Kieran Boland

Face Radio Live L.A. 
Essay by Darrin LITTLE (2008)
18th Street Arts Center SANTA MONICA

* Could you rate our masculinity just by looking at a face?
+ I am All That Has Been, That Is, and That Will Be. No mortal has yet been able to lift the veil that covers Me.

FACE RADIO LIVE L.A. evokes ancient Neith, the Egyptian goddess of war, in order to waste time a little bit less. In our contemporary isolation with its dialectically-frustrated lines of cell phone and Internet communication (the novel pleasure of no-waiting access pitted against the systemic pain of separation), one grows more and more impatient for advertisers, movie directors, lovers and even terrorists to get to the point. Boland's video cuts to the quick: It house cleans the familiar and often dirty window of film/video voyeurism, engendering crystal-clear viewer masturbation along age-old formulas of power, sex and creation; watercolor orgasms again and again and again. I want to put my finger in that pretty blonde's protagonistic mouth, but she's too busy conjuring characters that trick-or-treat Death or yak on transvestite cell phones when really he should be plucking his eyebrows. No wonder California Highway Patrol extremists burlesque around 4x4 sacrificial spaces altar-bled under sunny skies; if I had this kind of wind-up radio reception, I'd take off my mask, too. Neith also personified the primordial waters of creation, a.k.a. The Nile Motel swimming pool, where budget hieroglyphic directives linger in Spanish-speaking shadows. Why do cops favor mirrored sunglasses? Because I am You. The blonde goddess pulls the strings of wind-up men in order to menstruate barren shores of money traced, counted and stolen. To the ancient Egyptians, a picture was power, a thought-control currency. Today we are leaking through talk radio syndicates in our private canopic fantasies (feeding on T.S. Elliot's heap of broken images and D.H. Lawrence's after-humming of deep bells). Reach out and touch someone. Listen to my voice: What do I look like? What economic and sexual power do I open in your umbrella mind? Am I a woman's skirt caught in a car door embarrassment? Turn on my voice a speechless portrait that brightens nothing like who I really am, yet is me beyond the pop-culture nightmare. Heliopolis drove her mad. But the goddess she was (that I wanted her to be) achieved improbable Phoenix ignition—yanking a thousand ships homeward—in the purple and golden silence of Becoming.

Darrin Little is a Los Angeles based Artist and Writer.

*Sound bite from FACE RADIO LIVE L.A.
+Plutarch (46 - 120 A.D.) said the temple of Neith (of which nothing now remains) bore this inscription.

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