact form fixed!

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2009-01-03T17:20:25-05:00

Ack! Somehow, sometime, I broke the contact form! So if you sent me a message through there, I never got it. It’s fixed now. Please resend your message. I wasn’t ignoring you!

Jessie's Etsy Shop is up!

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-12-11T22:33:25-05:00

Run, don’t walk to Jessie’s Etsy shop! There you’ll find a boodle of lovely hand-made greeting cards, like:

Jess is Callithump!’s younger and more personable half, the Yin to Matt’s, well, whatever the orthodox skeptic’s equivalent of Yang is.

Please go buy stuff now!

I have to ask...

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-12-11T22:03:16-05:00

The Callithump! vending machines have a card with samples of the wonderful prizes you might win by putting 50 cents in our machine, just like any other capsule toy vending machine. The big difference is that instead of Hannah Montana stickers, we’ve got:

POLITICS
(...and yes, the words really are big and red. Really big. Really red. Can’t miss ‘em.). Near the word Politics are American flags with matches next to them.

RELIGION
Beneath that word are a pair of dice, positioned as if they’d just been rolled.

DEAD WHITE MEN
Around that word are black and white photos of men who died a long time ago.

POETRY
... and a variety of other things along those lines.

Okay, so now I have to ask, what is there about that that made you think there’d be something vaguely interesting for kids? Let alone appropriate? Or did your little darling get all weepy and look up at you with those big wet eyes and say, “But Maaaaawm! I just need #45 and I’ll have all the Dead White Men We Never Knew with beards! Puleeeeeeeeze! I neeeeeeeeeeed it!” and you just couldn’t say no?

Anyway, thanks for that. Your irresponsible parenting spoiled it for everyone else.

Changing the Mission!

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-12-11T07:11:53-05:00

Okay, I’ve thought about it, and you know what? I’m not going there. I’m not going to do Callithump! for kids. Not now. Having them in galleries would cheapen the gallery experience. It would reinforce to kids that the greatest tragedy in their lives is being bored. Leave the kids at home, or interact with them in ways that make the gallery interesting to them.

More importantly, kids don’t need them. Kids already have vending machines of their own.

One of my reasons for starting Callithump! was to bring back the experience of the toy capsule vending machine for grownups. Do you remember what that was like? When you were a little kid did you pass those vending machines after an interminable time being dragged around the supermarket by your parents. They were a magic oasis of red metal and plexiglass and promises of riches far beyond the asking price at the end of a terrible ordeal. You’d beg your mother for just one quarter. Just one quarter! Sometimes she’d give it to you. The prize was invariably something disappointing. Instead of the shiny metal watch you’d get a weirdly deformed cheap plastic animal. But you know what? It didn’t matter! The prize was a minor part of the experience. It was the anticipation. The feel of the cold metal as you turned the lever, the sound of the gears and the clank of the plastic capsule as it bounced down the chute. It was the struggle to get the capsule open. The disappointing prizes even made it more fun, an experience sweetened by risk.

Vending machines are very different for grownups. They’re more the products of our bad planning than a pleasurable experience. You we’re to busy to eat a proper lunch, so you grab an unhealthy, preservative soaked snack from a vending machine. You started your period unexpectedly early so you have to buy a diaper-sized, 20 year-old Feminine Napkin. You just might Score tonight, but you didn’t bring protection so you’re stuck buying a Frenchie the Tickler out of a machine that’s never been washed... EVER. One of the only truly enjoyable vending experiences available to adults, cigarette vending machines, are now illegal in the U.S. Fortunately, we have Clark Whittington’s Art-o-mat(R) to help preserve that experience!

Callithump! is trying to keep the magic of the toy capsule alive for grownups. It’s not for kids!

If the mission changes, it will be to make Callithump! less kid-safe, to censor ourselves less and to include more sharp objects and things to choke on.

Changing the Mission?

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-12-09T07:48:24-05:00

We started Callithump! with a number of goals in mind. A vending machine is a completely non-threatening and approachable device, while still being incredibly rugged. Using a vending machine you can deploy art in public spaces without fear of mishaps occurring to the artwork. This was one of the reasons why we chose vending machines in the first place. We wanted a format where we could break art out of galleries and classrooms and get it into bars, grocery stores and so on. That didn’t really happen. All our deployments thus far have been in galleries.

At the same time, we wanted to recapture the feel that you get from a vending machine when you’re a little kid for big kids. When I watch people interacting with the vending machines, however, I see that grownups are very wary of it, while kids gravitate to it, and immediately start turning the knob to try to get it to dispense a capsule even when there’s no quarters in it. They look pleadiingly at their parents who roll their eyes and drag them away.

It’s probably just as well. There’s stuff in those capsules that’s pointy or chokey or just plain boring to kids.

But what if we redirected? What if we made this specifically for kids? I imagine being dragged to an art gallery would be worse than going to Sweater World for a kid. But what if we filled the machine with things that were creative and fun, and would give kids something to do while their parents explored the gallery?

Something to think about...

...and we're back!

