The Ten Plagues For the exhibit today, the AP Art History class and Mrs.

Wiener chose to repurpose a printer into the ten plagues. This project, you could say, is a partial summary of what the class has been learning this year. One of the first artists we learned about was Wade Guyton, who uses giant printers to print out enormous canvases, otherwise known as print jobs.

Our discovery of Wade Guytons work led us to wonder whether it was really art and what art really is, something you may be wondering as you look at our printer. However, Wade Guyton has shown us we can make art out of printers, so we felt we were safe in doing so. One of the freedoms of the contemporary art world is that anything and everything can be art. Making art now requires an eye that liberates an object from its original purpose so it can be reshaped into what the artist wants it to be.

The Art History class also learned this lesson early on, when we studied Marcel Duchamp, whose influence on our work is clear. Duchamp is famous for this work, Fountain:

Duchamp took a urinal and, by turning this ready-made piece upside down and renaming it, repurposed it into a work of art.

Duchamps influence can also be seen in our depiction of the first plague, blood. We intended that part to look more like the work of the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock:

However, what emerged is what you see here. No matter. We went with it, and Duchamp, a member of the Dada group of artists, who believed that all is random and that theres really no point to anything, would have approved. Take a look at his work, The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even:

Never mind what the artwork means (yes, it does actually have meaning!). Whats important is that if youll notice, the glass of this artwork is cracked, and that happened when the artwork was being

transported. However, Duchamp, in true Dada fashion, said to leave the cracked glass, as it broke by chance and chance is one of Dadas most cherished values. In homage to Duchamp, we said, Never mind that the blood didnt emerge as wanted it to, but were using our Dada moment in an ironic way, as irony is another one of Dadas values. We want to show that chance is not chance in our artwork but that everything God planned the plagues deliberately, in order to show His hand in the salvation of Israel. In other words, as you see on our control panel, which represents God, who is in control of all, .

So the control panel represents Gods hand, you can see the Nile turned to blood, and the cartridge holder has been transformed into an abstract frog. The remainder of the plagues rest in the gutted printer, in what to us looks like one of the models Egyptians used to place in their graves. Here are some we saw when we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

On the left is an Egyptian garden, the middle is a granary and, on the right, is a brewery. Of course in our model, the Egyptian landscape, depicted with textiles, scraps of fabric, is turning apocalyptic. On the left is an Egyptian covered on his torso with kinim, lice, and, on his lower body, with shechin, boils. Surrounding him is a fabric that reminded us of arov, small, flying things that are swarming the mans house.

In the center of our model is dever, the plague decimating the farm animals, and above them is the arbeh, an abstract row of locusts. The repurposed CDs, now jagged, are barad, and they are raining down on the model and have hit the ground. The most fearsome plagues are on the right. In the top right corner, which has been painted black, is darkness. We rained down black toner cartridges into that corner to fully depict that nightmarish plague (and, by the way, anyone who has touched toner cartridges and has come away with inky fingers and smudges all over everything they touch knows what a plague it is to work with that medium).

Finally, for makat bechorot, we found a printer part that resembled a head and thought the cut wires do a good job of symbolizing a body that had been cut off from life. Around the printer is text we found from books and magazines that reminded us of the Ten Plagues and their awesome power. Finally, we found a portrait of a family at a meal, one that represents us at a seder, to remind us that the plagues and the Exodus are not some abstract tale or a story with strong aesthetic appeal but rather an integral part of our lives as Jews: