Everyone Loves a Parade
In his book, Public Opinion, the writer Walter Lippmann, discusses the nature of preconceived ideas and the relationship between concepts and experience in his chapter, The World Outside and the Pictures in our Heads. Lippmann writes that we tend to compartmentalize concepts and remember the more appealing aspects of an event, particularly when we have not experience it directly. I realized that my own understanding of war was through my participation in Memorial Day parades and by observing military marches. When I was invited, along with another artist, to create work for On Procession, an art parade sponsored by The Indianapolis Museum of Art, we designed a chest pack that we wore that held a portable dvd player, external speakers and displayed a looped video compilation of military marching armies, victory parades, and youth bands. We dressed as soldiers and marched, while the video and its marching music played.
This performance piece is called Everyone Loves a Parade as a way to indicate how war can be reduced to military marches and film footage from WWI to Afghanistan. The work also addresses the shifting landscape of alliances. Our mind's ability to compartmentalize notions of military power and might plays is represented in the video on our chests, as we become our own parade and incapsulate war.