ProposalsFor Artworks, Exhibitions, Installations, Videos, PublicWorks, Actions, Performances, and Cultural Manipulationsor What I would do if I had Unlimited Time, Money, and Resources
People
find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed
ones on a shelf. -Ezra Pound
When I was a child, I had trouble learning
to read and write. Perhaps this is why books are so important to me: because
of the challenge they present. The English language, my native tongue, was
a code that I had to crack. I have a form of dyslexia, which is more complex
than seeing words backwards. My mind extrapolates information faster than
I am able to process it. My eyes are always jumping ahead on the page and
my mind has to fill in the blanks. I had then and to a lesser degree still
do, have a horrible time writing, pronouncing, and spelling certain words.
But at the same time my mind and mouth are always filled with words and ideas,
as if I was cursed, to never truly be able to express myself.
A strong memory has been my saving grace,
I have had to learn all kinds of mnemonic devices in order to get by in this
world. I am unable to understand phonetics - I simply cannot "sound out"
words. When I was in grade school, to prepare for a spelling test I would
break words up into smaller bits and then create "little rotes"
in order to retain them in my head. The word JUSTICE is "just ice",
because "Lady justice is cold as well as blind." As laborious as
that may seem, it happens rather quickly in my mind. I know words are spelled
wrong if they look wrong because I remember seeing them right. When I read,
I do not hear words in my head; I see a pictographic image in the shape of
the words. The way I read is akin to Edgar Rice Burrough s description of
how Tarzan taught himself to read: by associating the pictures in the books
left by his long-dead parents in their hut. I do not associate text with sound,
but text with image. This graphological way of thinking was fostered in part
by my father, an undiagnosed dyslexic himself, and also one of the last great
hand lettering sign painters in America. For myself as for my father, text
has a weak connection to sound and syntax exists in pictorial space.
When Language is adversarial, it is hard
for someone to feel that they belong to this world. "In the beginning
was the Word." Our culture stands on the bedrock of words, without which,
humans are nothing more than apes. When your brain simply works differently
than the basic paradigm of the world/the word, you have the overwhelming sense
of being a chessman on a scrabble board. You had no say in the making of the
world that appears to be a prison of language, and everything becomes suspect.
People with different software than you created the very logic of all things.
In short the cultural world seems to be insane, and it is your problem.
I have come to think of dyslexia as actual
proof of Descartes’ Evil Demon, or the Gnostic Demiurge. Perhaps dyslexia
is really immunity to the illusion that is this world. When I see words and
numbers in the wrong order, maybe I am seeing the deeper truth; perhaps it
is the rest of the world that has a problem. Maybe dyslexia is a sort of experiment
in free will, and the greater parts of humanity are robot slaves of some sort
of Spelling Bee-lzebub.
When I was eight years old, I came across
a book by one of the great under-recognized geniuses of the last century,
the late cartoonist Bernard Kliban. In Kliban s
masterpiece, Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head and Other Drawings,
I discovered what would become one of the more influential forces in my artistic
life. Each page had a single or double panel image in which unknown truths
were revealed. Kliban presented a parallel existence that confirmed all my
suspicions.
Kliban
exposed a world of unknown truths and forgotten facts, including:
One
Apple will keep three doctors away for eight hours. One fence post is a fent
and a group of them is called a fents.
The
early nomadic Egyptians had small portable pyramids on wheels. Handsome people
have no trouble using pencils. There is now a new improved gas powered turban.
The Contaminated Pork Company has a factory in Cincinnati, Ohio. One can get
a job to think of Chickens.
Kliban's cartoons present his bizarre
musings as facts. He was essentially a hermetic philosopher who uses gag cartoons
the same way Wittgenstein uses his imaginary paradigms. Kliban's work throws
a monkey wench into our assumptions of the nature of reality. His cartoons
prove that the world still has mysteries. They remind us that Rhinoceroses
are really Unicorns.
A million years later in graduate school,
I received a negative critique that, ironically, summed up how I have been
influenced by Kliban’s work. The critic, after struggling to explain
her inability to get into my work, said- When I look at your stuff, I always
feel like I am coming to the story in the middle. That was the point! Who
is privy to the actual beginnings of anything?
All
culture is the exchange of artifacts, the vessels and abandoned husks of a
life lived. Everything is more than the sum of its parts. A work of art always
exists in the history of its creator. What Kliban did was prove to me what
I had already known: everything is a lie, often well crafted and seductive,
but nonetheless a fabrication. The
very fabric of our reality is a form of Epistemology, the blessing/curse of
memory sees to that. The veil of Maya is a tattered patchwork.
