Why did you paint the timeline?
I had found this website, artandculture.com, and there amongst the
other flashy graphics was a timeline. Under each artist’s name, there
was this timeline and two lines: lived and worked. I thought it was one
of the best graphics describing that information that I had ever seen.
Everything, its coloring and the font, made it very elegant.

I was also at the time reading a book called A Short History of the
Future, by W. Warren Wagar. This was a book that in a way I had
wanted to read for ten years. It had originally been published in 1989,
but I only fond it in the winter of 2000. I have always been interested
in the future as it has been depicted in the media. While growing up I
regularly became a fan of whatever TV show had some basis in the
future, which usually revolved around the year 2000.

Anyway, here was this book, presenting possible future scenarios for
the next two hundred years. I wanted to make a graphic displaying this
information, and that line on the artandculture site “showed me how” as
it were. So I drew it up one night on the computer. Aliens was on TV.

Here I was, one future scenario on TV to my left, the ones in the book
in my head, and then the Timeline on the screen in front of me. So
simple, the centuries that we are dealing with, that some of us will live
through. It’s quite possible that many of us born in the late 20th Century
will die in the 22nd Century. That’s what they keep telling us anyway.
So here was the field in which our being would play out.

And I also liked the fact that the Timeline, as a painting, had a lifespan
in terms of centuries. That it would exist for all of these years that it
depicts. That at the time of its creation, we can only fill in the details up
to the year 2000. But each block represents a decade, in which major
news stories occur. In the 90s there was the Oklahoma city bombing,
which I always think about, since it sort of came out of nowhere and
splashed itself across the mindscape of the time. And then there were
all the high school massacres. These weren’t predictable occurrences
based on trends at the time – no one could have forecast that in 1989.
But now, we say, they could happen again. Wager’s book is about
following contemporary trends to their logical conclusions. But time is
fluid, that ‘s one thing that keeps getting taught in time travel stories:
hat nothing is set in stone except the past, and even that can become
malleable through deconstruction. What fascinates me is what will we
fill those blocks with, those things that we can’t imagine happening
today.

And during that time, while we are busy creating crazy and memorable
history, that painting will be there, witnessing them, its oil paint
continually solidifying and gelling. Perhaps cracks will appear on its
surface. Its not immune to the effects of time, even though its place
within it is as a witness.

Why did you paint the postcard?

Initially it was because it looked so luscious that I wanted to put it into
paint. It cried out for the buttery texture of oil paint. But the thin is that
it too has been a witness. When I first found these postcards in the
store, I began to look for everyday images of the past. It was interesting
to see ones that had been sent by soldiers during the world wars. As
such, they were historical documents that were being ignored because
they were so common. But I grew up anticipating the future. I grew up
surrounded by old things, and knew that as I got older, their status as
historical objects rose.

The postcards are rich little semiotic fragments. The handwriting, the
imagery, they are documents of a time that was once common, but is
now gone. Yet these things survive. I have one that is really sweet…a
young girl wrote to her father and asked him to send her toothbrush.
But you know, this is a hog bristle toothbrush, and what they called
toothpaste none of us would recognize. Perhaps this girl is still alive,
she’d be in her 90s now. I’, more inclined to think that she’s dead, one
of the reasons her old postcards would end up in a used bookstore. But
the thought is that she lived out her life, gotten married and had
children – all the things that we are familiar with from award winning
novels. And here is a fragment from one of that story’s earliest chapters,
when the book was new and crisp.