Artist Statement for Project 3

Stop the Insanity!

This work is a composition of found footage, the two components being a collection of infomercials and a sound recording of Alan Ginsberg reading the footnote to Howl.  The infomercials are intended to express an attempt to order and control the created objects in the universe.  They do this for two reasons, first because the infomercials chosen are of objects that are supposed to help order and organize domestic possessions, as well as due to the infomercial medium itself is very formulaic by nature.  The poem is a reference to the Zen Buddhist dabbling of the beat generation artists and how, as Kerouac puts it, "everything has a Buddha nature."  This notion seems to parallel the ideas of the monists, especially Spinoza, who comes to the conclusion that there is only one substance in the universe and since there is only one, that substance must be god.  Everything is an attribute of the one eternal substance, and trying to impose a system of order by creating categories and places in which to put the things in these categories, denies that there the one substance.  And thus by trying to organize objects one is denying not only god, but their own holiness as an attribute of god.


The formal qualities of the video seek to parallel this concept.  At the beginning of the video Ginsberg identifies the chaos (that is supposedly apparent before the miracle product) as Holy, despite the obvious discomfort people feel without a system to control their environment and make them feel safe.  Ginsberg continues to list holy things, but the volume of the poem decreases with the imposition of the products and ordering systems.  The work ends however with both the clutter and the products gone and him declaring "Holy the hideous human angels!" the fact that the objects have faded shows that one must accept their place within the one eternal substance to truly actualize their holiness, and in so doing give up the need to control other holy things, either by possessing them (which causes the problem of process in the first place) and by imposing order (which is itself a Tower of Babel).