Simon Friedman

The year was 1996, and I was living in the inner sunset neighborhood of San Francisco in an apartment where I could hear the rats fighting in the walls as I tried to fall asleep each night. Unfortunately, this is not hyperbole, though it is fun to talk about in retrospect. In addition to the noise the rats were making, I was also kept awake by thoughts of doom. I had no idea how I was going to finish the writing of my Ph.D. thesis which I was in the process of slogging through (on rational drug design). My routine each morning, after I awoke in pure panic, was to put on sweat pants and go to the corner coffee shop to get a 16 ounce coffee. The thesis writing procrastination process was thus initiated. At some point, sitting in my room, staring at my notes, I started doodling on my empty coffee cup. After doing this a few days running, I decided to challenge myself, and see how many different ways I could write “coffee” or some type of decoration on this standard paper cup after I drank the contents. As the days went by, I became more sophisticated, making up a set of two simple rules: 1) The cup had to be completed in the day it was purchased. 2) The decoration had to be made using items I could find in my apartment (no trips to Utrecht). This lead me to utilize pen, pencil, highlighter, a lighter, a push pin, wax, salt, rubbing alcohol, food coloring, aquafresh, rubber bands, coffee itself, razor blades and a strawberry. I found myself each day waking up excited to see if I could come up with a new way of altering the deceptively simple form. As the days went by, I recognized themes emerging: First it was pen, then other writing instruments, then cutting was introduced. With each new idea, iterations could be developed. So once I came up with the cutting idea, many possible ways of exploring that theme could be examined. These ideas could be “over-explored” and the resulting iteration thus became stale. Then came the “hybridization” state, where large themes were interwoven, i.e. the cutting/sculptural approach married with the drawing approach. I started to see my coffee cup “project” as a manifestation of the dynamics of the process of creativity itself, though this was secondary to the simple pleasure I got each day from the act of creation, and of avoiding writing my thesis. Ultimately I finished my thesis, graduated and packed a UHaul for LA, where I was heading for a postdoc. The cups ended up in a Bay Area land fill but not before snapping some pics. In retrospect I like to think this was my final “artiste’s” statement regarding the act of creation: that ultimately all artist’s creations, as well as artists themselves, will eventually be subsumed into the earth. In fact, there just wasn’t room in the UHaul for three Xerox boxes full of marked up and used coffee cups.