11 Comments

How stupidly brilliant.
Brokenglish.blogspot.com
2008-09-18 22:10:55

It really is a fascinating show, the statistics are ever altered and new ones added. The performers playing the factory setting brilliantly — the brown coats and tannoy announcements as well as way the disused venue has been left untouched.

Check out http://www.thericeshow.com to see the show evolve through internet reactions.
Jon Bounds
2008-09-19 11:39:43

I remeber seeing something better when I was a kid in the science museum of my city, Madrid. It was a cube of 5x5x5m full of tiny green balls of 1mm in diameter and a giant counter at the front of the cube. The good part was that a a hole at the bottom and a feeder above the cube substracted and added balls representing births and deaths in the whole world. I saw this when I was 10 and you can imagine how awesome an instalation like that can be when you are 10.

I guess this trick has been used many times by many artists. Let's find all the "artists" that have copied the trick, here is the first, have you seen more?
daniel robert
2008-09-21 22:17:14

This rice should be used to feed some of the people it represents. 1 cup of rice = 1 human not dead from starvation. Someone please, tell me that these 112 tons of rice ends up as food for someone.

If not, this project seems horrendously grotesque for its decadence and utter waste. The comment to me would be on the disproportionate access to food and availability of resources.

This show should end immediately and the rice sent to Burma. I apologize in advance for my emphatic reaction, but food is needed as food at the moment. Pretty representations of statistical data is totally ineffective in comparison.
jovencio
2008-09-25 07:06:25

I've just read that all the rice used in these projects is returned to the food chain. I am glad to hear this. Though the fact remains, when it is being used for the project it is not where it is needed most.
jovencio
2008-09-25 07:16:44

Would be nice to have a funnel where rice dissapears at the rate of attrition and rice being added to the pile at the rate of addition
Phil
2008-09-26 01:14:48

Jovencio, I don't see the sense of your comment. Why because this show uses food is it any more of a waste of resources then any other art show or any human activity not directly related to survival?
Alex
2008-10-28 17:55:50

They should have one for the number of starving people that could have been kept alive by the rice in this exhibit.
MikeD
2008-12-06 20:29:59

So much rice! It just goes to show, you can't be too careful.
Russ from Brighton
2009-02-17 21:26:38

@ daniel robert -- Chris Burden is an American artist who has used common objects to represent staggering statistics. I recall one installation before the end of the Cold War which showed all of the tanks massed on the borders of East and West Germany facing each other (over 50,000 on each side, as I remember it). Each tank was represented by one US nickel with an unlit match laid on top of it. There is also a Korean artist named Do-Huh Suh who does astonishing realizations: a robe assembled from thousands of military identity tags or a walk-on sculture in which a horizontal glass sheet is supported by thousands of tiny plastic human figures.
Dan Spock
2011-02-22 23:14:33

Don't see why every is concerned by the fact that this rice could be feeding people who really need it when it actually couldn't. This rice wouldn't have been availible to the people that really need it anyway it is only availible to the people that can buy it. If you people are so concerned why don't you buy some rice and send it to where it is needed yourselves. I think this is a really clever exibit and it would be no matter what it was made from.
Hannah
2012-06-20 10:34:09

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