If accepted,
the Gnostic belief that the world is actually an illusion, then fictions are
illusions squared. If real is fake, then art is even more fake. And we are
all walking in during the middle of someone else’s movie, down in front!
For
sanity's sake let us agree that the only time is now and the only place is
here. It is the only way that we can have value and worth in this world. There
are no worlds beyond this world, no afterlife, no distant alien worlds, and
no other dimensions of reality. Unless there is a quantum leap in present
technology, no one reading this text will ever set foot upon another world,
travel though time, or pay a visit to the land of the dead - beyond what can
happen in the realms of the human imagination.
This
is it. Our reality is a small green and blue gem floating in an endless cold
void. If we can accept the brutal fact of Now-Here, then there is no limit
to what we can do.
In
Paradise Regained by Milton, there is a scene in which Christ confronts Satan.
Christ tries to reason with Satan, he says, -You are of divine origin. You,
like I know the future as well as we know the past. You know that in the end
good will triumph over evil. Why, if you know this, do you continue to fight?-Satan
replies, -Where there is no hope, there is no fear.-
Accepting the status quo is not what being
an artist is about. My artwork is an outright assault on dogmatic aesthesis
and meaningless consumer production. This world is filled with benign, cowardly,
lowest-common-denominator garbage. Why would an artist want to celebrate or
reproduce it? My work follows one maxim: great Art must serve a great purpose.
My purpose is to live a meaningful life. To do that, I must create artworks
that question the nature of reality and joyfully rebel against the powers-that-be.
Art is a Luciferean torch, which shows that despite all the commercialism
and superficial image production, there can still be meaningful expression.
To be an artist is to be the serpent in the garden.
This text falls under the category of,
"If you build it, they will come," or, to be more exact, "if
you propose it, they will come." The projects that follow are what I
would do right now if I had the time and resources.
These
projects lack execution and form; they are limited by their own immateriality
but given power by it as well. They are spermatozoa, pushing forward to merge
with the egg (the material world). These ideas very well might mutate beyond
any recognizable state, and hopefully all will improve before they are completed.
It is in the making that an idea becomes real. The brutal facts of the materials,
the unforeseen factors, the despair of love’s labor lost and the amazement
of creating something that you never dreamed would become real, are their
own rewards. These pages are here because I believe in their merit as catalysts.
They are proposals to alter and/or question reality. I want to give us all
an extra helping of the fruit of knowledge. To question everything, including
questioning everything. I am putting it all out there. Some of these ideas
have been in my head and notebooks for a long-time; others came about from
the very fact that I was writing this text.
Where is the new wine? Dying on the vine!- James Douglass Morrison
Some
of the ideas aren t that original in the proper sense, they are simply things
I would like to do, something I read or saw that I would like to do my take
on, or spring board off of. Treating ideas and concepts as secrets is a luxury
that I cannot afford. If by writing them down I am ruining them for further
investigation, so be it. I can always come up with more, those that fearfully
hang onto a few precious ideas as if they were jewels simply don t understand.
Others have had similar ideas, and created works that relate to mine, it does
not matter: it is not who does it first; it is who does it better. Hopefully
these ideas will strike you as ripe, ready, and alive, not dusty goods upon
a shelf. Everything is a re-creation of everything else - this is a two way
street. This text itself is an idea that has come to fruition, I am doing
this as a means of advertisement, these are my wares and possible investments
for interested parties - but also as a project in itself. Make no mistakes
you are holding art in your hands.
Miracles
by Mailbox
Proposal
- To exhibit sculptural objects that have all arrived at the exhibition space
via the United States Postal Service. These objects would be ready for exhibit
in their delivered state; they would not be enclosed in packages or containers.
No one would need to unpack these objects, because the outer -postal skin-
would be the actual artwork. The method of delivery would be the content of
the objects. The fact that they arrived via a mail carrier, and not via the
artist directly is what makes the objects artwork. The object s morphologies
will play with the concept of -what is a package- and what is not. And with
shape, texture, and color, the placement of stamps, as well as the sender
and receiver addresses. The style of the text on the object, the postmark,
the stamps themselves and weight of the objects would be an ever-changing
mutation of the expected appearance of conventional postal objects. Also,
the X-factor of abuse during the postal processing would add another dimension
to the work.
