The Products: Dozens of consumer goods, colorful,
new, shiny with unmarred plastic wrap, taut with unbroken seals, cluster
on the gallery floor. They make a free-form sculpture of sorts in their
constellation there on the ground, centered roughly on a laminate fiberboard
box, the scanning station, and look almost like offerings surrounding
an altar. One consumer picks up a video or some breath mints and moves
toward the scanner; another sets down a six-pack at the far edge of
the grouping. The products drift. The arrangement is a graph of the
evening's aggregate consumer whim.
The Consumer: Her eyes and cerebrum are hyped
up. She is going in for some art, going in for some rigorous spectatorship,
booster-packs strapped on her attention span, high-level interested
engagement about to be unleashed. Thing is, she finds in All day
and All night an experience that is much easier and more fun than
that, something tactile, something erotic, effortless. The disjuncture
is the opening onto her question.
The Projections: To summon them, the consumer
scans the barcode of a product at the scanning station. Scanning triggers
the projection of that product's commercial onto the blank wall behind
the products. A slick, sixty-second soundtrack blares, causing consumers
to turn and watch until the show's over. Two LCD screens glow, each
imbedded in a fiber-board "monolith," the same slick, fake-wood
surface as the scanning station, with a trapezoid of dingy gold, vintage
speaker fabric in the lower half. On the right monolith, earphones hang
provocatively next to the product's small and brilliant image. The left
LCD screen displays close-ups from the commercials – bizarre, enlarged,
slow motion, dense as jewels.
Gun: It's on the other side of the gallery,
playing as the agent of some excess, some inefficiency in the system,
a surplus that can't be recycled back into the nearly liturgical balance
of the main gallery setting. Surrounded by sheet plastic. Black, dense,
bolted to its mount. A glaring addendum.
