We Deserve Scheme Z and Excavation or the Law of Diminishing Returns

Yang, Shin-Yi , 2000/12/01, 2019/05/15
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We Deserve Scheme Z.

This is a Reclamation Artists Project in 1990 at the height of public outcry against “the Big Dig” in Charlestown-a five tiered eight-lane expressway interchange, part of the Central Artery/Third Harbor Tunnel Project for Greater Boston. A gas pump contains a video monitor showing Boston rush-hour traffic with the audio track overdubbed several times until it sounds like babble. A dead bird covered in oil lays where the price per gallon is usually displayed. The word “Mobiline” is taken from Duchamp’s “love gasoline” the substance activating the Bride’s motor in his work “The Bridge Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even” in the Phildelphia Museum of Art.

 

Excavation or the Law of Diminishing Returns.

l994 Reclamation Artists project about the same highway system. North Point, Cambridge. Replicas of Duchamp’s Readymades appear to be strewn along an excavated highway. This installation is on the site of the (now under construction) Central Artery. The installation was intended to “disturb the peace” of Modernism as Duchamp had done and as the highway construction is presently doing.

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