
PHOTOS: ARTNEWS
PHOTOS: ARTNEWS
The video concerns an egomaniacal and slightly clueless architect named Amos, who played by an awkward puppet, and his plans to construct a utopian apartment building. Takes the form of a semi-surreal television program, the piece begins with a kind of riff on Woody Allen’s opening monologue in Manhattan, as Amos tries to state his intentions. “I want to build something important,” he says, before deciding that doesn’t sound right. “I want to change the world.” That’s not quite appropriate either.
Amos has a few moments of genuine self awareness—“I could be asking people to live in a way that is stupid,” he admits at one point—but with a slight shift in tense in the video, it becomes clear that the building got built . . . and things did not go well. A machine crushed someone, an off-screen voice intones, and the solar panels fried a bunch of birds. The gym got shut down after an unnamed incident.
Pretty quickly it becomes clear that we are sitting in a portion of the building itself, watching the work. The space is fairly comfortable—a pod of darkness amid the frenetic fair—but also a little isolating. The video is so beautifully shot, and so oddly funny, that I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stay there and decipher the whole abstracted story. But there were people waiting. I left pleasantly confused, and so I’ll end by quoting Amos: “I want to express myself, but I can’t find the words.”