8. We’re All Toast in the End
As Lee asks his brother, Austin, in Sam Shepard’s True West about his collection of stolen household appliances: “What’re you gonna do with all those toasters?” The Toaster Project is British artist Thomas Thwaites’ response of sorts to Shepard’s kitchen-sink existentialism.
In a kind of perverse DIYism, Thwaites attempted to assemble a working toaster entirely by hand using only materials he could scavenge from abandoned mines and other middens of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom. The result looks like an accident in a smelting plant. The process (documented in a book and website) says a lot about our dependence on large-scale industrial infrastructure and techniques for the simplest domestic pleasures—and the two-slotter itself manages to look like a lost artifact of the Bay Area funk art movement.
Sep. 12–Dec. 8; ZERO1 Garage, San Jose
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