This project is about method of distribution
being merged with content, but the possibilities of form and subjects that
it can address are endless. I am trying to make an expression about the power
that is at all of our hands. For a little money (the cheapest postal prices
in the industrial world), Americans could be exchanging sculptures with each
other. Sharing the beauty of canceled stamps, the mystery of a closed package,
the unexpected surprise of an unknown.
One aspect of this
project has been -the puzzle- or component piece(s), in which discrete pieces
delivered separately, can be joined to create a larger, more complex sculpture.
Ideally, an exhibition would begin with the first few objects arriving each
day and placed in the exhibition space. Little by little the objects would
take up more and more space in the room until their interrelationships were
exposed and the pieces were joined to form the
The
primary influence on this work has been the Correspondence art movement of
the 1960s and 70s, represented by Ray Johnson, Buster Cleveland, Anna Banana,
Wallace Berman, and On Kawara. If you affix proper postage, you can mail anything,
through the U.S. postal service (though it can’t be perishable, or something
that would damage other mail). This medium of exchange is the mischief, which
turns mail into system of commerce and exchange in subversive art. Often items
of extreme economic or sentimental value are entrusted to the mail service;
this project plays with this convention, the objects soon to become valuable
art commodities via mundane actions of the postal service.
Besides an exhibition space, a patron
could pay a membership fee and receive a postal sculpture every month for
a year, since this method of working gets a great deal of its content from
the surprise in the mailbox. I have been working on a version of this project
for three years with my friend Scott Wolniak, who has a small gallery space
in Chicago. I jokingly started to send him these objects, but it has become
a force in my life, a constant side activity. No matter what else I have going
on I can make these objects. The production of these miracles allows me to
have a system of meaning; I produce, mail, and never see them again, yet I
know they continue to exist. I am the believer, the objects are my offerings,
the mail is the cycle of life, the postage stamps are my sacrifice, the mail
carrier is an angel, and the receiver is the keeper of the secrets.
Trashsures
Proposal - To create and then abandon
a series of art works in the city of New York. These objects will be made
from materials that are presently in my studio. They are half-finished, ignored,
false starts that are filling up all the valuable space in my studio. There
is a raw quality to these pieces that I find at once appealing and also repugnant.
I have a compulsive desire to "push" artworks, to keep adding, altering,
and fudging with pieces. I also am constantly finding objects that can become
the beginnings of great aided readymade pieces.
All of the objects have a truth to them. That truth is that they are
unfinished works of art - no one would think that they were random pieces
of trash. Through this project they will become simulations of a very real
urban phenomena: the waste of a failed artist. Part of living in New York,
is to come upon, piles of abandoned semi-destroyed works of art, the trash
pile. My pieces would be more assertively placed. I want to confuse people
as to whether the pieces have been thrown way or left by mistake. They will
be set down, in areas of high traffic where they are sure to be seen. Then
the fickle finger of faith will collaborate, these pieces might be ignored
for days, destroyed by the first passerby, or taken by some urban trash connoisseur,
or some duchampian might claim them as ready-mades. I will produce maps of
their locations, which will be mailed out as exhibition notices so individuals
will be able to seek out these pieces. The random reward of an Easter egg
hunt comes to mind.
This
project would be a means of purging these objects from my life. I will simply
take them in their present state and scatter them across the city, photographing
each one and recording its new home. I hope the outcome of this is two fold,
people will see the objects, and know that they are -Artworks- completing
the Artist/Viewer circuit. Also the city is supposedly filled with keen-eyed
individuals that will hopefully “adopt” these objects, taking
them home, completing the Artist/Collector circuit. If I make enough of the
pieces and they become known, perhaps someone will write about them completing
the Artist / Critic circuit. If that happens perhaps a curator will want to
exhibit the objects or their documentation of them, completing the Artist/Gallery
circuit. If my assertions are correct, it will prove my idea that art that
negates ego and ownership can bring a larger reward for ego and ownership.
If you can make people think that you don’t care or are some kind of
revolutionary, then they will do whatever they can to embrace you. Why? Everybody
wants to be validated by the trickster, on the laughing end of the joke. Everyone
wants to be in on the joke. This may come off as a bit of art-world stratagem, but what
isn’t? What we pretend to be, we become, so I will pretend that I am
"abandoning" these works, but in reality I will be claiming the
greater world as
my own gallery.
The
Apocagenesis
Proposal - To create a series of large-scale
paintings of a mythic narrative cycle. The key to this work is the focus on
myth- not mythology. Myth is the birth of mythology. I am not trying to retell
old stories in a new way, rather creating a new story with ancient forms.
