Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love?

2007
Sound installation, spray paint on paper
5 PA speakers, 5 playback devices, 5 framed works on paper
Dimensions variable
20 x 24 in (each print)

In Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love?, five PA speakers stand in a line, like a line of speaking bodies, projecting the five addresses that I spoke from a busy street corner in New York City in September 2007. Emerging from the corporate headquarters of UBS in midtown Manhattan, I stood at the corner of 51st St and Avenue of the Americas, at lunchtime every day for a work week, to speak to an anonymous lover.

Beginning ‘My dear lover’ or ‘my sweet lover,’ the texts I spoke were addressed to an unnamed “you” who the speaker was separated from for some unexplained reason. Woven in between comments on and about personal longing and desire, were comments about politics, war and the trauma and dislocation of living in a moment of war.

By inserting ‘private correspondence’ into a scene of public speech, Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love? provokes questions about the territory of the space of the ‘political’ and the ‘unspeakable’ as it relates to love, enforced normativity and the mythic notion of ‘free speech.’

Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love? was the first of a series of works I call love addresses.