TARO HATTORI'S CONTRIBUTION to the annual exhibition of work by artists associated with the Kala Art Institute, Dubious Scales, was intended as a response to the presidential election and inspired by a quotation from Homer's Odyssey: "Jove weighs affairs of earth in dubious scales / And the good suffers while the bad prevails" (Book VI, line 29). The piece is a scale with two video monitors mounted to miniature strollers on each of its levels. The videos show close-ups of hands masturbating a penis and a vagina. When I saw the work, I wondered: what does this have to do with politics? Is it merely a crude joke referring to our president and vice president, "Bush and Dick"? Or does the obscenity of the piece refer to the collusion of the Republican and Democratic parties that Ralph Nader denounced throughout the election – the open secret disavowed by the artifice of the campaign and its staged opposition, as a spectacle that ultimately renders the "anybody but Bush" platform as conservative as Christian fundamentalism's? In this light, Hattori's sculpture presents American democracy as a masturbatory illusion informed by infantile wishes for paternal protection – with the two parties and the American public engaged in an orgy of mutual self-gratification. And the injustice it articulates doesn't refer to the travesty of the result but rather to the (predetermined) exclusion of meaningful alternatives by the parties' monopoly of the election process and basic agreement on central issues, including the war in Iraq, support for Ariel Sharon, and privatization as the sole solution for social problems here and abroad. Is this perhaps why the scale is level?
by Clark Buckner
