Hey, this is Meade with AU2.com and I'm back again for another three-minute art history and today we're going to talk about Tom Friedman. He's one of my absolute favorite artists and I found him very useful to study when I was in school. Friedman works within the overall structure of contemporary conceptual art. Initially, conceptual art began with the dematerialization of the art objects and an anti-economic and anti-commodity agenda. But in Friedman's work, the form or the material is just as important as the content. He began working in the style during grad school at the University of Chicago in the early 90s. He painted his entire studio white and would bring in one object at a time to think about. He would try to get to this very basic structural essence and the pure meaning of each thing. This led to some of the most groundbreaking pieces in his catalog such as the slightly used bar of soap with inlaid pubic hair. He broke on the process of art making into four parts, the idea, the material, the form, and the presentation. All of these stages had to be in balance or at least considered for a piece to be complete. You can see evidence of this process throughout his work. He will typically base the construction of a piece on the particular form of the component parts, sort of like a molecular structure. In the toothpicks culture, for instance, you can imagine that the points of the toothpicks are glued together in what's probably a sphere in the center, then built outward into its final form. He uses the four-range of presentation locations, the floor of the wall, the ceiling, high-low corner, pedestal, etc. Ultimately, we're led to think about the infrastructure that it takes to produce the commonplace objects he uses and the systems in place are just in our society, especially those we take for granted. One of his most minimal and maximal pieces is 1,000 hours of staring, which took five years. It's simply a piece of paper at which he stared at for 1,000 hours. Apparently, he did document the work, but he found the presentation of the documentation unnecessary. Here, we're entirely dependent on the title, which Marcel Duchamp called the Invisible Color, for the transmission of the meaning and medium of the work. Friedman's work is always fun to see, especially in person, and it has a wide appeal because of its obvious craftsmanship and its use of recognizable materials as well as its clarity. I'm Meade, and this has been another three minutes of art history. Thank you.