Conceptual Installation (w/Larry Miller, 2003)
The best metaphor for SD:OMTSOMA is that of an American pop cultural experience found outside the Western cultural context (Japan), which was brought back to the United States, only to find that in trying to translate it back to the culture from which it came, the piece’s meaning becomes even more alien. For example, if one takes some text and translates it to a foreign language using a computer translation program such as altavista.com, the translation is far from perfect. If that resulting text is given to the program and translated back to English, the resulting text is almost unreadable. In addition, there may be some new text that may remind the reader of something tangential to the original narrative. The result is a nonsequiteur; a moment where meaning breaks down and the confusion of incomprehension sets in.
In this case, SD:OMTSOMA arose from a brief encounter with a bizarre site in Yokohama. On the way to the train station with my friends Hamilton Armstrong and Setsuko Miura, I happened upon a mailbox stand in front of a residence that had a series of porcelain figurines mounted upon it of the Disney interpretation of the dwarves from the Snow White fable. They had been there for some time, as the acid rain had eroded a bit of the ceramic enamel, and their luster had turned to a patina of chipped corrosion.
Upon further examination, I noticed something quite strange about this pop cultural devotional; there were only six dwarves, and three of them were the same! Did the homeowner know that this was such a paradoxical sight, or was this only a strange happenstance? Regardless, this moment has lodged itself in my mind for two years, and demanded that it be reconstructed in the United States, creating a cultural translation that breaks down further much like the mentioned retranslation through Altavista.
However, in translating this experience back to a US context the repetition of the dwarves reminded me of cloning and genetic manipulation. Had this homeowner been horrific genetic experiments where we would be doomed to revivals of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in which we would have to suffer the awful moment when Snow White wakes up to see no “Doc” at the foot of the bed, but three clones of Dopey? Perhaps this is a slapstick metaphor for the dangers of cloning, but hopefully it’s entertaining.
As the way the figurines would be displayed changed from readymades to resin to wax, this was informed by colleague Larry Miller’s of Fluxus and his conceptual work in creating personal copyrights for individuals’ genetic codes (mine is part of this display), as well as his ‘Vegetable Logic’ series in which various time-based installations were created with vegetables to infer many comments, including that of ephemerality. The ephemerality of the moment resonated with me, as well as the fact that much of the American supermarket employs significant amounts of cloning and genetic modification technology. In addition the commodification of this form of manipulation of living tissue draws clear parallels between the Warhol’s ideas of mass production of media products, the mass marketing of popular culture icons like Snow White, and the commodification of DNA.
Where the change has come is that in addition to products and mass media as mass production commodities, DNA has been commodified as well.
This theme runs throughout
the piece, from Miller’s parsnip and seven carrots to the appearance
of three duplicates of Dopey on Snow White’s footboard. In addition,
the duplicate figurines in each series contain a lock of the artist’s
hair and a drop of his blood, signifying the duplicates as containing
identical DNA signatures, and therefore clone of the artist. The dwarves,
Bashful, Grumpy and Dopey all are archetypes of the artist’s self-image,
and were selected as his homunculi for this installation.