If we think about the world of fiction as a world that actually exists alongside
our own, then we can begin to better understand ourselves. My interest in
myth is in altering the viewers understanding of this world by altering the
mirror world of fiction. Their sense of recognition, I want people to reconsider
their assumptions about fiction (which is our mirror), and to not take the
fantastic for granted, thereby not taking the mundane for granted either.
This
project will work from the point that theology is anthropology. Humanity creates
God(s) in order to re-create itself. Understanding this retro-genesis is a
hermetic practice, of believing that God does exist solely in the human mind.
This ultimate fiction is the final mirror that must be explored. In my artwork
this content becomes fixed, but the form changes based on whatever aspects
of this idea I wish to explore. This is an infinite system, that I can tear
apart both conceptually and physically without losing cohesion. Any endpoint
becomes a new beginning.
Part of being an artist is dealing with
the fear of “giving away the game”. Agendas are hidden with the
practice of fearful poetics. Everything seems to bend to caution, and discretion
is not the better part of valor. Everyone wants his or her work to be well
received. This want becomes a need, the need becomes a fear, and fear becomes
the thing driving the work. So to break this chain of conceptual cowardice,
I propose to make a series of large-scale (painting/drawings) that have a
dynamic narrative; exploring the -Apocagenesis- the beginning of the world
as the final revelation, in a rebus of mythic reality with fully realized
plastic form. The narrative will be based on the pan-narrative schema that
author Neil Forsyth described in
Lack,
Hero Emerges, Donor, Journey, Battle, Defeat, Enemy Ascendant, Hero Recovers,
Battle Rejoined, Victory, Triumph, Repeat.
I
will couple this schema, with my own idiosyncratic values and assertions,
which includes the contemporary action hero as surrogate Messiah along with
concepts such as Gnosticism, Ancient Astronauts, and Theodicy. My goal is
to create images that can be understood by the active viewer. I don t expect
every nuance to come across, but my work is generous. I always depict a world
that is writhing with abundance in terms of object/subject matter and information.
Nothing is left out. If you look you will see. Nothing outside of the work
for its intended reception: autonomy is paramount; you will not have to read
a title card to understand these works (unless you are a blithering moron).
A teacher took a group of students though
a museum and we came upon a Rubens painting of St. Catherine and the Virgin
Mary. The teacher said, -You all know what this painting is really about,
right?- I said, -It s about St. Catherine and the Virgin Mary.- He laughed,
and said, -No it is about this repeating line, you silly puddin head!-He then
proceeded to gesture in front of the painting showing how the fold of her
Mother s arm rhymed the profile of the Virgin Mary, and how that fold was
rhymed again and again in the painting. This is everything that is wrong with
art education. If we think about artwork as being all about the formal devices
used to create them, then all other aspects become moot. This is an agenda
that turns us all into soulless geometers. The greatest works of art become
formalist experiments or decorative luxury objects.
This
project will be well underway by the time this writing has been completed.
There will be around twelve to twenty works in total. These paintings will
be my attempt at the rigorously over-the-top masterpiece paintings. Every
aspect will be considered and all the complexities of form and content will
be explored, making the greatest paintings the world has ever seen.
The
Apocagenesis: The Teleplay
Proposal
- To produce a video in which I will act out an elaborate narrative based
on the Apocagenesis paintings. About two years ago I painted oversized portraits
of my Dramatis Personae, the characters in the Apocagenesis. These archetypal
characters are Heroes, Villains, Gods, and Monsters, each of whom represents
various concepts of import. These portraits are mounted on poles to create
protest sign-like placards. I will use these placards as the sole signifiers
of character in this video play. I will stand before the camera and perform
passionate monologues as each of the characters. These monologues will be
edited together to give the impression of character interaction, creating
multi-character scenes. All of the text will be improvised and emotional.
The final video piece will be no more than 60 minutes long; this piece will
be segmented into smaller acts. This could be expanded into a play with other
actors playing the parts.
I am interested in dealing with the Fantastic
in a manner that focuses on ideas, not special effects. I want to utilize
Brecht s Epic Theater, in which there is an intellectual distance from the
subject. The fact that it will be me, wearing a black robe, standing in my
studio, will force the viewers to focus on my words and actions to -get- the
story. The placards will become signs for quick identification. This work
will be the documentation of a ritual being born, and will be an attempt to
re-create theater in its primordial sense, in the manner of Thespis, the first
actor.
Thespis, who lived in ancient Greece,
is believed to have been the first playwright to introduce an actor, independent
of the chorus, who delivered monologues and also engaged in dialogues with
the leader of the chorus. The birth of drama is dated from this innovation.
