My current sculptural focus is the garment's ability to encode the social function and status of its wearer. The primary garment of my present sculpture is protection for the corporate gladiator, the armored "cumberbelt," a pinstripe parody of economic authority. The cumberbelt causes a disfigurement that represents social refigurement by the age of Instrumental Reason, and the distorted valuation of humanity and natural resources that Modernist ethics of industrial expansionism mandate.
By cannonizing qualities deemed important by society, monumental public sculpture becomes a repository of cultural principles. In the same way, armor collections represent the values and lifestyle of their era. My suits, like medieval armor collections, embody social ideals once with function, whose time has passed. Until a few hundred years ago, Aristocracy was the governmental norm for centuries, I am intrigued by myths of the organizations from the early 1700's in Europe and North America, associated with counter-authority trends leading up to the American and French Revolutions.
The Internet offers a suitable forum to display my sculptures. The economic and political structures that control the World Wide Web as site for international commerce and telecommunication are among the groups which are the current focus of my work. Especially in current times when prime airwaves are auctioned by the FCC for US$1.00 per band, the fair market value of which was at least $US50,000. The taxpayers loose the difference, which was supposed to be applied to deficit reduction. When I saw this on the July 17, 1997, NBC Nightly News, my stunned mind ricocheted towards the time when the value of a bit will be determined by its content.
Rather than constructing a site that mimics (rather poorly) an actual gallery, I chose, for my virtual gallery, to structure The EMPIRE of COMMERCE as an interconnecting narrative form, similar to an arcade game. This enables me to present much of the source material of my artwork in a digestable way, and help guide the viewer in aquiring meaning from my work.
In actual culture one must complete certain ordeals to earn the privilege to higher status, wealth, information and knowlege. This is the basis for my site. By "playing the game" the participant will be able to view my sculpture, learn more about them, and enjoy themselves along the way. It is in the spirit of Bakhtinian Carnival that I parody authority, and the self-legitimizing tactics used by humans with power...it is better to laugh than to languish.
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