[edit] To Do!

Please help out if you're interested ~macri

Volunteer to help out this project
Request or Donate Materials!
How are you going to get it to the playa?
Put together a Budget
Register
Plan your clean-up
Do you need Staging and Construction Space?
Document your energy needs so the Con Ed Man can help you out
Are you planning any events? Let the Event Coordinator help you
What are your space needs? Let the urban planner know so s/he can feng your shui
Are you going to need grunt labor or someone to attend to certain daily chores? Let our task-master know and s/he will be happy to assign you solitary slave or a whole a chain gang
Does your camp have any Fashion Needs? Let our Fashion Consultant haberdash you

[edit] Concept

[edit] Mending Wall, by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast...
...The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again...
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

By quoting the Elders of the Hopi Nation in his �Yes We Can� speech, Barack Obama inadvertently revealed the ambivalence of the American Dream. If we are the ones we�ve awaited, we are also the ones we�ve dreaded all along. Recent history shows us how American dreams can quickly turn into American nightmares. Indeed, the two can coexist right along side each other!

This year�s art theme is a great opportunity for some introspection�some peeping into the darker corners of the American Dream. Rather than waiting for someone else to lead us on a path towards a better future, the Hopi Elders would have us first examine our selves and our own actions.

[edit] Installation

[edit] By Night

A MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain) training site will emerge from the inky blackness of the deep playa.

First, a sign welcoming you to �Camp Justice.�

Behind a curtain of chain link fence and barbed wire, lit by overhead floodlights, a diorama of American Justice appears.

[edit] By Day

In the light of the sun, we will observe that these figures, now covered in playa dust, are just dummies or scarecrows. �Camp Justice,� which seemed so terrifying at night, will now resemble some abandoned Museum of Law.

The daytime experience will be disorienting. We might feel tricked like Evey in V for Vendetta, when she realizes that her imprisonment is a farce perpetrated by V:

Evey: I hate you. I hate you because you just talk junk and you think you�re so good that you don�t have to make any sense! Nothing you say means anything. You say you love me, and you don�t because you just frighten me and torture me for a joke� You say you want to set me free and you put me in a prison�
V: You were already in a prison. You�ve been in a prison all your life.
Evey: Shut up! I don�t want to hear it! I wasn�t in a prison! I was happy! I was happy here until you threw me out.
V: Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.
Evey: That�s warped! That�s warped and evil and wrong! When you threw me out I went to live with somebody. I� I was in love with him. I was happy. If that�s a prison, then I don�t care!
V: Don�t you? Your lover lived in the penitentiary that we are all born into, and was forced to rake the dregs of that world for his living. He knew affection and tenderness but only briefly� Eventually, one of the other inmates stabbed him with a cutlass and he drowned upon his own blood. Is that it, Evey? Is that the happiness worth more than freedom?
Evey: How do you know? How did you know what happened to Gordon?
V: It�s not an uncommon story, Evey. Many convicts meet with miserable ends� Your mother. Your father. Your lover. One by one. Taken out behind the chemical sheds � and shot. All convicts, hunched and deformed by the smallness of their cells, the weight of their chains, the unfairness of their sentences. I didn�t put you in prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.

Perhaps someone else, wandering into the site during the day, will read the installation�s plaque on the ground, which was not visible during the night:

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good�And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin�s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.

-Giorgio Agamben, 2003

<< return to main page