My favorite English teacher always stressed the importance of assuming the author’s intentionality when reading creative work rather than dismissing randomness or parsimony as inscrutable.
This was lucky, because Khristian Weeks’ new installation at Golden Belt is both random and parsimonious—he connects commonplace objects in ways that showcase their unexpected acoustic and kinetic qualities.
Through its name, The Use of the Useless coaxes us to find threads of intentionality and utility in a one-room gallery full of objects, light and noise. Which is, admittedly, a difficult task.
An unwinding music box produces a minute cone of tinkling within the parabola of a suspended chrome bowl, slowly rotating to conserve angular momentum. In another piece, dangling foil and flatware short an amp’s exposed circuit board, producing feedback in scrapes, crunches and distant gunfire.
Within the room, a lot of potential energy is established through suspension, friction and gravity. So many things are on the verge of falling and destruction—saved only by counterbalancing motors, acetate or alligator clips. Children gaze, prod and mill around in fascination with Weeks’ mechanical web. Two baby monitors, linked together with a cursive strand of wire, allow visitors to listen to whispers from across the room. An LCD projector plays static synchronously with the tortured amp.
At the opening reception Oct. 15, Golden Belt was overrun with children fleeing their hipster parents, and nearly all of them made their way to The Use of the Useless. I asked fifth-grader Julian Berla for his interpretation of a few works, first pointing at a spinning wire weathering away a melon-sized block of sedimentary Styrofoam: “The artist’s speedwhacker,” he replied. I asked for his favorite, and he directed me to a Rube Goldberg-style drawing machine. Placed over butcher paper, a stick of graphite was cinched to a camera tripod tied to two fans, mallets and a glockenspiel over the course of several ceiling rafters. “Never hang a fan upside down,” Julian warned. “You might get this.”
As children, we fetishized some objects—collecting and pleading and crying over them—because we gave them a utility and connectedness beyond anything in the disposable adult world. And at Golden Belt, Weeks has reminded us of this thesis statement of childhood play: how the seemingly ordinary can be combined and transformed into a tool, a spaceship, a wonderful thing of a thousand uses.
The Use of the Useless runs through Nov. 15 at ROOM 100 in Building 3 of the Golden Belt complex at 807 East Main Street.
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