BOXES 12 x 12 x 12"

WATER WINDMILL BOX
There it is Take It!
-William Mulholland at the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct

Three wandering Zen monks, Seppo, Gansto, and Kinzan, lose their way while on a pilgrimage through the mountains. A green vegetable leaf floating down a stream revealed that someone was living further up the mountain. But they decided that anyone careless enough to lose one vegetable leaf was not worth meeting. Just then they saw a man with a long-handled hook racing along the stream.
-Zen proverb

I was told that Echo Park was cruisey in the thirties. You would walk around the lake and men would tip their hats and you knew that they were like you, but the LAPD also learned how to tip their hats. I was too young really, but I almost understood. Many years later I heard that a guy with the Scientologists bragged that in the thirties when he was a kid he threw faggots in the lake to see if they would float. I steered clear.
-Ray Donner

Box One contains a pool of water that is activated by a mechanism that at intervals produces a small wave or concentric circles.

STONE WINDMILL BOX

Lillian, the youngest participant in my uncompleted film, scratches at the desert floor with a rock and wonders aloud how anything could be built out of sand. Her stone raises large clouds of white dust. She is bathing in the ether, pounding with her rock until she is covered in a fine powder. Finally she gets tired and says: its too dry out here. Her mom unsnaps her water bottle. Water flows from stone.

My wickedest thrill is to watch tourists snap flash photos of the night skyline off the rail of the Observatory. I know full well there will be thousands of snaps ricocheting all over the world, millions of eagerly observed snaps of the edges of rough sides of boulders, trees and flower beds and darkness... pictures of over-illuminated bougainvillea and the LA skyline reduced to a red blur, a smear of erasure replicated in Fujis, Agfas and Kodaks... visions of monstrous vastness proudly brought home to enthralled relatives... crushed granite paths becoming crushed presentation velvet... A solid shifting bedrock. It was so big. It was so bright. It looked like this.

Box Two contains stone, native to Southern California.

EARTH WINDMILL BOX

California is an island on the right hand of the Indies and very near the terrestrial paradise
-Las Sergas de Esplañdia de Montalvo Queen of California Calafia)

Los Angeles is a bright, guilty place.
-Orson Welles

Box Three will be filled with earth taken as a core sample from Elysian Park, whose geology is closest to the earth over which I sleep. A mechanical device shakes the earth slightly at intervals causing a small dusty cloud to rise above the edge of the box and fill the surrounding environment with the remnants of this staged geologic event.

The image in this box directly references television news footage shot during a recent Los Angeles earthquake which depicted portions of the San Gabriel Mountains rising and settling, producing huge clouds of dust as each aftershock was registered. This dust cloud was in fact the only visible and recordable portion of the geological disruption, aside from seismic measuring graphs and convenience store surveillance camera footage. It became the only natural & replicated marker of the seismic event.

It had an air of not belonging to America, though all its motley ways were American. It was a city of refugees from America; it was purely itself in a banishment partly dreamed and partly real. It rested on a crust of earth at the edge of a sea that ended a world.
-Frank Fenton A Place in the Sun

We sold them the climate and threw the land in...

HOME