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-12-08T07:30:15-05:00

If I’d any idea the drain that moving and starting new careers was going to put on our lives, I would have just officially put Callithump! on hiatus while we got our lives together. Finally, the creative recession that’s kept me from doing anything worthwhile seems to have passed, just in time for the Maine College of Art Craft Fair. We debuted a new vending machine there, as well as the first Callithump! boxes, which are finally done. They’re only, what, half a year late? I guess I’ll have to fire myself!

The new vending machine is currently living in the trunk of my car, but with any luck will soon find a happy home somewhere.

Jess did great at the fair, selling cards of her Gocco prints, photographs, and Victorian mash-ups a la Max Ernst. Hopefully, this momentum will carry over into her soon-to-be-opened Etsy shop!

Callithump! now in Portsmouth

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-09-07T17:22:02-04:00

Callithump! is now appearing in a new location, ellO Gallery in Portsmouth, NH. ellO is a great gallery, and we’re really happy to be there. The Callithump! machine feels very at home there.
It’s really great to see a gallery like ellO in Portsmouth. In their words:

ellO gallery & shop is a mixture of a (commercial+affordable) contemporary art gallery, alternative exhibition space, retail space for individual artists selling handmade goods & moderately priced works & also an infopoint for the contemporary art community in Portsmouth and beyond.

It’s a refreshing treat to see a place like Ello. Most galleries in Northeastern seacoast tourist towns tend to cater to the tourists. They’re fine for when you need yet another landscape, sunset over the ocean or boat painting. You know, artwork that matches your couch and is totally devoid of anything interesting, controversial or unpleasant. At Ello you’ll find work by aspiring artists who aren’t necessarily part of the local art establishment. You’ll also find work that isn’t traditionally considered to be art, such as t-shirts, postcards and buttons. There’s lots to like at ellO. It’s nice to find a gallery that’s willing to sell work that’s affordable and fun in a town like Portsmouth, which has a reputation for being pretentious and expensive. ellO is providing opportunities for new artists to connect with new audiences. Callithump! is delighted to be hanging out in the corner there!

Meet the Fun-o-Meter!

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-07-15T21:14:53-04:00

Zoomdoggle is a website (or blagazine, as it’s creator, Jack Bronstein bills is) devoted to the most noble pursuits of having fun and getting others to have fun. Recently, Zoomdoggle has broken free of it’s InterWebly bounds and is wandering the streets of New York incarnated as the Fun-o-Meter, a vending machine that sells fun ideas for 50 cents! In addition to a fun idea, you also get a toy, a lucky penny, and a quarter because Jack wanted to sell his ideas for 25 cents, but only had a 50 cent machine.

Hey Jack! I’ve got a 25 cent machine I swap you! Our first vendor was a 25 cent one that the dealer sent us by mistake. We tried to make a go of it at that price, but the cost of our contents is too high, and it was killing us!

Jack’s been walking his Fun-o-meter around town and trying it in different locations to see how people react to it. You can read the whole story here.

I’m enchanted with this idea, of course! This is creativity encapsulated in its purest form. In addition to being the first artists to incorporate vending machines into art, the Fluxus artists also created scores. Instead of a fixed piece of art, you’d get a score, an instruction or set of instructions, the performance of which was the artwork. Thus, the line between artist and audience was obliterated. Everyone could be an artist. Everyone could be art. At the same time, the difference between making art and playing games also broke down. As well it should! Zoomdoggle’s fun ideas remind me very much of Flux scores, with instructions like, “Tag someone without warning and run. Now they're it.”

Thanks, Zoomdoggle, for making the world a more fun place!

In Production

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-07-07T20:15:30-04:00

Things are moving right along with the box for special collected issue #1! This is time trying to do a 3-color screen print. They’re looking great! The photo doesn’t do it justice. The wavy lines are actually gold & bronze metallic ink that look like ordinary cardboard until the light catches it just right and you get a glowy surprise!

Making production extra challenging is the fact that the weather got all hot & humid today, two things that don’t go at all well with screen printing. The inks take forever to dry! But the good news is, we’ll be able to start shipping these this week! Woo!

This is a truly limited edition. Many “limited” things these days are manufactured scarcity. With a computer print, print #10, #100, or # 1 million are all going to be identical. There are no plates or screens that wear out causing the quality of the print to decline. With these, however, after the 50 copies were printed, we discarded the screens. That’s it. That’s all there will ever be!

Coming Soon...

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-07-04T09:30:44-04:00

Well, we said the special collected edition of Callithump! #1 would be shipping in June, and here it is July already... Sorry about that! I’m afraid we were overly optimistic about how long it would take to settle into our new place. Our Callithump! gear didn’t even get unpacked until just a couple weeks ago! Plus, for the cover we’re doing a 3-color screen print, something we’ve never done before. It’s looking just lovely but it’s a bit of a technical challenge.

Anyway, enough of the lame excuses! If you’ve pre-ordered issue #1, you’ll be getting a special treat in the mail shortly, just to say “Thanks for ordering, sorry we’re slow.”

If you haven’t ordered yet, there’s still time to get in on the insanely low pre-oder price! I’m not sure we’ll even break even at the current price, so take advantage of us while you can! Buy now!

Simpsons Already Did it!

