ASFAULT
Installation; variable dimentions (1998)
Asphalt, paper, aluminum; video projection, monitors.
Asfault was a multimedia installation built in the parking lot of a warehouse commandeered by artists for a collective exposition in Gainesville, Florida. Each of the main components that formed the installation worked as an independent piece, yet all were united by a common metaphor: asphalt.
The installation consisted of a 0.9 X 0.6 meter (36 inch X 24 inch) asphalt block placed between two television monitors which were layed screen-up on the ground, propped up by concrete parking stumps. A 36 page aluminum and asphalt book (containing 32 digital prints of parking lots), and a composition-size notebook detailing the installation’s process of development and construction, were embedded within the block. These objects could be easily pryed from the block and viewed. The two television monitors reproduced continuous loops of long, slow, night-time shots of parking lots. A third video loop – which documented a demolition crew destroying pavement with a jackhammer – was projected onto a large screen from a nearby rooftop. The screen itself was constructed from broken pieces of asphalt layed flat on the ground. The audio from the demolition video was played at high volume through speakers placed near the projector on the rooftop. The entire installation space was separated from the rest of the parking lot by barricades and yellow caution tape, simulating an actual construction site. In order to adequately view the monitors and books embedded in the asphalt block, people were obligated to enter the space.
Built on a theoretical and aesthetic framework based partly on the writings and ideas of cultural critics such as Gregory Ulmer, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille, partly on the work of artists such as Robert Smithson and Edward Rusha, and partly on personal experience, Asfault explores the borders separating personal and collective experience. The blurred, peeled, stained, and worn markings on roadways and parking lots create a vision of personal identity as a decaying construct which, although constantly worked and reworked, paved and repaved, is always characterized by ideological fissures and psychological stains.