Great God Pan

“Smeared with dirt and pebbles to give it the color and texture of a rock, the polyurethane blob” first attracted the attention of keen-eyed Staff Sgt. Dick Sprinter during a raid on a Shiite safe house. “I knew it as soon as I saw it,” Sprinter told reporters. “Fucking Iranians.”

According to top ranking military officials, the recent discovery of a fake boulder filled with explosives in a car in the southern city of Hilla “clearly displays the insurgency’s wicked grasp of guerilla tactics.” Normally used to disguise Jacuzzi motors in landscaped backyards, hollow fabrications like these have thus far remained outside the terrorists’ vernacular.

U.S. officials went public with their find at a news conference in Baghdad’s Green Zone. What made this seizure so unique was the type of device found. Crammed into the uncomfortably small backseat of a Toyota sedan was a 200-pound homemade bomb secreted inside a massive faux stone. “How the hell did they get a big rock like that into a two-door?” wondered a puzzled Marine. “It looked like something from Land of the Lost.”

In a region that has been so historically unfamiliar with war and strife, the big question that has been looming over Operation Freedom up until now is who exactly is arming the insurgency? “Until now we had no idea where the insurgents were getting their weapons,” said one official, who insisted on anonymity. “It was like they were just materializing out of thin air.” Newfound intelligence, however, may soon help the U.S. close in on the culprits. “When we find out,” said one regional official. “We’re gonna bomb them.”

Though it’s appearance led to early speculation that it was the work of Pakistani special effects wizards, it was the “guts” of the boulder that left investigators no doubt to its origins. It was filled with small concave discs that, according to the New York Times, “look like a thick little alms plate or even a souvenir ashtray minus the indentations for holding cigarettes.” These discs, authorities say, are designed to melt when ignited, hurling molten slabs of metal capable of piercing armored vehicles. According to Army spokesmen, Iran, historically known as the world’s leading alms plate and souvenir ashtray manufacturer, is the obvious culprit behind such a dastardly device.

Explosives expert Major Matt Weiner agrees that bombs like these might likely be products of Iran. “You can never be certain,” Major Weiner said. “But having been part of a convoy once that drove pretty close to the Iranian border, I could tell that they probably have some pretty high-tech stuff going on there, what with the nuclear scientists and all.”

Not everyone was so convinced, however. John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research group based in Alexandria, Va. doesn’t believe that the copper discs could only have come from ashtray technicians in Iran. “All that is required are machine tools, he said. “You can buy them.”
“I mean, look at all those cylinders people use for L.P.G. cooking gas,” he added. “Do you think they are all imported from Iran? Probably not. I bet there are guys all over Iraq who make those things for a living.”

The real revelation to all this disclosure came late in the U.S.’s announcement. “At the heart of some of the bombs found in Iraq,” read the report. “Is a type of infrared sensor commonly sold at electronic stores like Radio Shack.”

“Bingo,” agreed Sgt. Sprinter. “Iranian Radio Shack managers WITHIN the United States are clearing their shelves of garage door openers and universal remotes and smuggling them, possibly through Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, into the hands of Iraqi insurgents.” His solution? “The entire frickin’ chain could be wiped out by Reservists on weekend training. Easily.”

But roadside bombs are not the only weapon American servicemen need to worry about. Nearly everyone in Iraq owns a gun. According to Wikpedia, the list of countries which currently manufacture the popular AK-47 assault rifle reads like a who’s who of global evildoers. Romania, Poland, East Germany—the very countries who are making the world unsafe every day with their audacious meddling in world politics. Check the papers, hardly a day goes by without news of some Polish thuggery on a global scale. “That could be a more undercover op,” suggested Sgt. Sprinter. “Maybe kidnap the families of the heads of their governments until they stop making guns.”

And just because the U.S. is the biggest arms producer in the entire history of the entire world doesn’t mean that any of our weapons ended up in the hands of bad guys in Iraq. “That’s preposterous,” asserted Sgt. Sprinter. “There might be a few weapons left over from the British when they were helping Hussein battle those pesky Kurds back in the ‘80s, but we keep pretty close tabs on our own armaments.” When pressed on the fact that munitions recently seized from pro-Sadr insurgents bore U.S. markings, Sgt. Sprinter was quick to explain. “They were obviously stolen from when the Ayatollah took over the embassy and got all those hostages in the ‘80s. I’m telling you, it’s the Iranians.”

Posted by Erik at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This piece of mine appeared last year in the Mexico City-based magazine Perros Negros. If it looks familiar that's because it's an expanded version of a previous post from way, way back.

