JACK THE PELICAN PRESENTS
DANNY GOODWIN:
Sneak Peak —The private residences of
Paul D. Wolfowitz, Chevy Chase, MD
John T. Ashcroft, Gurnee, IL
George J. Tenet, Potomac, MD
George W. Bush, Crawford, TX
Danny Goodwin, Albany, NY
Opens Friday, November 21, 7-9pm
Runs through December 22, 2003
Contact Don@JackthePelicanPresents.com
Several hundred feet above the private residences of key members of the Bush administration float the aerial surveillance balloons of artist Danny Goodwin. —Or so his live video feeds would have you believe.*
There is a menace implicit in the medium. Watching snippets of AWACS surveillance footage on the evening news, we have come to expect—even desire—an elegant technological kill. But Goodwin’s helium-fueled lightness of being poses no threat. And nothing much happens here. Donald Rumsfeld never even shows.
Even less sinister are the dozen aerial stills of Goodwin himself, his neighbors, wife and kids. We see them down below like model-railroad figurines, swathed in the sweetness of a backyard summer day.
This is Goodwin’s homage to Larry Walters, who rode his lawn chair skyward into the annals of popular folk history. A buoyant flying dream of false-empowerment.
Danny Goodwin is founder of the online Central Intelligence Museum, which features photographic documentation of devices alleged to have been improvised by operatives in the field. They are straight from the manuals. —The kind of chimerical gizmos that phone-shoe Maxwell Smart, Agent 86 might find useful. Never mind that Goodwin fabricated them—as an artist—for the camera. They look real enough to have provoked the attention of the Presidential Secret Service.
Goodwin’s suspicion that he might be under surveillance—not unwarranted—has swelled into a grand fiction. A central player in the game, he weaves a fabric of information and disinformation, truth and falsehood as seamless as the official realities of Jayson Blair or the White House.
*Indeed, Goodwin’s videos are faked. An armada of spectacular devices hovering round the gallery's atrium pointedly belies the conceit.
Danny Goodwin is the Head of the Combined Media in the Art Department at the University at Albany, SUNY. His works have been shown at Art Resources Transfer, Inc., Ronald Feldman Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the California Museum of Photography.
