Archive for April 4th, 2008
How to Document The Bombing of the Surface of New York City (2002)
How to Document the Bombing of the Surface of New York City, Brooklyn, New York.
This performance temporarily ‘borrows’ the surface of New York City in order to communicate, amongst other things, the scale of military bombing. The dimensions of bomb craters from elsewhere (Afghanistan and Iraq) and the things reportedly found within (bodies of sheep, women’s shoes, child’s arm) have been drawn in chalk onto the pavement. Scale does not refer to size alone, but time. These geological upheavals are created instantaneously. To simultaneously measure out and hand-draw the dimensions takes an hour. To dig down thirty feet, which is the ultimate goal, would take weeks.
The dimensions of this crater: 72 feet in diameter. 30 feet in depth. This is not an unusual size for the bomb craters detonated by US forces in the Middle East.
To dig out a space in our own city with our bare hands engages a gesture that visually collapses the temporal and geographic boundaries already transgressed by current military technologies; the original ‘displacements’ have broken linear notions of time, space, causation, and identity, and so we, citizens, can try it on for size as well- albeit, the differences in location, scale and effect painfully school us in the impossibility of knowing this disaster.
Paul Chan and Heather Delaney were essential in the shooting and editing of the documentation.
