Helps the World

2025  
25 x 86 x 72 inches
a floor sculpture detournement of Bruce Nauman’s1967 piece, (Window or Wall Sign).
Burnt Titanium PLA, Fala/Fazer|| Speak/Make Algorithm

Helps the World is a floor sculpture created in response to Bruce Nauman’s 1967 piece, The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths (Window or Wall Sign).

I remembered only, ‘the true artist reveals mystic truths.’ The omission of ‘helps the world’ prompted me to ponder Nauman’s proposition anew. In our landscape of networked surveillance and algorithmically weaponized data how does the artist help? Might hiding be a better strategy than revealing?

Helps the World is a detournement where Nauman’s text becomes indecipherable as it transforms into an algorithmically generated language of gesture-based glyphs. The glyphs, extruded as human-scale 3-d forms, are arranged in an ascending spiral on a stage. The sculpture’s totality is obscured from viewers. To read the text they must enter the performance space of the stage and physically traverse the spiral.