How America Changed the World
How America Changed the World is an installation work consisting of 124 individually framed pages appropriated from a single magazine found in the check-out isle of a chain grocery store in middle America soon after George W. Bush declared an end to major military operations in Iraq. The magazine, entitled How America Changed the World , is a brilliant and potentially moving illustration of the Bush administration's ideological rhetoric concerning domestic and foreign policy decisions since September 2001. A strange mixture of religious patriotism, fire and brimstone nationalism, and good ole fashion cowboy bravado combine to turn democratic values and the mass murder of human beings into a spectacle for consumer thirsts quenched in the boredom of a grocery store checkout line. The content of the magazine is organized under the following banners, which constitute the parameters of the installation: America and the World Under Attack, The President Takes Charge, The End of The Taliban, Rally 'Round The Flag, The Spirit of America Lives, Fallen Heroes, Ground Zero: The First Anniversary, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Allies and Enemies, America Victorious. The magazine takes us through three years of consumer-minded political rhetoric ripe for critique. Each framed page will be superimposed with images and text that, in various ways, deconstruct the oversimplified and ideologically loaded magazine content, often by providing images that many US citizens have not seen concerning the so-called War on Terror. This is the making of American mythology, and does it matter that the story is a gruesome one marked by gross misconduct by elite profiteers and a largely apathetic and/or unapologetic American public? It is a fearful time, and history is busily being written by the victors.
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