If the Only Tool You Have is a Hammer (In collaboration with James Gallagher)
Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, The Pier 2 Art Center main Square,
12/10/2011-1/31/2012, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan
Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival, The Pier 2 Art Center main Square,
12/10/2011-1/31/2012, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan
This installation intends to transform a shipping container visually into two trailers with hitches for both ends. The converted container will become a symbolic conveyance: one half is the mystical land of planting, containing fruit trees, and the other half is the mystical land of raising and holding cows and other animals. The work questions the way food is developed and produced for the world today. Our work borrows inspiration from Abraham Maslow’s Law of the Instrument. He uses a hammer to describe man’s reliance on a single solution to solve a multitude of problems. In 1966, Maslow stated, “It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” We live in a world of premises. With every response a hammer, every problem becomes a nail to drive home. Is man’s solution the only answer?
The idea for our interactive display came from an effort to poetically link the type of single-minded behavior cited in Maslow’s law of the hammer with the consequences of being separated from the Earth. In a preliminary sketch for the project, we conceived of constructing two trailer carts, one holding a cow, the other an orange tree. These are vehicles that compartmentalize nutrition as a rational, mobilized commodity. With our focus on designing better cows and orange trees, the future appears to hold no insurmountable obstacle. We close the door to a sacred connection to the Earth. The Earth is home to all life. The earth is our home. Our container has everything human adaptation requires. It grows food. It contains food. It travels. The hypothetical cow and fruit tree inside a transplanted transportation device is not presented to highlight modern advances in survival. They are set to entice us into questioning how the most advanced human logic has come to separate us from the mystic center of life: Earth. Therefore, with its planted habitat, our stationed trailer contains artists’ humble efforts to bring the cosmos home to this place.
The idea for our interactive display came from an effort to poetically link the type of single-minded behavior cited in Maslow’s law of the hammer with the consequences of being separated from the Earth. In a preliminary sketch for the project, we conceived of constructing two trailer carts, one holding a cow, the other an orange tree. These are vehicles that compartmentalize nutrition as a rational, mobilized commodity. With our focus on designing better cows and orange trees, the future appears to hold no insurmountable obstacle. We close the door to a sacred connection to the Earth. The Earth is home to all life. The earth is our home. Our container has everything human adaptation requires. It grows food. It contains food. It travels. The hypothetical cow and fruit tree inside a transplanted transportation device is not presented to highlight modern advances in survival. They are set to entice us into questioning how the most advanced human logic has come to separate us from the mystic center of life: Earth. Therefore, with its planted habitat, our stationed trailer contains artists’ humble efforts to bring the cosmos home to this place.
The Kaohsiung International Container Arts Festival has been held once every two years since 2001 and has become a distinctive Kaohsiung event. The 2011 Container Arts Festival has a theme of "Home." the artists have created visions of the home transcending time and space using cargo containers. The 12 outstanding teams participating in this year's festival are from Taiwan, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. This year, artists from Kaohsiung's sister cities of Honolulu, San Antonio, Miami, and Tulsa obtained sponsorship from the US Department of State with the Visual Arts Initiative Program.
