I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE 2003 - ongoing
The day after dangling his baby from a hotel balcony Michael Jackson said “ I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE”. While not an apology, it was an acknowledgment that an error of judgment occurred. Jackson, and this phrase, are the early conceptual muses for this ongoing, and as yet unrealized project, These “terrible mistakes” appear to be one of the inevitable allegories of life, regardless of whether an individual resides in a public or private orbit.
Jackson’s public life, first as eccentric celebrity, and now as pariah, evoke the flawed and trudging nature of a life lived on a monstrous scale. His allegorical expulsion from the Garden of Neverland (now at risk of foreclosure) into a meta-post-Edenic world resulted from a terrible mistake.
Barry White (who died in 2003, the year this project was conceived) provides music that offers the promise of sensual redemption and unconditional love – a Garden of Foreverland, a post-Eden-Eden for misbehavers. His sexy, hallucinatory, seductive music, from the 70s and 80s - now droning endlessly in banks, laundromats, elevators, gas stations “classic” – has now both achieved the institutional status of background noise, while, at the same time, his solicitations and lamentations of longing and desire, occupy a singular and unnoticed, presence socio-sexual interactivity in the culture-at-large. Both Jackson and White are core to this project and provide many of the contradictory iconologies that shape the work in I Made A Terrible Mistake..
The project is organized into 2 constructed rooms, modeled both Edenic models. ,Within each space, there are paintings, photographs, video, sculpture. The objects are stabile, yet the environment is in constant flux, lighting events alter the clarity and visibility of objects as well as the architecture of the rooms. Sound components leak through the entire installation. These elements guide how I Made A Terrible Mistake will look. Paintings, normally the focus of an exhibition by an artist who is a painter, in this situation become props, or the back-story, both as an installation and for a “House Party” event(s).
All works can exist as a single exhibtion or a traveling one: a cross-community enterprise that invites the audience to both view and participate. To listen, move, sit down, perceive, and feel. The vulnerability of the objects in these situations embody part of are my own “terrible mistake” and are what I intend for the project. All works in the exhibition and events will ultimately recorded in documentary videos. These works will also be physical objects on a journey, participating in this process, and subjected entropic wear and tear of this( misadventure. Accrual of damage, minor or major, is expected. At the end of the traveling cycle, all work, intact, will return to NY for an exhibition that will comprised of the installation and additional documentary evidence of CD’s and DVD’s that record each House Party event.
I MADE A TERRIBLE MISTAKE – IN TWO STAGES:
1. THE EXHIBITION -Works are installed on in a set of constructed walls that create 2 rooms“rooms” These temporary rooms will both serve as walls for hanging objects, and, will as become objects themselves. Each wall will contain a different mullion through which theatrical lighting is be projected into the interior spaces. This light will be programmed to replicate a cycle of transitions – from day to night; east to west, collapsed into a 1-hour, repeating loop, rotating from east to west, while illuminating the interior in a falsely “natural” fashion.
This constantly shifting lighting environment will be the main source of available gallery lighting.
Other lighting sources in simultaneous play are: Reflective Mirrored Balls of varied sizes and color Disco lighting effects and televisions playing in real-time.
Audio and video (see below) recorded during the House Party to be included in the exhibition duration of 3-5 weeks.
2. THE HOUSE PARTY – a real-time event that is the Opening. Two simultaneous events will occur at the House Party/Opening:
a. A DJ will sample selections from White’s music for the, he/she will mix a new program for duration of the House Party. This re-mixing will be recorded, along with my own remix, entitled White on White. The resulting CD-rom will be in playback during the exhibition period,
b. 10 video cameras loaded with 15 minutes of recordable videotape will be given to attendees. They can record whatever they like during the House Party. This video will compressed and transferred to a DVD as an unedited record of the House Party. This will be will in continuous playback during the exhibition on 2 TV monitors. Each of the videographers will be given a copy of the DVD.
All specifications are available upon request.