It’s impossible to miss by the sounds of it: the clickety-clack of a split-flap departures board reverberated through a tiny ante room in the 30,000 square-foot De la Cruz Collection on the busiest evening of the month for art patrons in Miami, called “Second Saturday.” Entitled “The Family of Man,” after Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 photography show at MoMA, Miami-based installation artist George Sánchez-Calderón revives the aforementioned exhibition’s concern with the migrations and transitions of the ordinary citizen, but also sharply comments on the seemingly intangible economic institutions and their lack of transition alongside that citizen’s thirst in their torrid, financially-driven world.
There was a marked difference in this destination board, however. The information appeared to be complete nonsense, at first. The letter “U” appeared repeatedly where the “destination” should have read. As the flaps quickly toppled over, cities in New England such as Foxboro, Providence and Greenbush were passed over, then the entire board lay completely empty. Suddenly, with a keystroke from a computer operator tucked into a corner behind the massive black board, the noisy flaps were reinvigorated to reveal the names of the world’s most powerful banks (filling every last “destination” space), including AIG, Merrill-Lynch, HSBC, Standard & Poor’s and Wells Fargo. Where the “track number” and “times” should have appeared, instead was a successive line of “Z”s. Immediately following this sequence, all of the destinations showed “Providence,” adjacent to the numbers ‘6:66’ repeated across the track/time spaces.
Sánchez-Calderón was clearly relieved when he saw viewers steadily filing in, two or three at a time, for a solid three and a half hours during the show’s opening. “I never saw this coming, man,” he said looking all around him, “I was going crazy thinking I could never get this thing to run!” Indeed, the task of operating a nearly 60 year-old Solari departures board was one that began as early as March . . . and concluded less than 72 hours before its unveiling. “George was going crazy between all of these old engineers saying ‘Okay we can handle it,’ and then ‘Nope, no idea,’” said New York-based artist and friend Shelter Serra. “It was really down to the wire.” But for all aesthetic purposes, the board appeared to be performing according to the artist’s programming.
More important than the achievement of resurrecting an outdated invention, though, was the force with which the concept hit audiences. “This work shows all of the so-called ‘destinations’ as the financial industry,” said Rosa De la Cruz, “It’s about war. Rather than the war between politics or places, this is about a war of economics. That’s where the real war is. And with Providence, then showing Satan’s numbers of 666, its very clear.” For Sánchez-Calderón, the war comes to those in transit: which is all of us. All aboard.
“The Family of Man” is situated in the Project Room of the De la Cruz Collection at 23 NE 41st Street, Miami, and will run until October 8. George Sánchez-Calderón received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1995 and his BFA from Florida International University (FIU) in 1993. Sánchez-Calderón produced a true-scale recreation of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye beneath Florida Interstate I-95 during the first Art Basel Miami Beach in 2002. He will open a small gallery space in Downtown Miami called TOMORROWLAND in late 2011. Sánchez-Calderón lives and works in Miami.