Thespis is also said to have introduced the use of pigments and masks to disguise
the performers. Just as Thespis stood in front of the audience and stated
that he -was Bacchus,- I will stand in front of the camera and become the
various characters in the Apocagenesis. Thespis s actions mark the moment
when theater broke away from ritual and lost its direct connection to the
mystic. This project is about -the forward return,- I want to do the opposite
of Thespis, to access the mystical power of character invocation. Through
ritualistic magic, I will become the characters.
Props
Proposal - An exhibition of props from
all of the other projects. Since a number of pieces and projects I am proposing
will use props and other such trappings, it would be of interest to have an
exhibition that was only props. At first, it would seem to be simply that,
the objects will be presented and there would be photo-documentation of the
prop being used by a model or myself. There will also be a short text explaining
the how and/or why behind the actions or events. But as the exhibition proceeds
the props will become more and more bizarre and the actions more and more
fantastic. This will transform the props into -power fetish objects.- The
end result will be an expression of what Sigmund Freud called technology,
The Prosthetic God.
The
prop collection will include, ceremonial robes, musical instruments, tools,
walking spools, balancing devices, masks, costumes, armor, robots, exoskeleton
jetpacks, E.S.P. Helmets, soul catchers, medusa ray guns, and time machines.
Object
endowment, the practice of rehabilitating found objects with new and unintended
functions, is an important part of my life. I am amazed at what people throw
away.
This
project will present the props, written statements for each piece, photos
and/or videos of the props being used. Half of the objects will be actual
props from other projects, the rest will be completely fictional, with the
documentation being the element of truth in the exhibit. The rewarding art
experience is based upon the revelations of unknown histories. People go to
see art in order to see the residue of a secret meaningful life that has been
going on unbeknownst to them. The most interesting parts of retrospectives
are the early, quirky unknown works or the bizarre later-day tangents. Novelty
is a bi-product of discovery, and there is nothing new under the sun, but
the sun's light can be broken into new form by prisms.
The
Timeline
Proposal-
To create a long scroll-like drawing on paper, with ink, collage, and acrylic
paint, that will be the ultimate timeline of all events, real and imaged throughout
history. I believe that drawing is the highest form of human expression. Drawing
timelines has moved outside the bailiwick of artists and into the world of
scientific/historic illustration, like cartography. This project will be a
timeline to end all timelines, re-claiming the creation of such things to
the world of the artist/philosopher.
This project draws from the history of
humanity s habit of mapping the future along with the past. In the Vedic traditions,
the basic unit of time cycles through 4.3 billion years, and then begins anew.
Everything that happens will occur again. Christendom has been producing timelines
for hundreds of years that begin with biblical history and go past the present
to show the -apocalyptic end times,- Many of the timelines are available on
the Internet. Scientist have produced numerous theories about the future of
the universe. In Speculative Fiction, many writers present the reader with
-the history of the future.- H.G.Wells, E.E. Smith, Olaf Stapleton, Arthur
C. Clark, Philip Jose Farmer, Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovercraft have all
setup complex chronological frameworks that destroy themselves upon their
lack of maturation. My timeline will reconcile as many incompatible histories
as possible. This project will create a timeline that presents a -true- multi-layered
history of the universe, instead of a linear progression. It will be a vast
Gordian knot of various conflicting, revisionist histories. All manner of
unknown, or untrue facts will be explored and the future will be thoroughly
explained in detail. The events covered will be from before the Big Bang to
the End of Time and beyond.
No
matter how much -proof- is brought forth to support the Big Bang, it will
always be a theory, (unless time travel becomes a reality). This piece will
treat all the ideas about where we came from and where we are going as equal.
Did the universe begin with a Big Bang or with the breath of a Giant?
History
and Science dominate our view of time. This project will represent all the
theories and concepts about Time equally, all the wormholes, paradoxes, divergent
realities and loops. This timeline will be a kind of -artifact- akin to the
Mappa Mundi (World Map). Completed around 1280 AD. The Mappa Mundi was the
culmination of the Medieval Christian European search for a world that would
accommodate the Bible and Greco-Roman learning. The offspring of art and science,
it was an encyclopedia of the world, including strange -races of humanity-
and mythical flora and fauna. The Mappa Mundi is an artifact of a worldview
that was complete and dynamic. This artwork is a closed yet infinite system.
We exist on the other side of the Mappa
Mundi. We exist on a completely different Earth than the one that it depicts.
