Mona Hatoum, Slicer, 1999, Egg Slicer, stainless steel and marble.
“With this sculpture, Hatoum has turned an ordinary domestic object into something menacing by enlarging an egg slicer to measure four feet in length. The artist began to use kitchen utensils such as graters and colanders in her work during the 1990s, describing them as ‘exotic objects.’ They represented the traditional feminine domain of the kitchen, objects which traditionally kept the housewife tied to the home, yet greatly enlarged they assume a threatening aspect. ‘Slicer’ has been made on a human scale, with its slicing blades raised menacingly. This darkly humorous work is influenced by Surrealism – Magritte is one of Hatoum’s favourite artists and his paintings which distort scale are a predecessor of this work”
–National Galleries Scotland
vs.
Ann Hamilton, (privation and excesses • grinders), The Carol and Arthur Goldberg Collection1988/1991
“A component of the installation privation and excesses, 1989, was a pair of wall-mounted mechanized mortars and pestles, one of them grinding teeth, the other one grinding pennies. The dematerializing teeth were in contrast to the overriding element of that installation, a 45 x 32 foot field of 750,000 copper pennies-laid into a surface coating of honey on the building’s concrete floor. As Hamilton notes, “Where the installation juxtaposed the animal economy of honey to the human economy of money, these grinders similarly juxtapose the biologically produced and the human made.” For her earliest mechanized tables, as well as her most recent spinning speakers, Hamilton has tinkered with existing industrial equipment for sculptural and audio effect. The pulverizing sounds of these two grinders within the installation, as Hamilton notes, were ‘the background to the lathering movement and sloshing sound of hands in honey.’”Photo credit: Ben Blackwell
Text excerpted from Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects. New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2006. Joan Simon
Little Bristling Soul 