There remains within sculpture a place concrete, an arena in which to congregate, occasion for hallowed ground.
Here wait.
Here weight.
The terrain discreetly calls for pause. Locale binds us together; interpretation severs the bond.
These sound sites stake physical and psychic perimeters that probe: the dearth and depth of our assistance and reservoir; the artifice beneath the free floating capital of "natural" economic law; transitory states of substance and the precariousness of communication; and the trappings of distinguishing between aesthetic, political and moral orders. Each stage awaits, acknowledges, and is fulfilled only through our agency.
The silent loci emphasize historical listening through individuated objects, static vehicles of what cannot be understood. All cautiously commemorate traumatic events, unarticulated crises that literally have no place, neither in a dissociated past not fully experienced nor in an unintegrated present incomprehensible. Within sculpture --- their remains.
Found No More At All, 1998, 18" x 52" x 52", 2000 lb. iron-banded marble millstone, 144 glass goblets, wine, pulverized bone, bone meal.
Found No More At All, premiered in Apocalypse Now And Then: Art At The End Of Time at DePaul University in Chicago. The sculpture was inspired by St. John the Divine's accounts in Revelations of a sea of glass mingled with fire, the violence of angelic judgment, and the silencing of artisans of whatsoever craft he be. It was composed of a 2,000 pound marble millstone, found in the rubble of an exploded paint factory, balanced on 144 wine-filled goblets.
A reconstructed version at The Alternative Museum in New York City used a wider eighteenth century millstone from the Tuthilltown Mill in Gardiner, New York. Pieced together from granite used for ballast on a ship from France, this stone ground wheat, rye and corn, in a water-powered mill built by slaves. Both versions, with their biblical and historical references, question the use and abuse of power, collective resistance, and personal transcendence.
Foreign and Domestic, 1998, two identical anatomical models of human brains, labeled.
Homages to personal and national identities collide. The simulated no longer seems predicated on the fake.
Fast, 1999, 108 gilded plastic carrots, eighteenth century carriage without horses, 120" x 60" x 80".
The first in Guilted Age, a set of seven cautious memorials created for the L.C. Bates Museum, honors unacknowledged labor, the driving forces behind and in front of carrot and stick promises.
Charge: Redefining Genocide, 1999, altered bugle, black flag, marble sarcophagus lid, 60" x 24" x 6".
Undertaken Duty
When genocide called us to action
The mouthpiece grew the bell's attraction
The air still blew
No fee to view
Ethnic cleansing with satisfaction.
The Kitchen: Double Delight or Device For Eating Two Ice-Cream Cones
Simultaneously Without Having To Give One To A Beggar
1994, dimensions variable, 2 hand-made ice cream cones, mechanical device.The humanly created sacred market responding to the demands of wealth has the delicious tendency to concentrate power in ever fewer hands.
Choke: Witness for Peace, 1998,
34" x 4" x 4", wooden baseball bat, eye of vertebrata
(fish, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal)
Courting Silence Choke Justice, being blind but not deaf, Don't blink, Finds unacceptable Don't strike, Sounds of suffering, laughter, breath Don't breathe, Justice is terribly swift. The enforcement of international justice strikes out while the physical intimidation of opposition voices drives home. A June 17, 1999 National Public Radio report on British paratroopers mentioned that they found in a torture chamber in Pristina, Kosovo, a baseball bat inscribed with the label "mouth-shutter".
Choke: Witness for Peace, Detail,
1998, 34" x 4" x 4", wooden baseball bat, eye of vertebrata
(fish, amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal)
Blameless: The Hegemonic Break, 1998,
3" x 30" x30", 15 cue balls, wooden pool rack, white felt.
Welcome Blameless I accept market liberty. The collective contained, like to like, I accept corporate law let be. on a level field, in a pure land, I accept neighbors just like me. with nothing undone, the winner's won. I accept God's white supremacy. So what's your big fucking problem?
Still, 1999, 78" x 48" x 48", From the series Guilted Age, 19th century schoolhouse bell with text amended by gilded band-aids. The original text, a motto for a school housing orphans and charges of the state, was I want to do just as Christ would have me do. It is amended to: I want to do just as I would have me do.
Not All Slippage is Hermeneutic, 2004, 12" x 12" x 3", cast plastic banana peels.
White Trash, 1999, dimensions variable, white trash bag filled with white-collar office refuse.
Spring: Let them keep their children — tethered, 2000, (dimensions variable), Installation view, ten panels: 4' x 8' x 1' each, concrete, chalk, metal traps, 14 min. sound loop.
