projections

while driving last night i saw this burger king sign -- snapped it quickly with my camera phone since i was at a traffic light. wish it came out better, actually i'm surprised it came out at all, my phone being fairly crapalicious coupled with my looming panic/awareness i was at the one short red light in all of the world and late to get somewhere. but phew, i got it. at least you can still see the sign with the burnt out B, R, and KING, leaving one word ablaze: URGE.

was this the work of some stealth kamikaze fast food employee bored on the job or better yet, who took the job for the sole purpose of unscrewing these lightbulbs in this formation? or is this artist just that artist that so frequently creates beautiful and brilliant works that awe and confound us, the artist of many names and no name at all? just saying "the" artist as if singular is questionable to me, but so it goes.

as a poet and playwright i am continuously thinking about the interface between text and image within the arts. i remember one distinct time of being stunned and affected by a site-specific text piece. it was the day i was walking near dublin's trinity college-- i walked along a cobblestone street, turned a corner and stopped short, gasped. high up on a stone wall before me was an installed strip of words in fluorescent lights: "i wouldn't give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning." being a petulant college student who contemplated dropping out on a daily basis, this was a perfect mirror of my feelings at the time. i took a photograph of it, and then decided to stay in school.

that quote, by the way, is taken from a soliloquy by james joyce: "I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don’t they go and create something..." there were other
similar snippets of text around trinity college, too. when i have a chance to dig up the photos i'll post them here.

i love the appropriation, reappropriation, and reinterpretations of great literary works, book nerd that i am.

and then there's jenny holzer, one of my all-time favorite artists. her projections, for one thing. look at this one from the new york series! breathtaking.

also, being a student of psychology i can't help but think about film (all film) in terms of projection=projection.

that is all.


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