September, 2004

It's worth noting that artist Joe Girandola, a stolid Michelangelo type, is concerned about the details. Like when he cuts thin strips of duct tape to craft inklike drawings of warplanes. Or how he meticulously exported dirt from the Trinity Test Site in New Mexico - the place where The Manhattan Project performed its 1945 dress rehearsal - for an interactive sculpture where viewers understand how society layers its misdeeds until they are forgotten.

“Duct tape is a quick fix,” he says, “which is what our society has become.” The way people use duct tape, a new layer upon a former layer to forget about a problem until the reason for the duct tape is unknown, mirrors our culture's “infatuation with not looking into what's really going on.”

Exploring what's really going on, according to Girandola, is the duty of the artist. And never has that role been more essential. “There are rewards to investigating things. The Patriot Act, for example: is this what America is built on? Is it worth erasing 200 years of history? That's not what we're built on; it's what we escaped from.”

Or take his Trinity Test Site sculpture: two cowboy boots, an overtly American construct, stamp Test Site earth onto paper overlaying a stencil of a mushroom cloud. The result is an eerily vaporous message emanating out of the dirt, recalling what happened there. Similarly, the duct tape C130 warplanes, made from a quintessentially temporary material, reinforce the transitory results of war in I Drop Bombs.

Girandola takes his probing eye wherever he goes. After living in a town undergoing the controversy of teaching evolution over creationism, Girandola sculpted a marble statue of a split face: Charles Darwin's was on the left and Michelangelo's God on the right. Godwin's juxtaposition of two faces so similar and so opposed reveal and refute the clash in an artful and tantalizing way.

Revealing has become a calling that has increased for Girandola since 9.11. “It's unfortunate that it takes the worst of events to produce these kinds of investigations into things,” he says, but he recognizes the unique place America is in right now. There may not be a more pivotal time to ask people to look beyond what's been said and accepted as truth. After all, though New Mexico claims the ground at Trinity Test Site is uncontaminated, they continue to truck in new dirt to overlay the old.

MacDowell Downtown begins its third season Thursday, September 2, 2004, at 7:30 pm at The Peterborough Historical Society. The series, which occurs the first Thursday of every month from September to May, is free and open to the public. Refreshments are served.

To sign up for our listserv, email .
or log on to www.macdowellcolony.org.