This Won’t Last

Illuminate the Plaza Presented by PNC Arts Alive

This Won’t Last

January 24, 2022 – February 21, 2022

Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts Historic Landmark Building
118 N Broad St,
Philadelphia, PA 19102

Featuring: Matthew Ober, Saskia Globig, Char O’Dair-Gadler,
Maya Shengold, George MacLeod, Emilie Slater, Michael Ipsen, and Matt Lavine.

This Won’t Last consists of seven new video works and a performance by the Philadelphia-based media arts collective Lino Kino. The series questions everyday assumptions about the roles and implicit meanings of monumental art in public spaces by presenting rarely memorialized subjects — such as failure, loss, entropy, the mundane, and the unacknowledged — on a monumental scale.

Each of the seven video works is put through rounds of video compression to create intentionally degraded iterations of the original works. When played in sequence, the slow decomposition of each video illustrates the long but inevitable physical and contextual decay experienced by traditional monuments. Our anti-monuments are lighter-than-air subversions of the ways in which monumental art can be in dialogue with the architecture of public spaces. Through their shifting multiplicity, these projections spark renewed considerations of collective memory.

This Won’t Last will be projected on PAFA’s Historic Landmark Building from dusk until dawn January 24 – February 21, 2022.

Screening Schedule:

Monday: Hindenburg/Goodyear Reincarnation Cycle, Matthew Ober, 8:30

Tuesday: The House of Entropy, Saskia Globig, 4:45

Wednesday: Xanadu, Char O’Dair-Gadler & Maya Shengold, 10:00

Thursday: Winter Games, George MacLeod, 18:30

Friday: Thank You Borgata Babes, Emilie Slater, 1:40

Saturday: Nature’s Organ of Anticipation, Michael Ipsen, 60:00

Sunday: When Your Mind Is Running, Your Body Is Watching, Matt Lavine, 20:00

Exercises for Interstellar Relations

Saturday, February 12th, 9am-5pm EST
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Broad Street Studio

118 N Broad St., Philadelphia, PA, 19102

In conjunction with artist collective Lino Kino’s projection series, This Won’t Last, the performance Exercises for Interstellar Relations is a monument building exercise. It aims to reassess the urge to memorialize human achievements. A group of performers will turn PAFA’s Broad Street Studio into a disaster-preparedness think-tank devising a response to a catastrophic paranormal event. Through a series of structured improvisational exercises, the performers will simulate potential scenarios of interstellar relations and diplomacy with the aid of corporate office tools. As the hours pass, the quantity of amassed paper in the space becomes a memorial to the interplay of people’s minds in response to a monumental crisis.

Guide to the Individual Works:

Hindenburg/Goodyear Reincarnation Cycle, Matthew Ober, 8:30

“Hindenburg/Goodyear Reincarnation Cycle” evaluates the history of the airship as a monument to failure. The Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey—only fifty miles from Philadelphia—was the nexus for airship development in the early twentieth century. In 1937, the German Zeppelin Hindenburg burst into flames at Lakehurst. In juxtaposing the public spectacle of the Hindenburg disaster and subsequent rise of the Goodyear blimp, Ober meditates on the process by which social value is repurposed as commercial value. “If the Hindenburg is a memorial of decay and disintegration,” notes Ober, “then the Goodyear is born from its ashes, emblemizing success, commodity, and American exceptionalism.”

House of Entropy, Saskia Globig, 4:45

“House of Entropy” notices the small ways in which big things fall apart at the margins. A sack of grapefruit acts as a three-dimensional model for thermal molecular entropy; a taxonomy of model houses implodes over a boating house on the Schuylkill River and a gutted hotel on the Atlantic City boardwalk; plastic finds new life from greenhouses to highway maintenance sheds to a hammock at Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. The rhythm of moments throughout the footage rewards catching it out of the corner of your eye, or returning repeatedly. The piece functions as a secret Globig keeps with the viewer. Through a progression of unexpected images in conversation, Globig reinvests magic in industrial sites and affection for inanimate objects as places inhabited by human and nonhuman beings, embracing the everyday freefall of lives in transit.

Xanadu, Char O’Dair-Gadler & Maya Shengold, 10:00

Xanadu is a painterly exploration of the American Dream Mall as a “living dead mall.” This entertainment center and shopping mall in New Jersey’s Meadowlands has been a construction project in the works since the mid 90s. For years, the massive project hemorrhaged money and resources until finally opening amid the COVID-19 pandemic.The title refers to “Meadowlands Xanadu,” the proposed name of the mall from 2002-2010, before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers caused the project to switch hands. Examining the mall-as-monument, “Xanadu” is a video collage of footage shot in and around the mall, referencing both the original renderings of the mall and videos posted online of dead and abandoned malls around the US.

Winter Games, George MacLeod, 18:30

“Winter Games” provides a textual account of MacLeod’s own upbringing alongside a collage of found footage and photography that references the failed Antarctic expedition of Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912). A stained-glass monument that venerates the captain and his crew floats through the lower frame as the doomed men trudge through ice and snow in a race to the South Pole. While MacLeod’s reminiscent text scans from right to left above the men, certain aspects of the artist’s life are revealed as a mold of social convention and gender performativity. Missed chances weave across generational and historical lines in this analytic monument to what could have been, and what could still be.

Thank You Borgata Babes, Emilie Slater, 2:00

Thank You Borgata Babes is a monument to the group of servers (colloquially known as the “Borgata Babes”) from Borgata Casino in Atlantic City who took legal action in 2006 against their employer for subjecting them to poor and insulting working conditions. Top among their frustrations was a requirement to be weighed, sometimes daily, before starting work. After ten years of court battles, the New Jersey Supreme Court declined to review their case and left the Borgata Babes without any further opportunities for legal recourse. Circulating limbs, performance of femininity, Fox News, gone but not forgotten- Thank you Borgata Babes.

Nature’s Organ of Anticipation, Michael Ipsen, 60:00

“Nature’s Organ of Anticipation” is a site-specific, meditative video collage projected exclusively on the limestone portions of the Historic Landmark Building’s facade at PAFA. The work is a patchwork assemblage of 300+ videos drawn from Ipsen’s personal archive of observational videos. The work subverts its own monumental proportions by bathing the historic Furness facade with a moving collage of life’s mundane and overlooked moments. “Nature’s Organ of Anticipation” celebrates the insignificant time that elapses between significant events. The piece takes its name from a poetic term for the central nervous system.

When Your Mind Is Running, Your Body Is Watching, Matt Lavine, 20:00

“When Your Mind is Running, Your Body is Watching” follows eight individuals droning around a 3D model of the Havre de Grace Quarry in Maryland. The quarry, an active reserve for construction aggregates, serves as a crucial environment for the characters. The enclosed outdoor complex is a natural accessory to the human models, like an inorganically occurring Counter Strike map. Cameras from a mock GoPro perspective follow each character as they speak. They are inaudibly mouthing the titular phrase, “when your mind is running your body is watching.”