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SERACH PROJECTS: MOBY DICK, 2003-
The Search Projects are inspired by Herman Melville's classic, Moby Dick. It started in 1992 when I bought a copy at a used bookstore in New York. I grew up near a whaling museum, so I come by my affinity for Ahab’s tragic endeavor naturally. Yet I’d never actually read the book. As an artist, I find the tale of Ahab’s obsessive search for the whale distinctly resonant, and clearly there’s a connection with my ongoing quest for some form of existential clarity that manifests itself in the process of making art. In my series of Moby Dick projects, the search itself has reflexively become the content of the work.
The first Search Project, “dickathon,” was an animated version of Melville’s text, which I projected outdoors at night during New Haven’s 2003 Festival of Arts and Ideas. The experimental project was inspired by animated graphics on TV, and the idea that, although we are often called a nation of non-readers, the medium of television actually calls on us to read quite a bit as we watch the screen. I used the very techniques that motion graphics artists employ—zooming, fading, blurring and crawling text—but inserted the more compelling content of an epic novel. The title, “dickathon,” hints that the activity of reading can be translated into a more active, time-based media, such as DVD and TV.
“Moby Dick, Used” is the second installment of the Search Project. At an exhibition in 2003, I began collecting used copies of Moby Dick in exchange for limited edition prints. Anyone could contribute a worn, well-read copy of Moby Dick and receive in return a digital print of the title page from the edition I bought in New York in 1992. The project was first installed at Hygienic Art Galleries in New London, Connecticut. In 2004, I was invited to install it at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Massachusetts, as part of the annual marathon reading of Moby Dick. The books are displayed on handmade, darkly varnished shelves that recall the style of nineteenth-century whaling ships, and accompanied by an original essay entitled “The Seafaring Metaphor.” Copies have been donated from as far away as Japan, but my favorite is the one that’s completely waterlogged.
In the final installment,"Search for Moby Dicks", my search expands geographically—that is, instead of waiting for Moby Dick to come to me, as I did in “Moby Dick, Used,” in this project I go search for it. I have documented Moby Dicks in Mexico, Brussels, England, California, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Washington DC. The project, which is ongoing, has been funded by a research grant from Connecticut State University and an artist's fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism.
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