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Foucault

The Micro-Mechanics of Material Metaphor

A computer-controlled machine carves the surfaces of 150 pound, cubic foot, blocks of concrete with its hammer drill. Each block is lifted onto the machine in turn and held inside its mechanism. The drill moves in a path across the block’s surface and laboriously traces out the words “girly man” in various configurations. The marked blocks stand on one side of the machine while the intact blocks lie in wait at its other side. A wall separates the controlling computer from the machine and the blocks.

Inscription of the Girly Man

Inscription of the Girly Man Installation (close-up of hammer drill)

Inscription is an exploration of the aesthetics of power in relation to the task of writing. Here, in a time when the neo-fascist spirit is casting a shadow across the political culture, and when the possibility of meaningful political discourse seems more and more remote because of it, there is a relationship between the wealth of violence–war, images of brutality–and the poverty of our communications. There is a relationship between the denigration of thoughtfulness as weakness, femininity, and gayness, and the impossibility of halting the campaign of aggression that the U.S. has embarked on, or of furthering stalled progress in the domain of civil rights or economic justice.

May, 2005

Inscription of the Girly-Man

The work Inscription might be said to have three fathers: Arnold, Franz and Michel. Or, it might be said that the dirty business of conceiving Inscription was the consequence of an even more crowded couch in which these daddies where only the last to deposit their gifts, and that therefore the memories of their conjugal adieus are just easier to re-member. Each stands, in a way, for a category, a body-type, a way of thinking and acting, a story, a function, an example for which their names are only one instantiation. They are archetypes, proto-types, exemplars.