Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?

Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?

Our daily lives are filled with consumption—$1.50 for a cup of coffee, $5.95 for a magazine, $17.99 for headphones, $1.79 for cough drops, $36.00 for a haircut. Whether bought out of necessity or indulgence, purchased alone or in a group, everything we buy has its own story to tell. We buy art supplies while feeling inspired, CDs while shopping with friends, and a new pair of jeans to give us a lift when we are feeling blue. Yet, these powerfully emotional experiences can be fleeting—quickly erased by the pull of the next "must-have" acquisition. In Obsessive Consumption , Portland-based artist Kate Bingaman-Burt holds up a mirror to her own obsession with shopping and acquisition. Faced with a mounting pile of postgraduation credit card debt, Bingaman-Burt concocted a unique artistic response to this all-too-common dilemma. She picked up a pen and began drawing her monthly credit card statements, painstakingly recreating every last ledger line and decimal point, vowing to continue serving her artistic penance until her debt was repaid. As a relief from this project—turning the idea of "retail therapy" on its ear—Bingaman-Burt began drawing one of her purchases from each day, losing herself in the items, patterns, simple lines, and typography. Obsessive Consumption represents a selection of three years of Bingaman-Burt's delightful ink drawings of sundry items. Accompanied by witty and insightful annotations, these drawings mock her own relationship with her purchases and put a personal face on the mass-produced items of our shared experience. Readers can catch a glimpse into the life of the artist from the collection, which includes wedding bands, a dog, a moving truck, handmade items from friends, Mississippi beer, Portland pizza, and lots of pens and drawing paper to support her drawing habit. A celebration of the beauty of the everyday, Obsessive Consumption presents a microcosm of consumer culture that will appeal to everyone from a thirteen-year-old mall-dweller to a middle-aged anticonsumerism advocate. "A professor of graphic design in Portland, Bingaman-Burt has been documenting her personal relationship with consumerism across a range of artistic endeavors. Here in this book, though, she bears witness with a daily drawing of something that she spent money on that day, beginning on February 5, 2006. The book covers the first three years of her documentary urges and her impulse spending. From her monthly credit card bills to a bottle of soda at the CVS to an iPhone (finally, on 11/21/08!) to more fancy artist's pens (the last entry), Bingaman-Burt bears witness to how we live today, and where all the money goes." --my3books "Speaking of amazing women, Kate Bingaman-Burt is a maker's maker. Her tireless work drawing purchases and then publishing them in a monthly zine has been bringing a smile to my face for years. I can't wait to see her book that comes out this March." --Design-Milk "Looking through this little book (itself a very appealing object), it's easy for me to feel Bingaman-Burt's joy in acquisition -- something most of us have experienced (whether we admit it or not) -- as much as her obsession with the stuff she buys, and her unease at just how much of it there proves to be. Obsessive Consumption doesn't order us around. Instead, Bingaman-Burt creates some space to assess our experiences in consumer culture, and figure out how over-consumption affects us." --onearth, April 22, 2010 "Princeton Architectural Press presents Bingaman-Burts in a nicely designed volume, with each section in a monochrome color for no particular reason, other than it looks good. That kind of sums up her drawings, too." --Bookgasm.com, May 12, 2010 "I was given the book called Obsessive Consumption by Kate Bingaman-Burt and while I enjoyed the illustrations, I didnt really know what to make of it at first. Cute, I thought, but whats the point of drawing pretty much everything one buys? I started reading the intro and all of a sudden the book took another another meaning: G and I started talking about how we were raised when it comes to shopping. We were saying how glad we are that we are not shoppers. After a few minutes we looked at each other and said: Wait a second, we ARE shoppers, we shop ONLINE. We just dont go into stores! Oops!Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?, by Kate Bingaman-Burt (Make sure to read all her little comments next to her illustrations. Truly entertaining!) " --Swiss-Miss.com, March 29, 2010 "Bingaman-Burt walks us through some of her favorite images in the book as well as some more recent daily purchase drawings." --Fast Company, April 7, 2010 "Obsessive Consumption (Princeton Architectural Press) is her sweet act of contrition... Read from beginning to end, Obsessive Consumption reveals a happy (if somewhat guilty) grasshopper who likes a good bargain as much as she likes a good burrito. Bingaman-Burt engages in the same name-brand culture as the rest of us, but in