Chairs and more chairs by Doris Salcedo

"1550 Chairs Stacked Between Two City Buildings" location based installation by artist Doris Salcedo (2003) for the Istanbul Biennial. 

I have been asking for bread bag tags from friends and family and I routinely get little bundles in the mail.  Sometimes I get 4 or 5 tags and sometimes, like at the restaurant the other night with friends, I am handed a bag stuffed to the gills with them.  The joy of receiving things in the mail is incredible!  I hope to start sending out more snail mail this year to spread the JOY of real physical mail.

Back to the bread bag tags.

My requests for the tags is always followed by, "What are you going to do with them?"

Well, I can now tell you what I'm NOT going to do.  I will not toss them all between two buildings to make an art installation.  I cannot even begin to imagine how many chairs it would take to make a pile that size**, but what I can tell you, is that the number of bread bags tags to make a pile that size would be in the hundreds of millions if not hundreds of trillions.

I have several hundred tags now, so I'm really pleased that at some point in the very near future I can start using them in art projects.  I'm thinking the first project will be fairly small - maybe filling an art canvas.  If you are saving bread bag tags for me, don't stop!  My ultimate goal is to be able to fill an entire wall in my house with the tags.  I still need thousands more tags and I, personally, only come across one or two a month.  I'm finding that it takes a village to collect bread bag tags.  I bet it took more than a village for Doris Salcedo to collect all of those chairs!

**I guess I didn't even read the photo caption - there are 1550 chairs in this installation!  (where is that V8 when you need it?)

More on Doris Salcedo here

Have a wonderful day!!
Kristin