NEW ENERGY AND THE MOVEMENT MOVEMENT
Ferg DeWitt’s Trans-a-gons and How They Received a Second Chance

Last Summer in New York, two members of the East Coast New Energy group began conducting tests of some movable “trans-a-gon” sculptures that they recently had fabricated according to detailed plans drawn up by noted New York conceptualist Ferg DeWitt more than three decades ago. Brooklyn-based artists Mike Paré and Ian Holman made an incredible discovery while collaborating with DeWitt on a pair of megalithic graphite wall-blobs at an uptown Manhattan gallery. In the process of searching for artist proofs in a dusty crate, they instead unearthed a virtual lost treasure.

“Trans-a-gon” was a concept DeWitt had been working on since the mid-‘60s,” Paré explained. “But he dropped it at some point in favor of the two-dimensional geode graphs that proved so popular with collectors.”

So while just about every major institution owns at least one of DeWitt’s graph pieces, his trans-a-gons have remained virtually unknown. Until now that is.

DeWitt gave the pair his blessing in fabricating and eventually utilizing the many-sided pieces. Though the original plans called for the shapes to be cast out of cream-colored polymer, the new trans-a-gon prototypes are currently being constructed of 90% recycled craft paper stretched over a wooden frame, which is then coated with a synthetic gloss gesso, at least for now. “We plan to have them made exactly to DeWitt’s specs before we show them publicly,” Paré explained. “We’re just having a little trouble with the earth-tone range available from the plastics manufacturer.”

Paré figures the unconsummated sculptures were originally conceived as part of the ITT-sponsored Sense/Motion display at Expo ’67 in Montreal, but were never completed because DeWitt had a falling out with the company’s execs over their invested interest in non-personal communication industries.

“It was extremely important to DeWitt at that time that human interaction remain intimate,” he explained. “Innovations like video-conferencing and speakerphones really rubbed him the wrong way.”

At a parking lot/test area somewhere in Greenpoint, Paré and Holman race back and forth across an expanse of asphalt near their workspace. It’s a spectacular and exhilarating display. Pentagons, a pair of hexagons, and something with eleven sides speed across the hard surface, blurring as they go.

“It’s not important how many sides the shape has,” Holman would later tell me, “It can be a hexagon or an octagon or whatever. It just has to be able to move.”

Not since Michelangelo Pistoletto rolled his giant ball through the streets of Turin has the art world been privy to such poetic extremes of motion and form. After a brief demonstration the artists regroup under a nearby tree to discuss their progress, DeWitt’s theories, and the current status of Minimalism.

Gaining steady notoriety over the years through the visionary and scientifically-informed automata of the Constructivists, Alexander Calder, and Jean Tinguely (especially his self-destructing “Homage To New York” and méta-maticdrawing machines), the “Movement Movement” can in reality be traced as far backs as the 18th Century when a giant mechanized duck designed by Jacques de Vaucanson revealed its ability to “chatter, eat, digest, and waddle, to the great astonishment of spectators who traveled to see it from all over Europe.” But it was not until the Minimalist object became accepted as a legitimate form (i.e. Brancusi’s “Bird In Space”) that a sculpture like a trans-a-gon could have been realized. And it was not until the unanimous recognition of such “weighty lumps” as an art form that a concept like trans-a—gon became, in DeWitt’s words, “necessary.”

 “Shape-art has been static since forever,” claimed Holman, who admitted that though he admires the reductive tradition and the oeuvre of its innovators, particularly Stella and Malevich, he often longs for “that feeling of the wind in my hair.”

“I think it was [Japanese fashion designer] Yohji Yamamoto who said that Minimalism was just another word for sloth,” he added.

Looking back over the parking lot, the trans-a-gon shapes, now resting motionless, have gone back to their static forms, looking more like pre-paint job Ron Davis maquettes than revolutionary “contour vehicles.”

So what exactly is trans-a-gon technology?

“The ‘gon’ part refers to the shape itself,” explained Paré. “In reality everything is a shape because everything has edges, except maybe a black hole. Trans-a-gons could be many-sided, even like a dodecahedron, which is very complex. Mostly we stick with an amount of sides that we can count on our hands or pieces of paper because our solar-powered calculator doesn’t really recharge inside our studio.” The ‘trans,’ he goes on to explain, stands for either ‘transport’ of ‘transformation.’ Both are applicable. “It’s hard to tell from his notes and Ferg can’t really remember.”

