To see all is, perhaps, to see nothing… and thus, a view from the afterlife…
Calling to mind Luigi Russolo’s Dynamism of an Automobile, and the Futurist Manifesto’s delirious promise of power through technological singularity, the works in Kingdom Come capture instead a futurist melancholia—the onslaught of the everyday rendered as an immersive VR. The tableaux included—a crosswalk, a delivery van, a lingerie advertisement, an apartment staircase—were constructed using a smartphone’s panorama feature. To produce this sense of a wider view, the effect requires fragmentation and reassembly. Images are broken, time stretched and compressed. The panorama has grandiose aspirations: to capture all. But an unsettling distortion emerges at the seams. A gut feeling that totality can’t be simply a grand sum of so many views.
New York City is a fitting subject then, a throbbing Leviathan of individual subjects, each with a vantage, each with a wildly disproportionate claim to personal space, property, net worth, self-regard or the opposite, all tangible intangibles, surrounded then by the material fact of the city—bricks, panes of glass, curbs, manhole covers, screws.
They say, he says, all rise must fall,
all born must die. All this flatten to an inch, made of screws anyway, made of pieces, everywhere then
return to pieces. Sorry!
A certain passivity is required, as most modern conveniences offer an inertia, an incapacity. One’s sense of being a subject of history is ostensibly verified by an output of about 20,000 photographs a year, mysterious HEIC files in many cases, an amount of material that would require superhuman processing power to collate and composite into a nearly comprehensible life. Try to locate yourself then among the mob of image producing subjects: dogs marking the curb with piss, moving on, pissing again. Subjectivity reaches its saturation point. One yearns then for the divine photographer, an omniscient view, satisfying all need to record, a great ledger, mmm, yes, it’s been called the grace of god!
Everywhere glass, steel.
Everywhere pigeon, rat, roach.
What is the same here,
same everywhere.
Friend. Recognize.
Coca cola same.
Wristwatch same.
Street corner same.
Delivery!
French words, English words. Equal, OK. I say, OK.
Café American.
He goes….
He goes hahaha, you can’t go like that.
No. Don’t be no, OK.
Don’t be lovely, OK.
Be not OK, be not one more window,
one more door.
Up, outside, everything up.
They say, he says,
all rise must fall. All born must die.
All this flatten to an inch, made of screws anyway, made of pieces.
Everywhere then, return to pieces.
Sorry!
Walk, you see,
walk know the way,
rent don’t pay, haha, OK.
Landlord dead, someday. We pray.
Uptown, the Yankees play,
Bronx River Parkway.
Angry, angry, every day.
Where I come to, they arrive,
they know.
War away, here OK.
For now we, they,
we know the weather.
We know the wind blows;
we know ocean air not too far away.
We know, OK,
freedom reign for those who pay.
Here!
Outside!
Downstairs!
Buzzer?
They go. Door Slammed!
Angry now, don’t you be grateful, Kingdom Come, they say,
all is done.
Don’t say everywhere steel. Everywhere glass.
You are here, around. Everyone.
First breath, last breath. Everywhere.
Dark, then light, then dark.
Same second, same pulsing second. Same hour.
Everyone idiot. Beautiful, beaming idiot. Stand. Sit.
Always return
Always rent free from then.
Always, occurring. Until never. Never was. Never once. Not at all.
—Win McCarthy
at Francis Irv, New York
until October 12th, 2024