There is, right now, a giant eyeball in Dallas.
I can’t tell if the artist who designed this is the sort of fellow who frightens small boys off his lawn with rakes and chainsaws and kicks the occasional puppy with his steel-toed boots, or if he is destined to be my very best friend in all the land. Maybe both. What kind of genius/madman comes up with this kind of nighmarish nugget of awesome? This monstrous delight? What kind of person painstakingly copies, then magnifies his own peepers and puts them on display? And more importantly, is he fun to have over at dinner parties? (Seriously, Tony Tasset, you’re welcome any time.)
A giant, goddamned, eye. What will they think of next?
Spend five minutes staring into that mammoth pupil and….oh, rats. I think it just swallowed my soul. Also? I’m pretty sure I know what Hell is like. Heaven too (same thing, really – two sides of a single coin, darkness and light, matter and wave, hello and goodbye, the vastness of space and the singularity of time, and oh, god, my soul, my soul, my shattered soul). Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, right. The giant eye.
Apparently, this ocular glory/horror was once stationed in Chicago (I’ve been to Chicago; the eye is appropriately bloodshot and bleary), but was recently purchased and positioned temporarily in the State With Which One Must Not Mess. I’ve been to Dallas, too. As I recall, it was rather thin in the art department, for a city of it’s size (of course, as a Minneapolitain, I am spoiled, art-wise). Perhaps they were simply waiting for a Sculpture the Size of Texas. It’s three stories tall. That’s a lot of art, if you think about it
Or, perhaps Texas is secretly Mordor, and you can’t have Mordor without the eye of Sauron. Perhaps there are, in the teeming guts of Dallas, hordes of Orcs and Uruk-hai and a whining Smeagol and perhaps even a giant spider, biding their time and massing their forces to unleash themselves upon the world. I’ve always wanted to visit Mordor.
And dangit. Now I want to go to Texas.
Perhaps I might locate my swallowed soul.
(ETA- Yes, I know, the picture here is from the previous installation. Is it my fault that Chicago is more photogenic than Dallas? No my friends, it is not. And speaking of the artist possibly being my new best friend, he also made this:
And this:
Seriously. New best friend. He just doesn’t know it yet.)
Kelly Barnhill 