The Gunz

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 23, 1996 | permalink |  |  

The Gunz, 1996 (aka Gitchguns)

A spectacle of violence forms around the scene of the crime--the images of guns in the (increasingly) post-industrial world are arbiters of taste and fashion. They tell their viewers what is good and what should be desired. Within every potential there is its opposite: emergent in every birth is the ultimate death. To break an image is to reaffirm that in choosing any one thing is to deny all alternatives. This is the case with these images, taken from the combination of guns and commerce, created to influence the desires of those who see them with one specific purpose and a secondary, clandestine one. Immediately they want their audience to do something: it is not a passive buy this, go here, eat that; on another level they act to flatten out the experience of life by making all actions/desires equivalent. There are no higher or baser goals, only commerce, and any symbols, sacred or otherwise, can be used in the furtherance of this one goal.
(written 1996)

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 23, 1996 | permalink |  |  

My paper constructions are not simple formalism using the human body as a source; they are the idea of transformation given a concrete form. As each composite of elemnets is considered an array of potential images emerge. This reflects back to us how we see the world centered around ourselves, and it is this vision which we use to construct a reality around us: we see ourselves in our world because we invent that world as much by looking as physically with our hands. Ours is a human world because we are human. The simultaneous appearance of depth against a ‘flat reality’ is simply an expression of our perceptions. Without us, our world is flat.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published July 4, 1996 | permalink |  |