Recipe For a Lemon Sharpie

Twenty years ago I was really interested in creating fictions within my art. At that time I made a series of work based on a photograph of bird poop that I digitally altered to make look like abstract paintings.   I printed them as if they were posters of the painting and I even created a web site for a fictional gallery complete with reviews by phony critics and  a 3D walk through of a gallery that didn’t exist.  Of course, there was plenty of evidence that it was fictional…that’s not the point.  The point is related to the idea of make believe.  When children play, make believeis an important part of the process…and that’s true for adults too. Most games involve some kind of make believe as part of the simulation. The illusion does not have to be complete…you are supposed to pretend.  
 
The first image I made for the My Secret Decoder Ring series was called Lemon Sharpie because the plant/mandala portion was an image of a lemon tree completed with a linear black line (sharpie).  But I thought it sounded like the name of a drink.  Therefore, I looked it up on the internet and…I did not find such a drink.  Instead, I invented the recipe, made the drink, and created a photograph of it (with a rubber glove in it, of course).  The final step was to put the recipe and the image in a book so that we can make believe it’s a real drink.
 
One of the best parts about this idea is that I can put it on Facebook and continue to pretend it’s a real drink…of course people will need to play along since the rubber glove alone is a big tip off…never mind the copyright notice! I almost went so far as to degrade the image of the drink to make it fit in the book (make it look duller) but I could not bring myself to do it….and why bother with those other clues right there.
 
One last point…the relationship of seriousness to play.  This endeavour asks people to play along with the idea that there is a drink called a Lemon Sharpie and it’s in this book, etc.  But everything I post on Facebook about it will be technically true…and in fact it now is a real drink, and to be honest—it’s pretty good.