What Ravenous is About
By Smith Eliot  

• We are numb.
• We are uninspired.
• We are alcoholic.
• We are strung out on heroin.
• We are calmed by hundreds of various prescription drugs, and
• We control our children with Ritalin and Prozac.
• We live with the television on, with the radio blasting.
• We buy thousands of dollars worth of merchandise we don’t need
• with money we don’t have.  

My past installations have been spiritual exercises for which I have brought the outside in to create idealized naturescapes.  Still interested in the relationship between inside and outside, I decided to reverse the equation: to turn myself inside out and create a work that addresses my personal history as an alcoholic and also that ties chemical addition to consumerism generally.  This is not a new idea.  Antonia Bird, for one, takes a similar approach in her 1999 work Ravenous , a film that also collapses the easy distinctions often made between necessity and desire, prey and predator, consumerism and colonialism.

RAVENOUS is an installation that consists of 1000’s of objects.  These objects are arranged categorically on shelves; they cover everything in sight –the walls, the floor, every piece of furniture.  They are all red.  The walls are also painted red, and the space is lit with red light.  Red is the color of desire, the color of stimulation, of danger.  Red means stop.  And warm-blooded creatures are red inside; my blood stains the pages pinned to the back wall.  Some of the objects that occupy this space are fabricated.  Those that are purchased were found at second-hand stores and garage sales.  Some of these pieces were trash-picked and painted.  The only requirement for inclusion is that the object be RED.  With color as the single unifying characteristic of this heterogeneous population of cultural flotsam, similarities begin to form between distantly related objects:  The Bible, Danielle Steele, The Robe , Robert Ludlum, Jonathon Kellerman, Sing Men!  On opening night I painted my body red and sat upon a 6 foot pedestal watching Antonia Bird’s film, “Ravenous” as visitors entered and consumed Red Vines, Red Dog Beer, Red Wine and Red Hots.

This artwork is about LACK; it is the physical result of the impulse to deny that lack, to fill the emptiness with stuff.  In order to create this installation I consumed voraciously for 4 months.  I shopped and searched, I loaded my cart and loaded it again.  It was very difficult spending my money on objects that are, in every sense, total shit.  And it was uncomfortable engaging in activities and taking on characteristics I criticize.  But the task was to stuff the hole, and stuff the hole I did.  I believe that because we imagine the hole as physical, we accord it the quality of boundedness. And this artwork, as material in the physical world, confirms that boundedness; it demonstrates the possibility of achieving a state of satiety.  But RAVENOUS is not only about physical holes.  It is also about the existential vacuum created by modern life.  This is a complicated hole.  If feels infinite although it, too, is circumscribed, albeit by membranes that are elusive, perforated, semi-permeable.  And what fills this hole is as mysterious as