Tiptoeing the Line

Packing peanuts, the floor is covered in packing peanuts.  I don’t know how many of you have gotten the opportunity to move about on a packing peanut carpet, but the next time you get something delivered you should try it!  It’s simply delightful!!  Or terrifying.  Depends on your surroundings.

I stopped in at Minus Space on Saturday afternoon to check out Michael Zahn’s newest installation.  I’ve had the pleasure to get to know Michael (and his work) over the past year-and-a-half and he has never ceased to amaze me with his brilliant ability to hold up his dark, demented mirror and stick it in the face of mainstream society.

This one is no different.  He basically takes over the room and, starting with the packing peanuts, it’s a completely jarring experience from the second you walk in.

The wall on one side is a giant matte-black painting, peppered with colons, underscores, and periods.  The characters are the happy pea-green color that those of us born in the digital age recognize immediately as the friendly letters we saw on computers before mice, before GUIs, before hard drives.

And directly opposite of that wall is a line of ASCII renderings of someone that I believe is Star Stowe, a Playboy Playmate in 1977 who was found strangled to death just a few years ago.  (At least, she’s the only one who showed up when I googled playboy, playmate, and strangled.)  A horribly stripped wall (think of the ugliest waiting room you’ve ever been trapped in) serves as a backdrop for fake cardboard boxes arranged in little heaps throughout the floor. One even serves as a coffee table.  Against the far wall, away from the windows is a wall that resembles a more recent computer desktop.  It’s blue, and compliments the light streaming in the window directly opposite it rather nicely.

Taken together, the whole thing is a little startling if you work in an office (which I do).  It’s sanitized, yet possesses a sinister undercurrent.  I notice the cheap bottle of rye whiskey on the coffee table; Michael tells me about the faces on the wall.  And as I’m walking back across the styrofoam laden floor, another feeling strikes me.  I’m tiptoeing, not on purpose, I’m just doing it to try to compensate for the huge racket I’m making moving across the floor.  But tiptoeing, whether I’m conscious of it or not, happens a lot at an office!  Personality conflicts are swept under the rug, speech is sanitized, social-political views are blunted, and when dealing with someone far “above” you in terms of their standing in the company, you have to “tiptoe.”  I make it across the room and leap to the bare concrete floor.  I realize that I left my drink on the other side of the room.  I contemplate just pouring myself another to avoid that feeling again.  It’s Saturday, why do I feel like I’m at work again!!