Big Box I (2007)
Sculpture with electronics. 91 x 91 x 23 cm. Courtesy: Postmasters Gallery, New York
Big Box I is a miniature of an American-style “big box” shopping mall on a slowly rotating turntable. The nearly featureless building facades alternate between a trash-filled wasteland and an overgrown jungle. A single camera films the scene, presenting it on a wall-mounted monitor as a drive-by view –or as seen by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, as “one single [looping] catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” as he is blown toward the future by the storm of “progress”. What identifiably remains are only the corporate logotypes, implicitly asking about both corporations’ responsibility for the carnage and their role in the “irresistible” future. What is progress now?