It is the duty of the artist to create such things. Art is a means of thought
that actually allows communication between the past, present, and future.
The final goal of this project will a
document for future generations about our current understanding of Time itself.
A future when we understand mechanics of Time as well as the waterways of
earth. When we of the present are the primitives, marking dragons at the edge
of the world.
Unicycle Action Paintings
Proposal- To create a series of large-scale figurative paintings using
my unicycle as the -brush.- This proposal stems from two major inspirations
and influences.
1.
Jackson Pollock and the history of Action or Process Painting, which is about
the mechanics of compromising or removing the ego from the act of creation.
The facts of this art s creation are almost always less interesting than their
appearance. Having blind mice dipped in paint crawl around on your canvas
sounds like a great idea, but if I have to know that to justify the painting,
how good of a painting can it be? Pollock s paintings, at their best, transcend
their making. They are not about the dripping of paint, but rather about the
Void, Chaos, Hope, Tragedy, Infinity, and Doom. I think the challenge of Action
Painting is trying to tame a wild bronco- instead of just hanging on and hoping, to tame the beast. Pollock had control and a purpose when he
worked. The idea of him, as a monosyllabic wild man is completely erroneous.
He said that he denied the accident. Pollock was controlling the chaos, not
the other way around. My unicycle painting would be an attempt to do the same.
2. Various divination practices from around the world- In which chance operations take place within a selected zone or area that are then interpreted. These interpretations of phenomenon are taken as prophetic signs. For example, the Shaman would create a square frame and prop it up, so as to give an unobstructed view of the sky. Then, the Shaman would wait to see what entered the frame and from what direction - a flock of birds from the north, a leaf blown up from the east, a dark cloud floating by from the west. All these things havemeaning, and their position within the frame effects that meaning as well. If I were to look upon the field of the canvas as such a divination field, and then ink up the wheel of my unicycle and ride it on that field, what meanings would arise? The very morphology of my rather amateurish unicycle riding could be analyzed for the divination, conceptual, and figurative direction of the painting.
In all of my artwork, I am trying to set up a battle between the lofty aspirations of my content and my purposefully brutal way of working. This project would extend that dialectic. I have always considered my tendency to clean up the accidents of creation to be an obstacle in my work. I overly tweak and hedge things, and that can sometimes take away the vitality of objects. If I am forced to use my unicycle as my only painting tool, then I can only aestheticize the results by become a better unicyclist. That is why I would attempt to make figurative paintings with the unicycle. To make abstract paintings would not be a challenge, there would be no index of recognition to deal with. The end image will be based on whatever image came out of the riding, as in Rorschach blots. This practice of extracting images from random marks is a common surrealist game, and in the end has more to do with what the artist wants to see. Just as the Shaman interrupts the omens that chance generated.
This project will be completely photo-documented from start to finish. The photo-documentation will be of passing interest, and not to be intended as a justifier of the project. The most important factor in this project is the paintings being autonomous of their process. Knowledge of their making should never be more interesting than the finished pieces. The Non-traditional methods must create an unexpected object, not an interesting anecdote about their own method of creation.
The
Earth(s)
Proposal - To create a collection of models of the earth that are all
completely autonomous and mutually exclusive of each other. Each of the models
will present a paradigm of our earth that is based on some sort of logic,
but does not adhere to current scientifically-approved ideas of what the earth
looks like, i.e.: an oblate spheroid covered with two thirds water and seven
continents with a molten core. These models will be made of common map and
globe making materials. Since modern globes and maps are made digitally for
accuracy and mass-production, I, too would use desktop publishing software
to create these maps and models. However the final pieces will be made my
hand. The models would be a fusion of my own assertions and the vast history
of geographic apocrypha: the flat, hollow, inverted, square, fantastic, and
geo-political earths.
What if a globe was created that charted all the invented lands of
fiction: Atlantis, Lemuria, Lilliput, Oz, Brigadoon, Prospero’s Island,
and Xanadu would all be given their proper place upon the earth, How much
bigger would the earth have to be in order to accommodate these lands? Models
would be based on the mythic and ancient ideas of how the world exists in
the universe: upon the back of giant turtle, resting in the womb of a giantess,
floating in a void under the floodgates of heaven. This project would entail
the creation of numerous other paradises, paradigms, and parodies of the earth,
including all the subjective cosmologies that can be imagined. This quote
from the Flat Earth Society should help to illustrate what I mean:
The Nutcracker Sweets
The Serect Life of the Elephant Man
