aka the useless american, or other people's money...
I drag a barge of dirt to Nauru, to fill in the gaping hole left from the phosphate mines that have eaten 70% of their country. But this is not development; this is Art. This frees me*
- frees me from the White Man's Burden, from my Postcolonial role as a paternalistic white man with solutions from afar that destroy what is sacred and preserve only what I understand or value.
Related work
Robert Smithson Floating Island
This "wonderful Robert Smithson folly" is an island pulled around Manhattan by a tug boat. It could be useful as a traveling park, but instead it is art, so it is useless. It literally contains promise, held aloft from utlity and forced to be an object of distant contemplation. Can we make art that can be contemplated from a distance while also being used. Can we make art that doesn't say 'fuck you' to the hoi-polloi?
Ayse Erkmen, Shipped Ships (65 mb/ 15min movie)
Ships from apan, Italy, and Turkey are shipped to Frankfurt, where they are manned by their native crews and ridden by local Frankfurters. Aside form the fact that ships are used, I am interested in the notion of displaced culture, transferring a piece of these countries to another in a tangible way.
Vito Acconci, Personal Island
