I Give You One Thousand Dollars

on a gift card for HOME DEPOT. You have one hour to make all your purchases. Then you report to a snotty art gallery with your purchases and have three hours to make a dazzling display in the White Cube of space allotted you. What would you purchase? What would you make?

The museum culture should just admit it's Project Runway. It's time.

I think I'd just spend it all on yard statuary, like chintzy Michelangelos and fake Roman fountains. No, all figural. No fountains. Those fake Chinese horses and soldiers buried with their Emperor.

And I'd buy a sledgehammer. And I don't know what I'd do after that. I mean besides use the sledgehammer.

I would break them down to the smallest recognizable fragments.

And then maybe glue them on some giant monolithic piece of clothing and make some person wear it and live in the gallery's space non-stop, carrying the weight of that horrendous detritus. I picture it as a giant poncho of death. Or maybe more like a flying saucer you wear. The wearer would try to do basic tasks under the burden. And maybe workmen would come out and glue or otherwise attach more fragments as the day wore on. Until at the very end, all you would see is a rubble pile of cultural fragments and a vague hint of movement under there. The person.

Sisyphus is funny.

It should be painful to watch. This clothing of fragmented cultural shards.

It would look like the poets. The armadillo American poets.

Or maybe I would just go nuts with shower curtains instead. They can be fun.

But that's just too Christo, right? Too twee. Too fey.

Now that makes me think of Crisco. It would be fun to coat books in batter and deep-fry them in Crisco. I'd like to do that to a lot of American literature that people celebrate but I don't. I'd like to deep-fry the books to show people what sort of shit they're eating. Maybe batter and deep-fry some broccoli, calamari and red peppers too to feed your gallery guests. That would be obnoxious but visually interesting. But I couldn't get those things at HOME DEPOT. Sigh.

HOME DEPOT doesn't have a toy department, but you can still find toys.

You could make an artificial pond.

No, I think I would just use the money to bribe poor HOME DEPOT employees to engage in a script I wrote and have them act that out.

And maybe have a little LED display showing how much of their paycheck they earned while they were doing these weird tasks.

Like maybe have a woman removing every single thorn, one by one, from a large arborteum of rose bushes transplanted into the gallery, traipsing back and forth, completely harried, while another just sat on his or her ass and masturbated the entire time. Have a camera mounted on a collar around the woman's neck, broadcasting her face in live time as she tries to remove the thorns with her bare hands, without pricking herself, which will inevitably occur many times. I think of this as a good metaphor for the typical work environment. Torture doesn't work if you build feedback into the system.

Sisyphus and Work.

Maybe make a third stand in the back and jump non-stop or until he couldn't take it anymore. With his back to ya.

Why pretend that any work of art is not a token gesture of idealism in slave culture.

If your art isn't aware of that fact, you're probably making stupid art.