If DeWitt indeed embraced modes and/or methods of transformation in this work then it is likely he was aware of advancements being made in the late-1960s at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. Psychologist Dr. Bernard Gunther, in a series of workshops he conducted there, pursued different actions of what he called “Sensory Awakening” or “Sense Relaxation.” In one exercise—“Exploring”—participants were instructed to go under a sheet and interact with others in the room. Any form of contact/encounter was deemed acceptable, as long as one remained under the sheet. The action of entering the silhouette of the fabric, thus giving it a form or a shape—though not the ultimate goal of Gunther’s exercise—is a pretty good representation of the individuality plausibility of shape-art-creation, and its relation to movement, in this case, the exploration about the room. Like with the trans-a-gon actions, the simple formula—transformation through action—results in some level of inner conversion. “When it is over, experience how you feel,” Gunther would tell his pupils upon the completion of the exercise. “Come out from under your sheet.”

Another impetus towards DeWitt’s and the trans-a-gons’ development was the artist Robert Breer. Known primarily for his animated films that he began while studying painting in Paris in the late-‘50s, Breer played a rather large part in the motion-based three-dimensional form movement. In 1965 the University of California at Berkeley presented a show entitled “Directions in Kinetic Sculpture,” curated by the sculptor George Rickey. In the exhibition catalogue, Breer’s work is represented by a photograph of a dozen white geometric shapes. Entitled “Styrofoam Floats Moving Down Country Road,” this piece appeared just a few months before DeWitt began his work with trans-a-gons. And yet despite their similarity, distinctions must be made between the two mobile sculpture groupings. While DeWitt’s objects rely on speed as a characteristic (albeit through human and formal energy), Breer—who would interestingly enough go on to work as an animator for the children’s television show Electric Company—was content to allow, with the aid of small electric motor, simple movement, sans marked velocity or acceleration. While such distinctions may seem minor now, in 1966 Mankind was still three years away from a Moon landing and leaps in technology, not to mention these artists’ brand of “technical conceptualism,” occurred in great bounds rather than predictable progressions. Regardless, Breer was first, and differences of intention aside, there is no reason to believe that DeWitt was ignorant of his work. Both artists were based in the Hudson River Valley region and it is very likely that DeWitt spotted the Floats on one of his evening walks and had been inspired to take his geometric forms “on the road” so to speak.

In relation to these influences, it must be noted that DeWitt and his trans-a-gons favor not transformation over form, but transformation throughform. Instead of separating action from object, DeWitt hoped to create one from the other. For many years this seemed to be a forgotten goal, remembered only by DeWitt, lingering somewhere in the depth of his mind. Today his buried dream just may see sunlight after all. In fact, Paré is currently working on a film of large-scale experiments he plans to conduct on the trans-a-gons at a place called Niles Canyon near Hayward, California. Word has it that he has solved the plastics issue and that these new prototype sculptures will be “up to DeWitt standards.”

“The work is set to be exhibited this summer at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco,” Paré informed us. “With all the interest in Minimalism lately, like the MOMA show and that thing at the Hammer, I’m looking forward to showing people how quickly things can change, or at least how quickly they could have changed in the ‘60s if Ferg would’ve kept going with trans-a-gons.”

There is a rather well known account of Alberto Giacometti visiting an exhibition of kinetic machines designed by the Greek artist Takis in the early 1960s. It seems appropriate to mention it here. Dissatisfied with what he saw, the aging Swiss reportedly complained at the lack of humanness in Takis’s mechanistic pieces.

“Where is the man?” he asked, “I’m only interested in the man.” To which Takis replied, “But so am I . . . in the essence of man.” Not convinced, Giacometti probed further, “But you’re not working with material, you’re working with energy.” Again Takis countered, “The whole point is that we can transform material into energy—in fact, we don’t think of them as two different things.”

Posted by Erik at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the Distance Lies the Future / Tracy Nakayama and Awakening of My Secret Brother (A show curated by Tracy Nakayama)/ featuring Jeremy Yoder, Erik Bluhm, and Mike Paré)
2007年1月27日−2月24日
ひとことコメント「主にニューヨークを拠点とし活動していた（現在ロサンゼルスに移住したばかり）アメリカ人女性作家、トレイシー・ナカヤマが２年ぶりに hiromi yoshiiで個展を開催致します。若者の愛と性欲をテーマとするエロティック、かつ美しく優しいセピア色の作品なります。今回はトレイシーのキュレーション展も同時開催致しますので、是非観に来て下さい。」

HIROMI YOSHII GALLERY
1-3-2-6F Kiyosumi Koutou Tokyo 135-0024 JAPAN

Posted by Erik at 05:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)