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Acceptable
Vocation
Acceptable Vocation, 19x15, 2003, prisma bronze & raisen
noir, carbon ink
Living on a small East Coast farm, my parents demonstrated industriousness
to fiscally stay afloat. Their entrepreneurial spirit modeled how I would
later survive as an artist. We boys assisted father on the family farm,
in the butchershop, selling vacuum cleaners door to door, and traveling
the Peninsula shearing sheep. His peddling resembled my own making of caricatures
on carnival circuit. As a child I toiled in the butchershop, wrapping t-bones,
sausage, and scrapple, which is a Pennsylvania Dutch meat loaf common in
the mid-Atlantic states. It is made from the scraps of the butchered pig:
headmeat, skin, heart, liver, tongue, brains, and any other leftover parts.
This meat and broth are combined with cornmeal and seasoned with much black
pepper. It is shaped into loaves for slicing and frying). Porky Pig has
a slight resemblance to the hog illustration used on the shop billboard
at the end of the road. The image of a personified hog embodies the tension
depicted between Mennonites and pop culture in this studio project. In father's
shop, pigs were for scrapple, not for stuttered comical conversation. Work's
intrinsic value often overshadowed mere compensation. Its virtue stemmed
from the proverb, "Idle hands are the devil's playground." Highly visible
"Richie Rich" wealth made one vulnerable to in moral judgments. Work was
typically viewed by Mennonites as an individual's natural state.
(a) Dodd,
James M. "An Annual Haircut", The Sussex Countian, Georgetown,
Delaware, 6/15/72
(b) Twin Willow Farms Butchershop: Established
by Milton Swartzentruber, Sr.
(c) Scrapple: A Pennsylvania Dutch loaf
common in the mid-Atlantic states. It is made from the scraps of the butchered
big; head meat, skin, heart, liver, tongue, brains, and any other left
over parts. This meat and broth are seasoned are combined with cornmeal
and lots of black pepper. It is shaped into a loave for slicing and frying.
In truth, dedicating ones life to earning large sums of money was respected
much in the same way secular society does.
(d) "I am; therefore I work"-Douglas
McGregor. Max Weber wanted to know if we lived to work, or worked to live.
(e) Katherine McFate, "A Debate we Need,"
from Philippe Van Parijs' What's
Wrong With a Free Lunch?
(f) Chris Busby, in his foreword to Molly Scott Cato's book Seven
Myths About Work (f) I Timothy 2:9.
I Peter 3:3
(g) Pastors and Elders of Greenwood
Mennonite Church, Letter to members, October 31, 1990
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