Sunday, February 19, 2012

Making the FEMA le Boxcar

FEMA Boxcar, exhibited as Boxcar Named Desire in Memory Play @
Herberger Theater Gallery


I don't know what I was thinking. This boxcar was formed around concrete blocks.  After making it at the studio it went by truck to its finish near the bisque. It was two cement blocks long end to end, plus the weight of the clay. I guess it got rubbed with iron oxides then textured with whatever was at hand, which you can see traces of on the legs. Parts were waxed first for accent. I remember the whole back fell in which then had to be propped up and repaired. There are sliding doors on the sides, or marks where sliding doors and windows used to be.The whole thing looks grumpy. Everybody knows the Gundersons are nearly hermetically sealed.  Part animal, part train, part derelict, part wreck, it only adds to the effect that after final firing part of one side and a leg detached. It came back in these pieces but a team assembled it with clamps and gorilla glue over several days and put Humpty back.This defect, because I then thought it one, bothered me until I saw there is a whole genre of broken glue backs at the Ceramics Research Center, to show the patchwork I guess of a Le Corbusier of pots. Reconstitute, that's the going parlance. We need to get some better pics of this BoxCar up, but till then reference the pic at Current Exhibitions and personal report of sightings at Some Events on the Jersey Turnpike.
BOXCAR is another of those fables at our sister state we'd rather not believe. Demythologists don't plan to. But still the excess populations threaten our superiors' earth. Something must be done. But no matter.

In some sections of our downtown the falun gong  meet surreptitiously and sing songs like this:

 It’s like I’m a midwife and I’m
 catching the heads as they’re falling,
Goin to the boxcar and I'm
wielding my prison shackles,
Shackled in a boxcar and its 
 higher than nor-r-rmal,
 three tier torture transporters,
Shackled in a boxcar and I’m 
startin' to get wor-r-r-ied,
 Chinese prisoner boxcars
Fitted with a guil-lo-tine and I'm
waiting for a martial law
 that makes me want to be a Christian,
 get me a seat in the boxcar
of the new world or-or-der.
 Experience firsthand
From an unpublished document:  
The Mythical Horrors of Carol Novak

Is it too good to be true that more of this appears at Thee Mystical Mirror Carole Novalis. Should not an omnibus be ensuing?

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