In SPRING the snares that interrupt an elegant formalism are both literal and psychological. Land mines from wars long over still maim and murder, now and for generations to come. And we continue to produce, sell, and sow, not ban, them (while animal traps are highly regulated, if not illegal).
Leap of Faith: Permanent Protection from Spring: Let them keep their children — tethered, 2000, 4' x 8' x 1', concrete, chalk, metal traps, 14 min. sound loop.
Recent floods in Mozambique have redistributed these indiscriminate devices, ruining all safe zones that had been cleared. Abroad such dangers are often invisible; at home, they are often disguised. The poor know danger lurks where help is offered. 'Social agencies, social workers, schools and welfare offices, in fact, usually double, today, as sites of scrutiny and surveillance. In such contexts, those most desperately in need are those least likely to receive assistance.'* *Fine and Weiss, The Unknown City, 1999
Such traps exist within our own boundaries regardless of class, as inequity reaps violence to the point that parents harbor their children indoors, tethered to television, to avoid the dangers of the street.
SPRING bounces between the horrors of daily realities and the refined aesthetics of art, while skipping over the pitfalls of easy dialectics. Getting back to universal form, geometric basics, is a fine, if austere, challenge to heed. When dealing with the physically concrete we would just as soon banish extraneous content and messy obstacles from the playing field.
But the lines we draw are as mired as the fingers that scratch the board of feigned neutrality. The game function of the hopscotch designs overrides the form as content imperative of high modernism. Easter egg colors don't quite succeed in making toys of vicious animal traps. Substance prevails.
Flirting with Re•membrance from Spring: Let them keep their children — tethered, 2000, 4' x 8' x 1', concrete, chalk, metal traps, 14 min. sound loop.
SPRING laments the impossibility of innocence on many levels, in our hearts and minds; yet, it also seeks to restore the purity of heart we associate with childhood. The temporality of chalk games is made permanent, inscribed in concrete. These particular traps are welded open, rendered harmless, in a gentle gesture toward disarmament.
Lying Blanket, 1999, 49" x 96" x 1 1/2", rubber coral snakes, vinyl paint.
The history of New England is, as are all histories, created and contested, suspect and subjective, lying and living, woven and rent, treacherous and tantalizing. The white-washing of language to justify colonial treatment of indigenous peoples is not so distant. Native Americans rights were negated by designating the land they inhabited and used as "vacant". Earth without irrigation and permanent structures was open to Caucasian claim. The deception of language continues today in our problematic role as enforcer of international justice. Ethnic cleansing, a more convenient and palatable substitute for genocide, releases us from the obligations of U.N. charters. Acknowledging genocide would have compelled us to action in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Cambodia. How we bleach our morality.
Lying Blanket is woven from Coral snakes that are indigenous to North America. They inflict their poisonous venom only when manhandled. Their made-in-China rubber versions, originally patterned with red, yellow and black (colors stereotypically associated with the non-Caucasian races), are white-washed. The image of the open blanket, symbol of childhood security, extended coverage, and societal comfort, serves as an icon of the protector as well as locus of the protectorate. The serpents, woven warp and woof, allude to the Spirit; concentrated power kept in check; a common ground of collective knowledge, phallic virility and Eve's agency, the endless deceitful proclamations (spoken with forked tongues) that become the bed of history, and the slippage inherent in interpretation. Lying Blanket lets the viewer decipher whether or not the spiritual purity we ascribe to whiteness is merited, whether or not this least absorbent hue represents a reflective common ground or an ever seething, ever sweeping bed of lies which both covers and is uncovered.
Infant Justice, detail, 2002, Nine glass gavels, mobile, two baby barbell rattles filled with stones, two cribs (60" x 30" x 48" each), paint.
Infant Justice is immanent, as well as present, and lives, as do we, with the discrepancies between the seen (frozen, utopic) and the known (active,chaotic). We know the ideals of our judicial system to be illusory; transparent gavels cast condescending and often cryptic shadows over our heads. The promise and image of impartiality is, in practice, easily broken, splintered through selective prosecution at home and shattered through blatant inequities in our foreign policy.
Infant Justice, detail, 2002, Nine glass gavels, mobile, two baby barbell rattles filled with stones, two cribs (60" x 30" x 48" each), paint.
Pleas for justice are muted, not pacified. Rattles of resistance unshaken, are not resigned.
The stones' cries contained, at great cost, --- for this moment.
Inheritance, 2004, glass baby barbell rattles filled with stones surrounded by a group of twelve BCE stone shekel weights.
Conscience Free, 2004, 12" x 7" x 20", fourth century BC terra-cotta Greek protoma, vitrine, hydrocal cauliflower cloud at the Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State.
