Carla Harryman, Cleveland

5:00

There isn’t much left of The American Dream ice sculpture. It has melted more quickly than anticipated. While we had imagined the emergence of new linguistic possibilities and indications of morphological promise, what happened resulted in a series of abrupt explosions leaving truncated limbs of letter supported on serifs. What remains are the thinning letters ERI DRE. How might I represent this effect visually in a word program? ERI __+)*~=_DRE.  To work with the remains of explosive collapse beyond a cursory comment or gesture here or there, may take more time than what is left in this day.

A comment just overheard included the criticism that any message that takes time, more than a couple of seconds to assimilate,  is not revolutionary.

5:44

Drawn to the dynamics of destruction and “making,” I had been planning on an impossible project that would use textual excerpts taken from the 1920s and 1930s. My thought was to write some translations and alterations beginning around the time the ice began to melt.

The time of composition moves slowly while ice melts more quickly in summer sun. Thus I have concluded with one alteration, a collaboration between John Maynard Keynes and Gertrude Stein:

So then as I was saying it is very confusing and sometimes in them, the kind of sensitiveness in them from many pseudo moral principles which have weighed down on us for there is in each kind of being, in independent dependent being, for 200 years and through which we have lavishly raised some in dependent independent being of the most repellent human qualities to the rank of virtues a kind of way of yielding

from The Making of Americans (1925) and Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930) as quoted in Utopia Toolbox. 1 by Juliane Stiegele