At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 the world’s falling apart, and I’m standing in front of a bronze surfer on Santa Cruz‘s Westside, taping up PPE to enact a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy that nobody’s read in its entirety because, and here’s the beautiful, fucked-up part, it’s lost. Gone. Euripides wrote it, and then history ate it, leaving us with these weird little textual breadcrumbs.
We’re wiping down our groceries with Clorox wipes like they’re contaminated evidence. Toilet paper has become a luxury item, a currency more valuable than cash.
The piece? I’m calling it The Man Who Knows. Which is either pretentious as hell or exactly the kind of cosmic joke we need right now, I haven’t decided yet.
It’s part of this larger project, IOTA, where I’m basically playing archaeological grave robber with the shattered remains of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Taking these fragments, these orphaned sentences that somehow survived when everything around them burned, and jamming them into the contemporary landscape to see what happens. Environmental art meets public art meets whatever this is.
Sometimes you just have to put ancient Greek wisdom on a surfing statue during a pandemic and see if anyone notices.
The Fragment:
The man who knows how to heal well must look to the lifestyles of a city’s inhabitants and to their land when he examines their illnesses.