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-07-04T07:05:14-04:00

In the classic South Park episode, “Simpson’s Already Did It,” Butters tries to come up with an original idea that hasn’t been done on The Simpsons. The challenge drives him insane, and he starts perceiving the entire world as if it were a Simpsons episode. Ultimately, in a beautifully postmodern moment, Butters realizes that the episode’s sub-plot was also lifted from a Simpson’s episode. Mr. Garrison points out that The Simpsons have been around forever, so of course they’ve already done everything. And even they weren’t original. The Simpsons got their idea from and episode of the Twilight Zone. What Mr. Garrison doesn’t mention is that even the Twilight Zone episode wasn’t original. It was cribbing from Theodore Sturgeon’s short story, The Microcosmic God. Watch the episode here.

I often have “Butters moments,” where I’ve hatched a plot only to find out that someone else has already done it. Case in point, Busy Beaver’s Button-o-Matic. They’ve been vending art buttons in capsule vending machines since 2002! They’re much smarter about it than we are, too. They actually have groups of different artists create annual series of buttons (instead of having one lonely person design 500 different buttons by himself!).

I didn’t know about Button-o-Matic when we did Callithump! Totally Buttons. What do I do now that I do?

I think most creative types are like Butters. We persue an idea just as long as we think it’s original, but as soon as we learn that someone else did it, we abandon it. Where did we get the idea that this is the way it should be?

Currently, there are 420 episodes of The Simpsons. That’s enough to use up every major and most minor plots there are. But that’s just one TV show. There are currently more than 6.7 billion people on the planet. Many of them are more intelligent, creative and talented than you and I are. All of these people have ancestors going back many millenia who have also been making stuff. What are the chances that any idea is original?

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive for originality. By some miracle it still happens, and the world becomes a more interesting place.

However, to shut off your creativity just because someone else did something like what you were going to do? That’s just silly and counterproductive. As Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” There’s much to be learned from following in other’s footsteps. Even if you don’t get bragging rights, you’ll still make discoveries and grow as an artist.

Instead of abandoning a project because someone else has already done it, I try to ask, “Can I bring anything new to this idea?”

Well, in comparison to Button-o-Matic... I, er, um.... well.... we’re cheaper! 25 cents instead of 50. I guess that’s something. And our buttons are smaller, so there’s that too. But more importantly, you can only get the buttons through the Button-o-Matic vending machines, and those are only in New York and Chicago. So we’re bringing access to art buttons to an area that didn’t have it before.

Maybe the Simpsons did it because it was a good idea that other people should pick up on! Maybe you should start your own “art gallery on buttons in a capsule vending machine” today! It’s fun, easy and affordable. You can find used vending machines for cheap on eBay, and button makers are widely available on the Web. Spring for a decent one, though. Cheap ones just aren’t worth it, and once you have a good button maker, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it! (BTW, if you’re a friend of ours, you have a standing invite to come over and use ours!)

Callithump! Gone South

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-04-16T18:17:54-04:00

Callithump! has just arrived in South Portland! You can now find it at Artascope Studios, 352 Cottage Road, South Portland, Maine.

If you haven't been to Artascope, swing by! In addition to Callithump! There's an art supply store & gallery. They also have classes there, and you can rent studio time to get access to all that equipment that you've drooled over but couldn't afford. Artascope is doing wonderful things making creativity more accessible to everyone, and we're really excited to be there!

Callithump! Totally Buttons, available now

matthew_leclair@umit.maine.edu — 2008-03-15T12:42:29-04:00

A Callithump! Special Edition is now available in Lord Hall, University of Maine, Orono!

Totally Buttons, as the name suggests, is entirely buttons. Each capsule contains one 7/8-inch button. The buttons are all hand-made by us Callithumpians. The machine in Lord contains around 450 of a projected 1,000 designs. Collect them All! Capsules vend for the special low, low price of just 25 cents, instead of the usual 50 cents. Get yours now! At this INSANELY low price they won't last long!

Why Totally Buttons?

Buttons, also known as badges or pinbacks, have been around since the late 1800s. Since that time, both their purpose and construction have remained almost unchanged. An image on paper is sandwiched between disc of metal and plastic (or celluloid, originally). A twisted pin is attached to the back to allow it to be affixed to cloth. In the 1800s, as today, people used pinbacks to proclaim their devotion to famous entertainers, political candidates and important causes; to make jokes, to display witticisms or conversation starters.

In some ways buttons can be seen as precursors to blogs, MySpace, Flickr and and other user-centered mediums. They provide a way to express your opinion publicly. The pre-Internet world provided few opportunities for this. By putting on a button, anyone who walks past you can know that you are a fan of Edwardian stage actress Lena Ashwell, or that You Like Ike, or that you're not As Think as You Drunk We Am. Callithump's mission has always been to get creativity into public spaces. Buttons are a natural medium for this!

As always, Callithump! is participatory media. Do you have a great idea for a button? A piece of artwork that would reproduce well in a tiny, tiny space? A slogan, cause, or curiosity that deserves public display? Let us know! You do the design, we'll do the production, and we'll reward you handsomely with buttons of your own design.